Rodrigue's Louisiana: Cajuns, Blue Dogs, and Beyond Katrina

March 2 - June 8, 2008

The New Orleans Museum of Art is proud to present a forty-year retrospective of the work of George Rodrigue, Louisiana's most famous contemporary artist. Opening to the public on March 2 and continuing on view until June 8, 2008, this comprehensive exhibition, the largest yet organized, will feature nearly two hundred paintings, sculptures and prints which survey the full range of Rodrigue's career.

George Rodrigue was born in 1944 and raised in New Iberia, Louisiana, in the heart of Cajun country. His family are descendants of the original French settlers who were forcibly exiled by the English in 1755 from Nova Scotia (called Acadia) in French Canada, relocating to the swamps and prairies of southwest Louisiana. Rodrigue began to make art early, beginning as a boy of eight while recovering at home from polio. After studies at University of Southwest Louisiana in Lafayette, Rodrigue studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Back in Lafayette and after a year as an advertising artist, he began painting full time in 1969, creating moody landscapes and nostalgic scenes of Cajun life. His paintings heralded the emergence of a Cajun cultural revival that soon swept the nation with its unique music, food, folktales, and humor.

With an ebullient personality and natural marketing savvy, Rodrigue quickly achieved regional and national fame. He found new ways to publicize his paintings in nontraditional ways, bringing his art to a broad popular. audience. He began incorporating his Cajun paintings into specially designed posters celebrating the festivals that are a unique feature of the small towns of southwest Louisiana. This lead to an series of portraits of famous Louisianans. Rodrigue's career and fame rose to a higher plateau in the late 1980s with his creation of the now iconic Blue Dog, inspired by the loup-garou, the Cajun werewolf. The image of the Blue Dog, featured in hundreds of original paintings and prints, has achieved universal fame from appearances on vodka advertisements, wine labels, presidential inaugural posters, department store catalogue covers, billboards for Xerox®, as well as the subject of numerous books and exhibitions.

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., Rodrigue established Blue Dog Relief to raise funds for the victims and their families with the sale of a specially designed print. After Katrina and Rita laid waste his native state, Rodrigue created a new series of special designed prints to benefit various relief programs and Louisiana cultural organizations. So far Blue Dog Relief has raised nearly $2 million.

The Exhibition is arranged thematically into six sections.

Landscapes and Oak Trees
After returning to Louisiana from art school in California in 1967 Rodrigue began painting the landscape of his region. In dark and brooding compositions the moss-draped live oak became the central motif. These simple depictions of tree, sky and ground were reinventions of the late 19th century tradition of Louisiana landscapes established by Richard Clague and William Buck.

Cajuns

Beginning in 1971 Rodrigue initiated his original series of paintings of scenes of Cajun life, inspired by family stories and photographs from the early 20th century. These multifigure compositions visualize the unique Cajun culture which evolved over two hundred years in the isolated bayous and marshes of southwest Louisiana. The subjects of his Cajun paintings are quite varied, from family portraits to school groups, gourmet clubs, barber shops, musical groups, dancers, faith healers, quilting parties, cake contests - all placed outside silhouetted against the ever-present live oak tree. A unique feature of the New Orleans exhibition will be a fifteen-panel historical cycle, The Saga of the Acadians.

Portraits
Concurrent with his Cajun paintings, Rodrigue was commissioned to paint a series of portraits of famous Louisianans: first literary (like John Kennedy Toole and Shirley Ann Grau), then political (Huey and Earl Long), culinary (Chef Paul Prudhomme) and musical (Louis Armstrong and Pete Fountain). These portraits lead later to others depicting current political personalities, from Louisiana governors to American presidents (including Reagan, Bush and Clinton).



The Blue Dog
In 1984 Rodrigue painted his first Blue Dog, one of a number of paintings commissioned to illustrate a book of forty Cajun folk stories by Chris Segura. For the story about the loup garou, the Cajun werewolf, Rodrigue was inspired by the black and white Tiffany, the artist's late studio dog. This first image depicted a small, scrappy dog with big ears, staring eyes and a shaggy coat of silver blue placed outside in Rodrigue's classic landscape setting. The dog's distinctive color was suggested by the bluish light of an overcast moon, as described in the Segura story. While over the years the setting evolved and changed the image of the Blue Dog has remained the same. His image invokes feelings of humor, love, confusion, irony, sadness, even desire. Now an international icon, the Blue Dog has become an Everyman or Everydog, who in his naivete and innocence triumphs over adversity.

Hurricanes
In a surprising departure from his realist work, in 2002 Rodrigue began a series of more than sixty round paintings in various sizes inspired by the awesome power of hurricanes, which have so shaped life on the Gulf Coast. Inspired by witnessing the power of Hurricane Lili as it passed over Lafayette that year, these intensely colored, vigorously brushed canvases are totally abstract, except for a few in which can be seen branches and trunks of trees and even parts of the Blue Dog swirling in the maelstrom. Prophetic of the later destruction of Katrina and Rita, these powerful compositions demonstrate Rodrigue's complete mastery of the vocabulary of abstraction.

Bodies
In 2004 Rodrigue began Bodies, his latest series of paintings. These works reflect a conscious return to the bayou and the classical nude, as well as an exploration of a new printmaking technique. In remastered digital prints, he combines his original painting with the innovations in design and color available through computer technology. The Bodies, while new in terms of technical process, include excerpts from his established language of symbols - the oak tree, the cemetery, the ghostly figure and the Blue Dog. These new works demonstrate that Rodrigue never completely abandons a subject but approaches his art with fresh eyes, treating the world to his ever changing vision.

The complete range of George Rodrigue's work is fully represented in the exhibition at NOMA. In addition, the artist's studio has been recreated in the exhibition, accompanied by a room of memorabilia documenting forty years of artistic life. While no catalogue has been produced for the exhibition, a number of recent books on Rodrigue's work are available in NOMA's Museum Shop. This includes the new George Rodrigue Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne 1970-2007, published by Abrams, New York.

The Rodrigue exhibition is presented in New Orleans through the generosity of Acadian Ambulance Service, Chevron, Lakeside Shopping Center and The Feil Organization, The Helis Foundation, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, WWL-TV and Anonymous Donors.