Major production funding for Art Rocks!

is provided by East Baton Rouge Parish Library.

The library's art collection includes local and regional artists and highlights the diverse styles, themes, and techniques of their work.

The collection is located at branches throughout the parish or online at EBRPL.com and by generous support from the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge.

The Louisiana Division of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, with the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

This week, Art Rocks!

heads to Folsom, Louisiana, where Basque born, internationally acclaimed Spanish artist José-María Cundín creates artistic masterpieces.

We'll talk to Andrew Rodgers, executive director here at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, about the brilliance of Cundín’s work.

And then we'll consider the kinetic sculpture of Lin Emery, who, like Cundín, elevated the Crescent City's contemporary arts scene.

Those stories, this time on, Art Rocks!

Hello and welcome to Art Rocks!, the series that takes you into the studios and explores the creative working processes of working Louisiana artists.

I'm James Fox-Smith from Country Roads magazine, and today we're visiting a special exhibition of works by the celebrated avant garde artist José-María Cundín here at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts.

This exhibition was the centerpiece for Artful Giving a Night at the Academy, a gala to honor Cundín who is a long time Louisiana resident.

As you're about to hear from Academy, executive Director Andrew Rodgers, Cundín’s connections to the school and to Louisiana run deep.

Cundín and his wife, Marion, are long time supporters of the Academy's mission to offer an engaging and a diverse arts curriculum to its students, who are surely thrilled to connect with and to learn from a celebrated master artist.

The mission of the Academy really has its origins when we think about Paris in the late 1700s, with the Parisian academy.

Going all the way back to ancient Greece.

It is all about the student working from a master artist and learning their crafts through the art of making.

The galleries themselves are these areas where we can present artists such as José-María Cundín, who are really true masters of their work and show that they are both artists and human beings and can connect and want to teach.

What I think he personally has always seen in the Academy is that melting pot of creative spirit.

Just like the academies.

He spent time in Spain as a youth and where people come to make.

And he taught here in the early 80s, actually, in the origin of the school, he taught a color perception class, not surprisingly, as a master of color.

And so seeing our institution from an educator and from a visitor and from an exhibiting artist, I think he is kind of specially poised to kind of continue his legacy here with this exhibition.

It's difficult to talk about his work without separating him as a man.

And his journey was born in the Basque region, which has always had its own particular identity.

So he saw where the winds were going with towards sort of dictatorship with Franco, and he knew he needed to leave.

He snuck into a orange truck to get over the border from Spain into France.

And just, you know, hearing that spectrum of his experience now almost as a nine year old man.

José-María’s wealth of knowledge, of art, of creation, needs to be honored.

He was of a group of Spanish and Latin American artists.

And I asked him very pointedly, I was interested, you know, were you kind of tempted to move into abstraction at the time?

Because at the time he was working very realistically and he said, no, because, you know, it was almost if at the time he saw that as not necessarily lesser than, but another journey that wasn't his.

And I think what is interesting about his evolution, that it was not until many years later that he began to think about, what artists call the plastic reality of painting.

Not necessarily, you know, the breaking down of form and abstraction.

And I think with his work you can see that, you know, all like beautifully synthesized in some of the work from the 2016, ‘15, where the figures began to become geometric forms that he actually paints them.

And that's the other quite interesting thing here is that where a lot of abstract artists, they diminish the forms, whereas José-María Cundín, you know, explodes the figure.

And in this very exhibition, I juxtapose two pieces.

One of his figures next to one of his later abstracts, and you can literally see the hair of the figure or the feet, the forms that she's holding.

So I think, you know, if we think of his impact in a broader way and, you know, he has exhibited nationally, regionally and all over the world, I think it is when and how he broke into abstraction and how he has always embraced his very particular and stunning use of color.

All of his abstract forms are still beautifully rendered from life, from still life.

He crafts them, sometimes even out of paper mache, and even so, the colors then continue.

So I think a master of pulling abstraction in a very kind of synthesized literal way, and a master of color in ways that we may never see again.

And I think that's why it's so important to celebrate artists of his generation.

Artists, that some have now passed and no longer with us, like George Dunbar and Lynne Emery speaking to Louisiana and the arts in this state, these artists are just as important to the larger story of art history as Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman.

He has had a legacy of collection and exhibition in the city of New Orleans, and has been carried by multiple very successful galleries locally, most most recently Callan Contemporary.

His journey, I think locally, I mean, was again personified beautifully by the exhibition where gallery owners and collectors came out and just, you know, there was a line out from the door to talk to him about his work and about him and his as a man, and how he's evolved as an artist.

And I think his most recent series, with which this exhibition features photographs inspired by the artwork of of Morandi, speak to his sort of deep love of what the city has given him, but also his desire to always push forward.

I mean, the last thing people would think is really that he would do a series of exclusive photographs, but he's decided to.

This exhibition and also his the breadth of his career, I think, is another piece that differentiates him from, some of his contemporaries and other artists, which is that he worked in a vast array of medium.

You know, when we talk about medium, we're talking about sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, installation, architecture.

And in this exhibition itself, we see many of those things from, you know, the satirical sculptures like Failed Prototype, which is at first glance just simply a plane.

But then you look at it and he's and he's, you know, painstakingly painted it to look like trompe l'oeil, a marble.

And then you begin to process and you think, oh, yes, of course.

Yeah, Marble Plain wouldn't get very far.

It's a failed prototype.

So his satire in his sculpture and also just the craftsmanship of his sculpture, which is really quite incredible.

This exhibition is his first retrospective.

So the first time that his work has been seen as a whole.

And so, yes, it's powerful to begin to look at this, this man and his legacy, even at almost the ripe age of 90 years old, he continues to push forward and play and engage with what his art can be and what art has been.

What terrific insight into the ways José-María Cundín continues to push creative boundaries.

Cundín’s life trajectory was cast early thanks to his artistic talent, he was awarded an art scholarship that saw him leave his native Spain before his 20th birthday when he set off for Bogota, Colombia.

The Latin American setting, which the artist described as magical, is where his first one man show debuted.

After artistic sojourns in Paris and Bruges, Cundín established his US residence in New York in 1958, but it was a short port of call in New Orleans in 1964 that convinced him that Louisiana was home.

Since 2004, he and his wife Marion have lived on rural property north of Lake Pontchartrain in Folsom.

As a founder of the neo figurative artistic movement, Cundín’s career spans seven decades.

His paintings and sculptures have been featured in hundreds of exhibitions, and can be found in as many corporate and private collections too.

So come with us now as we visit the Folsom studio of a recognized Spanish Master.

After his residency in Colombia, José-María spent formative years in New York City, which was fast becoming the center of the art world.

He then headed west, accompanied by his brother, to San Francisco.

But thinking the West Coast to exotic, he headed back east and ended up making a fortuitous port of call in New Orleans.

After finding his artistic family in New Orleans, José-María felt a calling to return to Spain in the 1970s following the death of Franco.

There he contributed to the creative recovery of his native Basque Country, exhibiting and teaching color and composition at the University of Bilbao.

After stints teaching the same course at the Institute of Fine Arts in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and at artist residency at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, José-María and his wife Marian returned to Louisiana, where they found the perfect pastoral setting in Folsom that has remained their permanent home ever since.

José-María says that after so many years, it was difficult to abandon a known and popular formula involving his figurative paintings, but feeling the need for a new expressive subtlety with the emphasis on color and composition.

He debuted his first exhibition of new work at the Academy Gallery in New Orleans in 1990.

José-María's use of color, as well as his study of shapes and masterful use of light, is extended to photography as well as sculpture, where his signature treatment of form is rendered three dimensional.

It was our honor to spend an afternoon with José-María Cundín.

A contemporary of Cundín’s was the kinetic sculptor Lin Emery.

In fact, Cundín and Emery's early involvement in Orleans Gallery six decades ago helped establish an advance its mission to serve as an arts incubator for the contemporary arts in New Orleans.

Both artists work places special emphasis on geometric shapes to communicate their artistry.

It's fitting, then, that this episode’s Vault Rocks segment revisits our conversation with the remarkable Lin Emery.

Lin Emery is an internationally recognized sculptress.

She was originally from New York, but she moved to New Orleans in the 1950s.

Lin Emery began making sculpture at a time when very few women were artists who could show their work, especially sculptural work.

She enjoyed New Orleans a great deal and decided to make that her home based in large part because the city was more accepting of female artists.

For the last six decades, she's been making beautiful kinetic art pieces that are very unique.

There are all over our state, even as far away as Singapore and China.

Even her very early works look as if they're moving.

They look like they want to take flight.

And in fact, Flight is a title that she's used for a number of her works throughout her career.

When I was in Paris, 11th and 12th century sculptors, on the face of the churches, they all looked as though they were moving.

Their drapery was swung open.

And so when I came back and started doing the Saints, I also posed them as if they were moving or doing something.

And so it was simply a visual interest in wishing that I could make things move.

She started off making kinetic work after the thought struck her while she was washing dishes, and noticed a spoon balanced on the edge of a cup.

And as the water would kind of plop down into the spoon and it would rock back and forth, she got the idea of making kinetic work.

They were largely fairly small, and over time she began to make them larger and more sophisticated.

All along, her goal has been to make kinetic art that moves in his life like a manner as possible, that are not simple machines, but harness nature to become more animated by natural forces.

She's really pushed the boundaries of what kinetic art can be.

Her work combines art and design and engineering and nature all in all, in one.

I think the nature element is something that I think is very unique about her work because of her reflective surfaces.

Not only is she harnessing nature, but they become one with nature when they're in the environment, which is part of her unique voice.

Perhaps because she is in New Orleans, in Louisiana, not in a center such as New York, she has flown slightly under the radar, but I think her star is still rising.

That's my proudest achievement that just just came.

It says Lifetime Achievement Award, Kinetic Art Association.

So as a kinetic artist, I have a lifetime achievement.

See the full story of Lin Emery as we honor her legacy in our playlist of past seasons at LPB.org/artrocks.

There, you'll find a guided tour of this spectacular José-María Cundín exhibition at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts in an Art Rocks!

digital extra.

And if you love arts and culture in Louisiana, don't stop here, visit CountryRoadsMagazine.com for a curated guide to many of Louisiana's curious cultural treasures.

That is that for this edition of Art Rocks!

So until next time, I've been your host, James Fox-Smith.

And from all of us here at LPB.

Thank you for watching.

Major production funding for Art Rocks!

is provided by East Baton Rouge Parish Library.

The library's art collection includes local and regional artists and highlights the diverse styles, themes, and techniques of their work.

The collection is located at branches throughout the parish or online at EBRPL.com.

And by generous support from the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.