HOME: The New Orleans Avant-Garde

a b o u t t h i s n e w s l e t t e r

The New Orleans Avant-Garde publishes articles about current issues as well as history of the New Orleans contemporary arts and culture.

In 2008, three years after the Katrina flood of New Orleans, it became apparent to Artist-Writer-Publisher, Phyllis Parun, that New Orleans needed an independent artistic voice.

The New Orleans Avant-Garde is intended as an independent press featuring the inside stories of those local artist-writers and the history of those who are the creators of the New Orleans art scene.

The New Orleans Avant-Garde has evolved into an event publication produced for major local artist events. It is written by artists who are culturally engaged but who avoid anything that steals their precious time from a joi de vivre existence.

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Picture of The New Orleans Avant Garde 2015 Spring issue

The New Orleans Avant-Garde can be found in the studios of artists, writers and friends and in cafés, galleries and other venues in the St. Claude corridor, the lower French Quarter, in Mid-City and at the Alvar Branch Library in the Bywater neighborhood where artists and literati hang out.

F A C T O I D

The term "The New Orleans Avant-Garde" was first coined by Phyllis Parun in the early 1960's to name a group of creative student colleagues at LSUNO.

F A C T O I D

PERCENTAGE FOR ART HISTORY
The true story of how New Orleans artists created this City of Artists

The Percentage for Art ordinance was originated by artists as part of the Artists Equity Association (AEA). When Phyllis Parun became aware of the work of the AEA, she called together local artists to form the Louisiana Chapter of the Artists Equity Association as its Founding President. “Together with Jim Richard, our VP, the Louisiana Chapter AEA officers wrote and introduced the first New Orleans City Ordinance to the City Council."

To understand how this developed, we go back to the environment and character of the New Orleans art community of the 1970's. This was before the CAC and before the ACNO when New Orleans was truly an anti-art environment. There were only three galleries, and all demanded "exclusive" gallery contracts from artists, which meant that New Orleans artists were not able to sell art from their studio nor have their work in several galleries simultaneously. It was through the research and organizational efforts of Phyllis Parun while she served as the Visual Arts Coordinator of the Artists Information Bureau housed at the N.O. Public Library and the efforts of a community of cooperating New Orleans artists that changed all of that.

It was a different era. The introduction of the Percentage for Art into New Orleans is the untold story about the artists activism of the 1970's in New Orleans and the role Phyllis Parun undertook as an artists community organizer and activist and the Visual Arts Coordinator of the Artists Information Bureau (one of only 8 in the US) housed at the N.O. Public Library under the Moon Landrieu and Dutch Morial administrations.

To understand those years tells the story of how New Orleans artists created the art community that exists in New Orleans today and how for 40 years the generation of disenfranchised artists pushed New Orleans arts onto the world stage, and how we have made Bywater into what in 2003 I named "the artists' village."

It's a true story of how grass roots artists-activists created this city of artists; how we continue to do so and that because of this artists' movement, why artists flock to New Orleans today to live the life of an artist.