When architecture professor Hector LaSala challenged his students with a project to build life-size portraits of themselves out of garbage, he didn’t know what to expect. His instructions included the preamble to the United States Constitution and a requirement to use cast-off elements. “It was a combination of coming up with who you are and the need to make something beautiful out of garbage,” says LaSala. “There is so much waste in our lives. In the future, that waste will need to be used. This was our chance to encounter the future now.”
The students responded with sculptures of such high artistic value that LaSala called Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum curator Lee Gray to schedule a show. “It is strong enough to fill the big gallery,” says Gray. The pieces join a long tradition of modern sculpture that echoes the works of such artists as Degas, Magritte, Giacometti, and Butterfield — both in gesture and by the elements of their composition.
Students used a vast palate of materials — scrap aluminum, Plexiglas, bamboo, wire, bicycle parts, motherboards, hoses, crab nets, a mailbox, sponges, vines, corks, fabric, car parts and driftwood to create boxers, dancers and musicians. Many of the works incorporate elements of the made and natural world interwoven, such as a maiden constructed of aluminum mesh and dried reeds, or a new father holding an infant. The father’s loins are fashioned from a dictionary, the child’s brain a sea sponge.
The artwork’s first rate, and the exhibit showcases the enormous talent in the student body in UL’s Art and Architecture school, as well as the creative leadership of the faculty. With only three more weeks to run, it’s well worth the effort to take a trip to the beautiful blue-lit museum on St. Mary Boulevard.
We The People, a collection of more than 60 sculpture self-portraits by second- and third-year architecture and interior design students, runs through Sept. 6 at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, 710 E. Saint Mary Blvd., Lafayette, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $5 and free for UL students and faculty. Free admission is also offered from 10 a.m. to noon, and on Friday for people 40 and over. Visit museum.louisiana.edu or call 482-2278 for more information.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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