Farrington Smith Gallery

Farrington Smith Gallery is proud to present our upcoming show of paintings by Steve Richardson and Katherine Thompson.

The artists’ reception is Saturday, March 24 from 6-9 p.m. We hope you’ll join us!

- Amy Farrington

This Saturday, March 24, Barrister’s Gallery, Farrington Smith Gallery and l’art Noir New Orleans have coordinated their openings to offer you a gallery-hopping experience St. Claude Ave.-style.

For Barrister’s Gallery, this is also an inaugural show at their new location of 2331 St. Claude Ave. and Spain. I saw the space at about the halfway point in its construction, and it promised to be very nice. The show is new works on paper by Myrtle Von Damitz, III and is entitled, “I’m Running Out of Coffee and It Smells Like Rotten Onions.” The artist’s reception on Saturday is from 4-9 p.m.

At Farrington Smith Gallery, we will have paintings by Steve Richardson and Katherine Thompson. Our artist’s reception is from 6-9 pm. (see the separate invite post for images)

Furthur down the way at 4108 St. Claude Ave., l’art Noir is opening their Comic Art Show, which includes work by Tony “Baloney” Juliano, Henriette Valium, and Caeser Meadows.

We’re excited to be building on the art scene over here in the Marigny/Bywater; please stop by any or all of these shows this Saturday, March 24!

I’ve submitted this information for cross-posting over at the Alternative Arts New Orleans blog, which I’m going to write more about soon. Please think about submitting to the site; the more people participate, the better the blog will be!

Amy Farrington

Hope you can join us for our opening reception this Friday, December 8th from 6 p.m. ’til 9 p.m.

- Amy

December is a month of photography in New Orleans. Lots of places will be participating, including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Contemporary Arts Center and us! A schedule can be seen here.

We are lucky to be showing work by Louviere + Vanessa, Jennifer Shaw and Jean Laughton. All have beautiful websites, so instead of posting a lot now about each, I encourage you to visit their spaces. Later, I’ll try to make individual posts for all three.

The opening reception will be here on Friday, December 8 from 6 p.m.- 9 p.m.

Our event mistakenly got listed in the Gambit as happening this Friday, so we will be here during those hours just in case, but the official opening isn’t until next week, so that is the best day to come by! Hope to see you then!

- Amy

The origin of these enigmatic and functional objects exists somewhere between Sculpture and Design in a realm I like to refer to as post-industrial primitive.

As Sculpture, my Art conveys the intensity of personal expression by synthesizing the history of Found Objects, the familiarity of Common Materials, and the directness of Assemblage…yet by acknowledging the intuitive and formal qualities of Furniture, my work gains meaning within the context of an individual’s physical interaction with it Day In and Day Out.

-Abe

1. …wishfulthinking…; Abe Geasland; mixed media and found objects

2. Electrolyte #43 (MALcontent); Abe Geasland; mixed media and found objects

3. …handshakedrugs…; Abe Geasland; mixed media and found objects

We are so pleased with how the night went. We want to thank everyone who came out…but especially the Wah Wah Ponies for their great live music, Madeleine for taking pictures of the event, and Noel and Gina Wright for letting us show the commisioned piece that Adam had just completed and brought over to their house only a few weeks ago. Also, of course, all the artists who participated!

Here are some folks in front of Gina Phillip’s drawings and Skylar Fein’s Presidential Silhouettes. If you missed the reception, don’t forget we’re open on Saturdays from 10 a.m. ’til 5 p.m.

-Amy

ETA: How could I forget Skylar for designing the postcard for the event? Thank you!

We got a lot of positive responses to our group show during the Marigny Bywater Open Studios, so we’re extra excited about the artists’ reception this Saturday night.

Try to join us for art, wine, and even a little live music!

-Amy

I suppose he’s our mascot.

Here he is in front of the desk that Adam and Scott made. So, Bywater Art Market was fun…we’ll do it again before the holidays, but not sure when. I’ll definately post sooner about it the next time we participate.

We may host the next New Orleans Geek Dinner, wherein bloggers and other computer-types mingle and pot-luck-it…I need to contact Alan G. to see what’s up with that. I’ve been a little shy, honestly, about mixing with other local bloggers because ours is about art and theirs tend to be more current-events oriented, but I’m gonna go ahead and jump in.

Adam has some pieces including Steamboat Sally and On The Delta in a group show opening in Brooklyn soon. It’s called Surge: New Orleans On High Ground, and is at the Brooklyn Lyceum in cooperation with New Orleans’ 3 Ring Circus Productions. Hope people up there enjoy getting a little NOLA flava.

Lastly, Adam is curating a group show to open in conjunction with Art for Art’s Sake on October 7. Our festivities will be during the day, when Adam also participates in the Marigny and Bywater Open Studio event. It just so happens that our mammas will be visiting together then, as well, so it’ll be a very busy and fun weekend for us! More information about the first Farrington Smith Gallery group show to come!

-Amy

We hung the first painting in the gallery yesterday.

It’s over by the door where it gets great sunlight, and it made us all happy to see it up there on the wall while we continue to work around it.

Adam fixed a glitch in the track lights today, so we shouldn’t have any problem making our goal to be open the first Saturday in August. Doug MacCash, the art critic for the Times-Picayune, did a little write up in last week’s Lagniappe about us closing the French Quarter place, so I thought we should have a concrete date for our reopening.

So now we have it- August 5th.

- Amy

I realized yesterday how long it’s been since I’ve made a post…can I blame it on the heat? Hmm…or the fact that Scott has been on a trip to London and Madrid for the last couple weeks? He’ll be back this weekend, so after this little breather, I think we will be kicking it into high gear. We are so close to having the gallery ready to go, but sometimes that’s the time you can lose a little momentum, isn’t it?

Just to make this post more interesting, I’m gonna throw in one of my current favorite paintings of Adam’s.

-Amy

On The Delta; Adam Farrington; Paint, Masonite and Steel

ETA: Adam wrote a little about On The Delta after he saw my post, so here it is:

It’s hard to imagine a property out of its current context. There are those ones scattered about that predate everything else around them. It’s strange to imagine them isolated, like the first seed to drop.

You know what they say about real estate: location, location, location. This place doesn’t have any of that, but luckily they also say if you build it they will come.

Territorial ambiguity makes for some dynamic tension; it can be like the three bears.

New Orleans has long inspired curious trespassing with all its strange vacant spaces, but it feels a lot less comfortable since Katrina. It’s different when you are familiar with the circumstances that forced the people out and left the doors ajar.

No One Home is pictured at night, maybe illuminated in firelight. Perhaps a party house in one of those broken bottle zones, or maybe the home of an impoverished heir eking by on SSI. You wouldn’t know, but you’d have to poke around.

There’s a ten speed leaning there. It reminds me of when I was walking by the wharf and there was this red Schwinn with a headlight and tire generator. It was leaning over on a pallet in the corner. It wanted it, but I wasn’t sure it was truly abandoned. I figured I’d come back the next day to see if it was still there.

Then I imagined some guy having to park the bike in exactly the same position each day before starting his wharf shift. So I clicked the generator down on the tire, like Goldilocks would. I figured the bike would be mine if it was still down the next day, but I never came back. It was all a little too OCD, and the bike wasn’t worth it. But that’s private property for you.

-Adam

People may wonder why we want to live in a port city, below sea level. But on a sunny day, there is nothing better than lolling by the Mississippi, watching the barges and boats go by.

Only one steamboat is in operation around New Orleans, the Natchez, which has a steam calliope you can hear playing regularly if you’re in the French Quarter.

But way back when, they crowded the ports down here. A steamboat captain named Milton Doullut even built two houses with design elements of the vessels he commanded; one was for himself and one was for his son.

The second isn’t as pretty to look at, but I like how it gives a tiny feel for the neighborhood and the proximity to the levee. They were built in the early 1900s, and were actually red-tagged for demolition at one point post-flooding. Thank goodness that was fixed.

All my out-of-town visitors get taken over the Industrial Canal into the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood Holy Cross to see the steamboat houses.

You may not be able to tell from the photos that Steamboat Sally is a kinetic sculpture; the wings flap and some of the embellishments in front bob up and down when you turn the crank. I try to summon the steam calliope music when I turn it.

-Amy

Until very recently, my mother typed everything on an ancient manual typewriter, which was her high school graduation gift.

The red and black ribbon wiggled round trips from spool to spool, clunking out fainter and fainter messages about whole wheat and recycling. Sometimes she’d splurge on a new ribbon.

After decades of jerking the ribbon back and forth, the machine gave up the ghost, and the digital age dawned in the form of a Formica-toned period piece from the dot com era. It was given to her by a friend, and though you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you shouldn’t buy it dentures either.

Somehow she managed to have it serviced…but most often she sends me hand written letters.

-Adam

Adam’s series of houses made out of old enameled bathtubs and with wings that flap make up an imaginary place called Farringtown.

After the flooding in New Orleans, Farringtown came into being shortly after we got our electricity turned back on and Adam was able to weld again. Here’s his statement of purpose for Farringtown:

“If you’re always fighting fire with fire and then life hands you lemons, so you make some lemonade, but then you find out that your city is inside a bathtub, you should probably have a house made out of a bathtub. Farringtown is an unique community of utmost consideration!”

Scott likes to break it down for people by saying these are the houses for the new New Orleans: they are up on piers, are made out of bathtubs so they are waterproof, and if all else fails (including the levees), they have wings to get you out of here.

The legs of the houses are made out of bolts and other various metal parts from old, rotted piers on the Mississippi. Adam likes to go rowing around in his flatboat collecting these off the banks of the river sometimes. So between those and the old metal bathtub walls of the house, they have a good bit of history built into them.

-Amy

Adam and I both love the bits of history you find in and on buildings when you’re lucky. I never noticed this baseball guy on our door frame until it was time to change things.

I’m sorry for the poor photo quality, but he’s gone now and I can’t retake it. Adam and Scott are downstairs painting and installing different doors as I type, and the gallery should be reopened in our new location within a few weeks.

I’m sad to see the baseball man go, but isn’t a fresh coat of paint just like a miracle sometimes?

-Amy

No longer in the French Quarter, the Farrington Smith Gallery is now at 2514 St. Claude Avenue. The move brings the retail part of our operation closer to the creative part of the process, because Adam’s studio is behind the storefront of the new location.

Adam and I live above the gallery and Scott lives in Treme. All of us love this part of town the way it is, but we also hope that more and more interesting businesses start populating it over here…not that we don’t appreciate furniture stores, of course! So in that sense, we hope we are part of an early wave of something bigger.

Opening the French Quarter space back in November was a spontaneous decision born out of frustration, pent-up energy and love for the city. We had been back for over a month but still had no electricity, so Adam couldn’t make art or otherwise work. People were filtering their way back and businesses were reopening here and there, but there was so much devestation all around.

Doing something positive seemed like the thing to do. By opening the gallery, we all felt as if we were digging in our heels and creating a bright spot. We wanted to bring a jolt of vitality to the city we love and to our own day-to-day lives. Now that the city is on it’s way back, we have an opportunity to get a little more specific and focus on the part of the city that we happen to love the best.

The move also simplifies our lives, both in the obvious, financial way, but also how we get to direct our energies. We will miss being right there on Royal Street, hanging out and seeing who happens by. But we all can’t wait to get going on some new ideas that have been simmering on the back burner due to lack of time.

We will be open on Saturdays from 10-5 and will be available for appointments as well. Just give us a call for that.

-Amy