Five new sculptures will join the public art exhibition in downtown New Orleans, known as the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition presented by The Helis Foundation (PCSE), with installations during the week of September 23. Over the years, PCSE has installed more than 35 sculptures by artists of local and international renown on Poydras Street between Convention Center Boulevard and South Galvez. A public-private partnership between The Helis Foundation, Sculpture for New Orleans, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the City of New Orleans Department of Parks and Parkways, PCSE is the South’s leading rotating public sculpture exhibition.
New PCSE artists and artworks included in the fall installation:
Lynda Benglis – Power Tower, 2019
Courtesy of Pace Gallery, Benglis’ “Power Tower” is an eight-foot-tall, newly-fabricated sculpture in undulating form fabricated in bronze, with a high-gloss gold patina.
Earl Dismuke – Dingbat, 2019
“Dingbat” is an ode to storytelling and outlandish stories the artist recalls from his childhood in this steel 11-foot sculpture.
Lonnie Holley – Headed to the Land We Were Promised (Glory), 2019
Holley created spontaneous silhouettes of figurative shapes nearly 17 feet tall, cut out of ¾-inch carbon steel with a torch for this totemic sculpture, which speaks of generations of narrative history within a single form.
Phil Proctor – The Guide, 2018
Previously sited on Atlanta’s Beltline, “The Guide” is fabricated entirely from steel I-beams and features an LED acrylic staff, being held by a towering contrapposto figure towering in at over 13 feet.
Kennedy Yanko – Three Ways, 2019
Fabricated from stainless steel, bronze, urethane and enamel, Yanko’s piece is comprised of materials that vibrate with both harmony and discord and, as her first public commission, features her signature “paint skins” technique.
“A unique aspect of the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition is that some of the sculptures are changed over time, allowing us to occasionally surprise the public with new pieces of public art,” said Jessie Haynes, Managing Director of The Helis Foundation. “This recent installation of multiple sculptures is a testament to the success of this project. The latest sculptures on the Corridor are an interesting mix of critically acclaimed and world-renowned artists’ works with emerging and mid-career artists, which provides a platform for engaging with exciting new work while also recognizing New Orleans as a thriving center for contemporary art presentations.”
About the PCSE Artists
Lynda Benglis – “Power Tower” Since the 1960s, Lynda Benglis has been celebrated for the free, ecstatic forms she has made that are simultaneously playful and visceral, organic and abstract. Her work demonstrates an enduring fascination with process and materials. Through her multifarious practice, Benglis continues a long-running investigation of the proprioceptive, sensory experiences of making and viewing her works.
Benglis was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1941. She earned a B.F.A. in 1964 from Newcomb College in New Orleans, where she studied ceramics and painting, and later went on to study painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Benglis resides in New York, Santa Fe and Ahmedabad, India. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Benglis’s work is in extensive public collections, including the Guggenheim, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Earl Dismuke – “Dingbat” Earl Dismuke is a Mississippi-based sculptor who is dedicated to enhancing community life through the power of public art, all the while pursuing his passion of creating his own body of work. He graduated in 2007 from the University of Mississippi with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in sculpture. Earl is a co-founder of the Yokna Sculpture Trail, a bi-annual rotating outdoor sculpture exhibition in Oxford, Miss. He is a recipient of the Mississippi Arts Commission 2019 Visual Arts Fellowship Grant, and a member of the International Sculpture Center. Examples of his work have been included in several international and national exhibitions, including but not limited to, Scope Basel in Basel, Switzerland, Lima, Peru, and several gallery and museum shows. Earl works out of his studio in Oxford, Miss., where he lives with his wife and four children.
Lonnie Holley – “Headed to the Land We Were Promised (Glory)” Lonnie Holley has devoted his adult life to the practice of improvisational creativity across many media, from visual art, to music and—most recently—film. His film, “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” premiered at 2019 Sundance Film Festival. His 2018 album, “MITH,” was critically acclaimed, making lists of the top 10 records of the year in the New Yorker and Newsweek. Paste magazine has named Holley (along with cultural icons such as Yoko Ono, David Byrne, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Laurie Anderson) as one of the 10 most important artists who crossover between the visual arts and music. Holley’s work has been acquired by, among many other museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Phillips Collection and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
Phil Proctor – “The Guide” Phil Proctor is a professional sculptor practicing in Atlanta since 2003. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from East Carolina University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Southern Mississippi. His permanently installed public art works can be found across the southeastern United States and Eastern Europe including several large-scale outdoor works in the Metro Atlanta area. His outdoor sculpture exhibition record covers the southeast and includes an exhibition at Hartsfield Jackson International Airport.
Proctor has developed a professional reputation in the public art community by his involvement in the infrastructure of public art. Some examples are: his role as a committee member for the development of a public art master plan for the city of Suwanee, Ga. and his initiatives leading to the first annual temporary outdoor sculpture exhibition in the city of Decatur, Ga.
Phil Proctor occupies an 11,000 square foot studio in south Atlanta where he works to generate his sculpture and other specialty metal work. His company is Nucleus Sculpture Studio LLC, where he designs, fabricates and installs custom projects for designers, artists and the motion picture industry.
Kennedy Yanko – “Three Ways” Kennedy Yanko is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist working primarily with found objects and paint. Her formal gesture towards material is balanced by her examination of the paradoxes within perception.
Since debuting sculptures from her “Elements and Skin” collection as part of a Derrick Adams-curated group show, “Hidden in Plain Sight” (Jenkins Johnson Project Space. Brooklyn, N.Y., 2017), Yanko has shown regularly at galleries and fairs domestically and internationally. Her work belongs to the JP Morgan Chase Collection, and the collections of Beth Rudin deWoody, and Helyn Goldenberg. In 2018 Yanko was named “Artist of the Week” during Armory Week by Milk Magazine and profiled by Vice.
She exhibited in Cry of Victory and Short Walks to Freedom as part of Hank Willis Thomas’ national For Freedoms project, and was a part of Parallels and Peripheries at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. In 2019, Yanko’s solo shows include Highly Worked (Denny Dimin Gallery, NY), Hannah (Kavi Gupta, Chicago), and Before Words (UICA, Grand Rapids). Each of these shows reveals the gravity of abstraction and its utility as an intuitive tool in understanding present realities.
Lynda Benglis Elephant Necklace Exhibit Coming to Ogden Museum
In addition to her installation of “Power Tower” on the Poydras Corridor, Benglis, a Louisiana native, will also present ELEPHANT NECKLACE, an exhibit at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Visitors to the Ogden Museum are encouraged to view Benglis’ presentations in both its Fifth Floor Gallery and on the Poydras Corridor.
Exhibition Dates: Sept. 21, 2019 – January 19, 2020
Artist: Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana)
Exhibit: ELEPHANT NECKLACE
ABOUT THE EXHIBIT Since the 1960s, Lynda Benglis has employed a variety of materials including beeswax, latex, vaporized metals and ceramic to explore the physicality of form. She has worked as a sculptor, painter and filmmaker in pursuit of a codified duality, seeking to expose the process of creation in its realization of finality. Her work is fluid, yet inert; organic, yet fabricated; sensual, yet rigid. The work invokes a corporeal reckoning within the viewer, exposing the preconceived constructs that exist within us.
Benglis’s ELEPHANT NECKLACE series is a body of hand-wrought, glazed ceramic curls that the artist correlates with the blown-out tires of tractor trailer transports strewn on the sides of countless American highways. “ELEPHANT NECKLACES are artifacts that I imagine as extrusions of life,” she says. “They could be described as fragments from mammoths’ trunks of an ancient time. Or perhaps they resemble strange umbilical cords cut after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.” The series evokes the biological remnants of a mysterious past with the tactile familiarity of a modern freeway. We perceive the work in stasis while it exudes movement, as we comprehend ourselves as single bodies while our infinite cells flow and change. This duality permeates the ELEPHANT NECKLACE series in its suspension of fluidity, immediateness of an imagined origin and elegance in hewn form.
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About The Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition presented by The Helis Foundation The Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition presented by The Helis Foundation was founded in 2013 as an initiative of non-profit organization, Sculpture for New Orleans, and has quickly become the South’s leading rotating public sculpture exhibition. Sculptor Michael Manjarris founded Sculpture for New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina with the mission of lifting the spirits of the people of New Orleans through public art and providing local and regional artists the opportunity to show in a public venue.
A unique example of a public-private partnership, Sculpture for New Orleans, The Helis Foundation, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and The City of New Orleans Department of Parks and Parkways work together to bring interesting and inspiring sculpture to the citizens of and visitors to New Orleans.
The Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition presented by The Helis Foundation has installed over 35 sculptures by artists of local and international acclaim on Poydras Street between Convention Center Boulevard and South Galvez.
For more information, visit thehelisfoundation.org or, text “Poydras” to 56512.