Featured artists include Linda Dautreuil, Dale Newkirk, and Zona Wainwright

Join us for an opening reception on Saturday, August 5th, from 4:30pm to 6:30pm

sponsored by Catherine Deano

Born in New Orleans and raised in a small bayou town, Tiffany Nesbit grew up surrounded by a family of creatives. Nesbit’s inspiration draws from elements of her personal past, present, and future living in both rural and urban areas of the southern United States.

Nesbit’s work uses small individual characters that are physically tied together, or collaged, to create large bundles and layers. The multi-faceted bundles represent the fullness, or chaos, that is possible when individual persons settle into larger groups. The structures are created from a mixture of found materials obtained from the side of roads, waste from construction sites, farming equipment, rusted vessels, etc. These objects are combined with handmade elements with materials like ceramics, plants, paper, fabric, house paints, and ropes.

Nesbit creates a sense of play and humor when the spectator interacts with the bundles by viewing or physically touching and re-arranging the pieces. When exhibited, the sculptures are never shown the same twice. They are forever changing and morphing into a new pile.

Reflecting on her work, Nesbit says: “The components that create industrial objects and organic structures are associated with each other in unpredictable ways. I am interested in searching for their similar attributes and using these characters to create a visual formula that constructs a compromise between the industrial and the natural. My work is the outcome of a fantasized environment, which makes peace with nature and the industrial world we live in: warping processed inorganic goods into forms that appear raw.”

OCTOBER 10 – NOVEMBER 28, 2020

Opening Reception by Appointment only, Saturday, October 10 from 6:00-9:00 PM during Fall for Art

Due to COVID-10 gathering restrictions, guests to the reception are required to register in advance for timed tickets to ensure limited attendance and adequate space for social distancing. Reserve Your Space Below.

“There is something about drawing with a soft pencil on a velvet-like surface that cannot be matched. No matter what is going on in my head or what stress I have in my life, touching pencil to paper soothes me. It is direct, low-tech and flows from within. Drawing is the foundation that all of my work is built on.

My recent drawings are created mostly with graphite and the marks are delicate and quiet. In these pieces I use intricately drawn patterns to suggest wallpaper, embroidery or domestic crafts that might have occupied a woman’s time in the day. Against these lovely, repetitive backgrounds, I situate a figure or part of the body in a tense or distressed pose with hair in disarray or toes flexed, interrupting the order of the drawn pattern.”

This body of work, “A Partial View”, is based on artist, Mary Jane Parker’s interest in hysteria, a disease that many women were diagnosed with in the early 1900’s. There are many theories about exactly what hysteria was and why it predominantly afflicted women. The aspect of the disease that has most fascinated Parker, however, is how the medical professionals used it to restrict women who did not follow the rules and expectations of society. In researching this period in medical history, Parker stumbled upon a group of drawings by the doctor who was a mentor to Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot. His fascinating sketches depicted states of restlessness, anxiety, theatricality and stress–– emotions akin to those our current society fosters.

A native New Orleanian, Ms. Parker’s work is mixed media combining printmaking and painting techniques with glass and bronze sculpture.  She received her BFA from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in studio art and her MFA from Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, in studio art with an emphasis in printmaking. Ms. Parker was the recipient of a Louisiana Division of the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in 1990 and 2001 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2006. She was also awarded a National Endowment for the Arts/Southern Arts Federation Award for Excellence in Works on Paper in 1990.  Ms. Parker used an NEA Independent Study Fellowship to travel along the pilgrimage route in France and Spain. In addition, she studied color woodcut in Florence, Italy using a Surdna Foundation Fellowship.

Ms. Parker has exhibited work nationally and internationally and is represented in New Orleans by Arthur Roger Gallery.  Currently Mary Jane serves on the board of the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans as the Visual Arts Coordinator. Ms. Parker is the chairperson of the visual arts department at the New Orleans Center for Creative Art. She is also a member of the teaching faculty.

“A Partial View: Drawings by Mary Jane Parker”, made possible, in part, by a generous donation from Catherine Deano.

Don Marshall, Executive Director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, brings together some of Louisiana’s most notable artists in his return to the St. Tammany Art Association (STAA) as he curates the “Northshore Invitational”, a special Fall for Art exhibition.

Bill Binnings, Douglas Brewster, Jerry Cannon, Emery Clark, Jose Maria Cundin, George Dunbar, Alan Flattman, Rolland Golden, Mark Grote, John Hodge, Shirley Rabé Masinter, Bunny Matthews, Bernard Mattox, Francie Rich, Philip Sage, Jean Seidenberg, Leslie Staub, Kathleen Trapolin, Hasmig Vartanian, Robert Warrens and Ed Whiteman.

While all of these artists had their start in New Orleans, the group spans a wide range of media, age, and backgrounds. Don Marshall covers the full scope of Louisiana artists and art history with this diverse group of nationally recognized artists.  

The Summer Show: A Nationally Juried Exhibition

The St. Tammany Art Association presents the 54th Nationally Juried Artists Exhibition. Join us July 13th, 6-9 pm for the Summer Show Exhibition Opening Reception to meet our Juror and featured Artists. For this popular juried exhibition, STAA will award some $3,000 in prizes, including the coveted $1,000 Best of Show award.

July 27th, 1-3pm, our juror this year, LouAnne Greenwald, the Executive Director of the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, will shed light on how she composed the 2019 show. Since taking on the tenure position in July of 2014, Greenwald has enriched and engaged the arts community throughout the Acadiana region. Using her position at the museum, to bridge the local culture of the University and community to a broader, national and international discourse.

Greenwald’s experience in museums and galleries is prolific. She has assumed roles as a curator and educator for the National History Museum of Los Angeles County, MOCA Los Angeles, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles. Prior to her position at the Hilliard University Art Museum, Greenwald worked as a consultant in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles raising funds for educational institutions. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for the LSU Museum of Art, in Baton Rouge, LA and is the Louisiana representative for the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries. Greenwald received her MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and received her CFRE certification in 2013.

One of the most diverse exhibitions of contemporary art in the Southeast, the juried competition of contemporary art invites artists ages 18 and up across the United States to submit up to three pieces for consideration. Accepted artwork is original visual art completed within the past two years and not previously exhibited at STAA.

Accepted pieces may be shipped to STAA to arrive between Tuesday, June 25 to Saturday, June 29, 2019. HAND-DELIVERED PIECES CAN ONLY BE ACCEPTED ON FRIDAY, JUNE 28, 10AM - 4PM, AND SATURDAY, JUNE 29, 11AM – 4PM. Due to concurrent programming, works cannot be accepted outside of these hours. STAA IS CLOSED from Sunday, June 30th through Thursday, July 4th for the Independence Day holiday.

The 54th juried competition opens July 13, 2019, with a reception from 6 pm to 9 pm and the presentation of awards at 7 pm. The show will be on view until August 17, 2019, when STAA will also host a closing reception from 6 pm to 9 pm in conjunction with Covington's arts festival, White Linen for Public Art. A gallery talk lead by the juror will also take place during the exhibition on Saturday, July 27 from 1-3 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public.

SPONSORS

STAA could not accomplish its goals without the support, involvement, and enthusiasm of community supporters.

Aubert Insurance

Dr. Richard & Maggie McConnell

Babette Beaullieu

Maggie McConnell

Luba Zygarewicz

Pushing Boundaries

Three female artists, Babette Beaullieu, Maggie McConnell, and Luba Zygarewicz, make visible the passage of time through sculptural installations showing that boundaries are as impermanent as time.

While all three artists are now actively working and based on the Northshore, they come from different backgrounds and places. Each woman came to a point in her life in which she discovered and reacted to the impermanence of life, nature, and time.

Born in Chile and raised in Bolivia, Zygarewicz moved to the United States via San Francisco when she was 15 years old. She received a BA from Loyola and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Zygarewicz began marking the passage of time while she worked to balance her life as a mother and masters student. Each day that she commuted to school, her car rides were a time for thought and inspiration that she cherished. This time in thought was as important to her process as the time spent in the studio creating physical pieces of work so she yearned to depict the presentation of those invisible moments.

While homeschooling her four children for 17 years, Zygarewicz struggled to find time as an artist so she decided that her domestic responsibilities and her creative needs should be inseparable. “My art feeds my home life and my home life feeds my art,” explains Zygarewicz. This inseparability of motherhood and art are seen in her installations made from the most mundane materials of everyday life. The dryer lint used in “Petrified Time”, creates an ephemeral passage of time in front of the viewer’s eye. The artist’s hair works in the same way in “Today” as each delicate ball shows the impermanence of time.

As a south Louisiana native, Babette Beaullieu has lived her life surrounded by a rich, cultural environment. Beaullieu is a multi-faceted sculptor, installation, and performance artist. She has a BFA from the University of Santa Barbara in Sculpture and went on to explore and study art in Europe and textile and wood carving in Bali. After years of working in the marine industry making sails and building boats, she made a change and began her professional art career. Experiencing the constant change that happens in all aspects of life and nature is a driving force in Beaullieu’s artwork. She has a special ability to acknowledge the impermanence and transitory state of the physical world.

Beaullieu, like Zygarewicz, explores the idea of not only inhabiting your home environment but being one with it. However, Beaullieu begs the question, “Do you have to have one spot?” Her hanging sculpture, “Hovering” addresses this idea of being ungrounded and the ability to respond to the constant flux of life. While describing her own idea of what creates a home in one piece, Beaullieu also describes grieving for the animals that have lost their homes from clearing land for construction. As the lot next door to her home, which is in close proximity to Lake Pontchartrain was cleared after 20 years, Beaullieu walked through the lot picking up objects in the dirt that she then used to create the piece, “They Need A House.” Through a ritualistic style of collection and reflection, Beaullieu copes with the changes and forced adaptations in life.

Born and raised in the Midwest, McConnell moved to New Orleans in 1981 after getting a degree in Interior Design. Yearning for the more hands-on nature of expressing her creativity, McConnell took a pottery class at the St. Tammany Art Association after moving to the Northshore in the late 1990s. She had a very quick connection to the clay and affinity for pottery-making so McConnell enrolled at Southeastern University. After starting the program in ceramics, McConnell was drawn to the sculpture department and there she found her truest artistic voice as a sculptor. McConnell uses her artwork and sculptures to reconnect with herself as she goes through the ever-changing journeys and adventures in life.

McConnell expresses an autobiographical chapter of her life as an artist and mother in “Leavings I & Leavings II”. The stacked leaves were made from paint cloths she had used for thirty years. Outlines of spray paint layered the cloths documenting different projects from years with her family. “It’s an outline of our lives,” she says as she reminisces on this ephemeral material used in cadence with natural wood. The importance of material and the way in which McConnell works with and combines materials from her domestic environment as well as the natural environment is a common theme in her work. In her piece “Without Measure”, McConnell offers up losses with every ceramic pocket. Each piece held combustible materials and was then fired. As the materials burn and loss is let go, they created the most unpredictable, mysterious colors. McConnell’s work is made of materials that she morphs and changes just as she has as an artist, a mother, but mainly as a spiritual being who, “finds nature wherever [she] can get it.”

St. Tammany Art Association (STAA) will host an opening reception on Saturday, April 13 during Spring For Art from 6:00 – 9:00 pm. The exhibit will be on display through May 25, 2019, in the Miriam Barranger Gallery at STAA. A Panel Discussion with all three artists lead by Dale Newkirk will take place at the STAA Arthouse on Saturday, May 11 from 4:00 – 6:00 pm.

The St. Tammany Art Association is located at 320 N. Columbia Street, Covington, LA 70433. Our gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10am – 4pm, and Saturday 11am – 4pm. All exhibitions are free and open to the public unless otherwise indicated.

St. Tammany Art Association is supported by the generosity of our 2018 Season of the Arts sponsors and by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council, as administered by the St. Tammany Parish Commission on Cultural Affairs. Funding has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works.

Just Below the Surface

The spaces in between Michel Varisco’s work force moments of meditative stillness amidst installations that rhythmically engulf the viewer, placing you “Just Below the Surface”.

As a native New Orleanian, Varisco’s work is centered around the human relationship and interaction with the environment, specifically water, and the effects that one has on the other.

After experiencing the destruction of the failed levees during Hurricane Katrina, much of Varisco’s work has focused on the fact that water not only sustains, but also has the ability to devastate communities and their beloved land.    

In “Just Below the Surface” Varisco takes the seriousness of environmental and personal themes and creates a whimsical experience she calls “magical realism”. “We’re losing our heritage land. In a desperation to communicate the fix we’re in, I just took everybody under water with me; fast-forwarding into a modern-day Atlantis,” explains Varisco.

The rhythmic repetition of her work is seamlessly presented in polyptychs and installations to parallel the natural patterns of water. The photographs, silk installments, and assemblage of objects come together to reflect the pack-and-go mindset that is so normalized to those living in an evacuation environment.