During the summer of 2005, New Orleans resident Anne Gisleson and her friends were in the midst of developing Intersection New Orleans, a collaboration that encouraged 25 pairs of artists and writers to find inspiration in 25 intersections throughout the city. After Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city, Gisleson and her friends were determined to regroup and continue providing a cultural refuge for locals.
“It was just kind of an imperative need to start doing things after the storm, because nothing was happening culturally, for obvious reasons,” Gisleson says.
The informal art shows and literary events that the group hosted in the months after the storm led to the formation of Press-Street later that year. In 2008, Gisleson and her partners opened Antenna, a gallery space on St. Claude Street in the city’s Upper Ninth Ward. Their intent with Antenna was to create a place that would support and inspire the local creative community by focusing on cutting-edge contemporary art.
“It’s a space where the commercial end is taken out of the equation,” Gisleson says. “It’s a space where people can do the sort of projects that they wouldn’t be able to do in a for-profit gallery, which tends to be a bit safer and market oriented.”
Press-Street is currently a 12-artist collective with a multidisciplinary approach, as each member specializes in a different medium. The non-profit collective also focuses heavily on New Orleans’ literary scene and actively promotes local writers’ endeavors. Press-Street is currently promoting the book Curtain Optional, a collaboration between father-son team Jim Richard (artist) and Brad Richard (writer). The book focuses on how Jim’s writing career and a creative household impacted Brad’s early life.
This month, Antenna has been showcasing How To Build a Forest, an art-performance installation by collaborative duo PearlDamour and artist Shawn Hall. In this piece, a group constructs and deconstructs a makeshift forest over an eight-hour time frame. The project is influenced by Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of 100 trees on PearlDamour collaborator Lisa D’Amour’s family’s property. How To Build a Forest addresses how events like Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill have altered the Gulf’s ecosystems, while allowing viewers to become active participants in the installation and, thus, their environment. In May, Antenna will be showcasing My Mom Says My Work Has Really Improved, in which artists will pair one work from their childhood with a recent piece in order to show how their aesthetic has evolved over the years.
Antenna also hosts a number of events, including the annual 24-hour “Draw-a-Thon,” in which artists and gallery visitors can stop by to sketch and socialize. Last year’s event brought in nearly 700 people, and Gisleson hopes that this year will pull in even more.
Over the past couple of years, Gisleson has noticed that New Orleans’ art scene has grown considerably, due in part to the influx of younger artists that will continue to make significant contributions to the city’s strong cultural legacy.
“A lot of young people have come in at a time when a lot of us that have been here since after the storm, working on these projects, are getting really burned out,” Gisleson says. “So we really have this influx of energy, ideas, and people who really want to keep things going.”