Aug. 16, 2006 -- The opening exhibition for the fall season at the Bradbury Gallery in Fowler Center, 201 Olympic Drive, on the campus of Arkansas State University in Jonesboro will be “Made in New Orleans: A Survey of Contemporary Art from the Crescent City” curated by Jacqueline Bishop.

The exhibition, opening on the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, explores contemporary art made in New Orleans before the devastation.

Just after the hurricane, Bishop was contacted by Carlos Parkman, the executive director for the Center for the Living Arts in Mobile, Ala. Parkman’s appeal was for Bishop to organize an exhibition of displaced New Orleans artists. Bishop, who is an artist herself, immediately began trying to locate several of her colleagues, resulting in the exhibition, which features 54 works by 31 artists.

The exhibit then traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, the Shreveport Regional Art Space in northern Louisiana and concludes its tour in the Bradbury Gallery, which opens on Tuesday, Aug. 29.

In a statement made less than a month after the hurricane, Bishop said; ”The arrival of Hurricane Katrina and her destructive remnants remind us that the basics of clean air and water are a priority for existence, electricity is a luxury and art is a necessity. Art is the language of landscape. New Orleans has somewhat disappeared, the population dispersed, and the close art community separated, but the language of New Orleans is alive everywhere; it is global.”

Evident in the work of the exhibiting artists, she also said, “Made in New Orleans is not meant to depict pre-Katrina New Orleans with obvious visuals, but to explore contemporary art that was inspired by the endemic and sometimes indescribable characteristics of our sensuous, leafy environment.”

Bradley Sabin says of his ceramic sculpture, “My current body of work is (or was) about the lush flora and fauna of the state. The hurricane has erased that visual information for the time being and the re-emergence is my greatest wish.”

Karoline Schleh, says of her work in the exhibit, “The small collages are part of my continuous interest in the temporal nature of documentation, how what we try to record is subject to the zeitgeist of when it is created and later analyzed differently as old information is destroyed and new information takes it place.”

Also included in the exhibition are Willie Burch, Dawn Dedeaux, Dona Lief, Robert Warrens, Lin Emery, Robert Warrens, George Dureau, Elizabeth Shannon, Jim Richard, Douglas Bourgeois, and Luis Cruz Azaceta, along with many more talented artists.

The exhibition opens at 5 p.m. on Aug. 29 and continues through Sunday, Oct. 1. Bradbury Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and 2 – 5 p.m. on Sunday. The exhibition is admission-free and open to the public. For additional information, contact the Bradbury Gallery at 870-972-2567 or Les Christensen at 870-972-2567 or via email at lchristensen@astate.edu.