Louisiana Abstraction includes a selection of artworks from the LSU MOA permanent collection. Mounted as a compliment to, Blurring Boundaries, this exhibition showcases the immense talent found within our state, focusing on abstract artwork by women with connections to Louisiana. This exhibit is on view August 2–October 16, 2022.

A one-time student at Louisiana State University, Margaret Evangeline draws on her Southern roots for inspiration. Her abstracted style has evolved throughout the years, shifting between brightly colored canvases with linear forms and shapes, to thick layers impasto mixed with crystallina powder, to experiments blasting metal sheets with a rifle to examine the effects on the surface.

This painting references Southern Gothic author Carson McCullers, who struggled throughout her life with identity, mental health, and physical ailments. McCullers died at age 50, leaving an unfinished autobiography entitled, Illumination and Night Glare. Evangeline’s painting features a chaotic scribble of lines, intertwining within themselves. Although the shapes occupy one space, they are separate with no interaction. One form stands out—the heavy scrawls of white paint contrast with the delicate, spiraling orange lines. The dots in the background reference the artist’s interest in bullet holes, the literal piercing of a surface. Could Evangeline be visually exploring the author’s maddening mental state and her struggles with identity and place? Or McCuller’s frequent literary themes of spiritual isolation and the plight of misfits and outcasts within society?

At the time of her death in 1997, Ida Kohlmeyer was one of Louisiana’s most well-known artists. She began creating art in her thirties, after discovering a passion for painting while taking classes at the John McCrady Art School in the French Quarter of her native New Orleans. While renowned for her large metal sculptures, Kohlmeyer’s distinctive style and personal vocabulary are often present in her joyous and exuberant abstracted canvases. The artist equated abstraction with being freed from the rigid confines of realism, allowing her to explore movement and expression through color, shape, and texture.

The Great Mother Isis was the Egyptian goddess of healing and magic—able to create or destroy life with mere words. Lin Emery captures her power with metal and movement, while achieving a sense of intimacy between the viewer and figure. Her winged arms are open in greeting, encouraging you to move closer. The face, a representation of the solar disk, a powerful ancient symbol for the sun and earthly life, contrasts with the reflective metal. The figure’s body is flattened and presented in profile, with both feet facing the same direction. The goddess is modernized, her spirit captured in contemporary form.

Emery studied art in Paris and New York, establishing herself as a sculptor in the early 1950s, a time when the medium was dominated by men. While the artist experimented with various forms and constructions, she was most intrigued by movement. Emery created kinetic artworks that took on life by shifting, spinning, jiggling, or traveling through space, powered by water, magnets, or wind. She states:

“My sculpture is kinetic, meaning that it moves. The elements are derived from nature, and I borrow natural elements — wind, water, magnets — to set them in motion. The rhythms are influenced by infinite variables: the points of balance, the normal frequency of each form, the interruption of the counterpoise. I juggle, juxtapose, and adjust to achieve the dance or pantomime that I want. Then the sculpture takes over and invents a fillip of its own.”

Alia Ali (Arabic: عاليه علي // Sabean: ‎ 𐩲𐩱𐩡𐩺𐩲|𐩲𐩱𐩡) is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist, who splits her time between Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Marrakech. A child of migrant linguists, Ali has traveled to sixty-seven countries, lived in and between seven, and grown up among five languages. Her migrations allow her to process the world through interactive experiences, with the belief that the act of translating and interpreting written language has damaged, rather than enlightened, particular communities, resulting in the threat of their exclusion. She is an artist who exists on the borders of identifying as West Asian, Eastern European, a United States citizen, queer, culturally Muslim yet spiritually independent. Ali’s work explores cultural binaries, challenges culturally sanctioned oppression, and confronts the dualistic barriers of conflicted notions of gender, politics, media, and citizenship.

This artwork is part of the FLUX series, of which Ali states:

“FLUX is a series of shifting photographic artworks that embody silhouettes that are warped and warped by textile, saturated in colors and a medley of motifs. Each frame is uniquely upholstered with wax print sourced from Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Nigeria and the Netherlands. While some of the images distort visibility, others create hypervisibility almost negating themselves into animated forms of camouflage. The outburst of saturated colors and hyper-optic motifs in these images, lend themselves to vibrating results obscuring the complex and sometimes iniquitous conditions by which these textiles came into fruition, thus destabilizing the source(s) from where they came from. The multiple dimensionality creates a kaleidoscope of perspectives, horizontally and vertically. Horizontally, in that this material has come into existence across borders over land and water, and vertically in that they draw from and evoke cosmic, mythical and religious inspirations. Furthermore, these particular wax prints are a key to mapping the colonial trade routes. While they certainly can be seen as escapist dreamscapes, they are also objects of oppression and capitalism.”

Clementine Hunter, born near Cloutierville, Louisiana around Christmas in 1886, is one of America’s most well-known vernacular artists. From early childhood, Hunter worked as a laborer, picking cotton on plantation sites throughout the Cane River Valley, eventually moving to Melrose Plantation in the 1920s to work as a cook and housekeeper. In her late fifties, Hunter executed her first artwork—a painting of a baptism rendered on an old window shade using discarded paints left by a houseguest. This early experience blossomed into a lifelong artistic career, seeing Hunter paint hundreds of vibrant and abstracted scenes of everyday life drawn from her spirited memories of family, the Louisiana landscape, and the local community. Untrained, Hunter’s desire to create was wholly innate and internally driven. Her compositions, often repeated, horizontally stacked motifs, give us an intimate view into her world. Hunter lived these scenes—she worshiped with the community, she picked the cotton, she grew the vegetables, she celebrated with friends and family.

These two images are especially unique, as they deviate from Hunter’s memory paintings and represent the artist’s expert hand at abstraction. She intentionally removes details—facial features, the outlines of plants, a horizon line—and focuses on color, shape, and emotion.