A White Fence In New Orleans That Has Seen Better Days


in every installment Artists, T highlights a recent or rare work by a Black artist and a few words from that artist that put the work in context. This week we are looking at a painting. BirchHer next exhibition opens on March 1 at the Fort Gansevoort Gallery in New York City.

Name: Birch

Age: 79

Based: New Orleans

Originally: New Orleans

Where and when did you do this job? The piece was made in 2020 and 2021 in a section of New Orleans called Ward 7. One day I walked down my block and saw this fence that I had never seen before. There was no one in the street; It was a sunny day, and when you think of New Orleans, you think of the people on the street, but at that particular time, it was like a ghost town.

Can you describe what happened in the study? This is a painting depicting a battered white fence and it has a ghostly quality to it; Actually, the fence looks like a skeleton to me given the broken pieces inside. White fences were supposed to be a symbol of prosperity, but this fence I looked at said the opposite. He told us where we are as a city and a country. The image is also life-size – I think 60 x 90 inches – so standing in front of it you can feel the monumental impact of what it depicts. I think I’m a storyteller and the piece seemed to say everything I wanted to say about this time in history.

What inspired you to do this? New Orleans is for me America’s most culturally relevant city, and it’s also a shared city. While working on this piece, the idea of ​​America seemed to be falling apart. It was like a double disaster: not just a pandemic, but an uprising, a coup, you name it – the overthrow of what we know as America. We still feel the effects of this in terms of where we are, who we are and, if possible, how we put this thing together. The image is in black and white — while living in New York, I received a large grant to go back to New Orleans and do a series of studies about growing up there, and when I got back I realized that New Orleans where I grew up was very different from what I had imagined. New Orleans is known for its color, but I’m back with the intention of finding another way to talk about what the city is about. My attempt to look at the place from another window.

What is a life-changing piece of art in any medium? Perhaps my answer goes back to the idea of ​​looking at things from a societal rather than individual perspective; Since my work is autobiographical, I don’t have a single piece of art to show. and New Orleans is is music, so I don’t think I can point to a particular musical form either. This seems very limiting. You can come to New Orleans and stay too long and you’ll never really understand it, but I always tell people to visit on a weekend because on Sundays there are so-called second lines that really sum up the identity of the city. Ordinary people following a band on the street, moving to the beat of the drum, which is the heartbeat of all of us. This common ritual takes over and creates a riot; It is impossible to be on the second line and not feel the full impact of your location. It gives us a unified purpose. Everyone participates, but it is fundamental to Black communities. It is therefore difficult for me to describe how I arrived at what I do in terms of image building, but the idea of ​​a collective culture gives me the opportunity to draw from different sources. Everything I do is layered.

This interview has been edited and shortened.



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