Order of Effects / Accommodating the Mess

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Samuel Beckett

This month we’re celebrating our fifth anniversary of accommodating the mess, making books by local artists that combine word and image. Press Street artist/writers Brad Benischek, Mark Yakich, Case Miller, Jim Richard, Moose Jackson, and Susan Gisleson, among others, are creating a large scale, narrative collaboration inspired by Press Street’s mission. In conjunction with the show, this month we’ll also feature Happy Hour Salons highlighting local art and writing endeavors.

Happy Hour Salons 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm (Drinks, presentation and conversation: FREE)
Sponsored by ROOM 220, Press Street’s literary arm.

Thursday, March 24th – Featuring New Orleans’ first online contemporary arts review and critical writing website Pelican Bomb: Cameron Shaw and Rami Sharkey.

Launched in February 2011, Pelican Bomb is an online platform dedicated to the growing Louisiana arts community. As a regional publication, it focuses on native sons and daughters, recent transplants, and folks just passing through. As a contemporary primary document, it reflects the transitional and transformative nature of place as related to the creation, dissemination, and consumption of visual art today.

Thursday, March 31st – Come celebrate the release of Press Street’s latest visual arts and literary collaboration: Curtain Optional, the father/son chapbook project featuring the paintings of Jim Richard and the writing of Brad Richard.

In both poetry and prose, Brad Richard explores the influences of his father’s work in his own, as well as growing up as the son of an artist. Jim Richard Professor of painting at the University of New Orleans and has exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art. Brad Richard is chair of creative writing at Lusher Charter School. He is the author most recently of Motion Studies (winner of the 2010 Washington Prize from The Word Works) and his work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies.