Willie Birch is one of the artists in ‘TEN YEARS GONE’ in the New Orleans Museum of Art, until September 7.
Stairway to Heaven, 2013.
About:
Willie Birch (1942, New Orleans) Willie Birch was only eleven years old when he decided to be an artist. After finishing graduate school he moved to New York and made his name working in paper maché, using the medium for social commentary and exploring the concepts of fragility and preciousness. However, after receiving a grant to research the history of slavery in Louisiana, he felt drawn to his home state after two decades away. Birch’s work evolved when he returned to his native New Orleans.
Martin Luther King Day Parade.
The Garden Hose, 2012.
Domino Players, 2008.
He began drawing larger-than-life portraits of his fellow community members from snapshots he took of local scenes. The door to Birch’s Seventh Ward studio is always open when he works, allowing him to tune in and draw inspiration from the daily rituals of his community and letting the people he draws see themselves depicted in large and empowering artworks that command space and attention. Birch says, “Being an artist in an African American community is an unusual phenomenon,” but “people gravitate toward truth and energy. And that’s what I’m trying to make happen, every day of my life.”
What If, 2013.
Though rooted in a specific time and place, Birch sees his works as allegorical and is fascinated by broader themes about the human condition that go beyond race or class. He views New Orleans as an extremely special place, where diverse traditions are melded and mixed, and often celebrates unique aspects of the city’s cultural traditions, but he also tries to emphasize their universality. Most recently, Birch has drawn inspiration from the soil beneath his feet and the crawfish that make their own small-scale land art by tunneling into the mud in his backyard. Cast in bronze, Birch memorializes the entrances to these dwellings and elevates the crustaceans’ handiwork to abstract sculpture (from massart.edu).