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About the artist

Willie Birch

b. 1942

Willie Birch is a New Orleans native and one of Louisiana’s most significant living artists. He first came to prominence for his papier-maché sculptures that depicted African American men, women, and children engaged in common activities and rituals. In 1993, a John S. Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award brought him back to New Orleans, where he began producing the work he is best known for—large-scale, graphic drawings of African-American life ranging from the spectacular public gatherings—choreographed and impromptu—that define New Orleans’s cultural life to intimate individual portraits and images of the everyday. For Birch, his distinctive figurative style is founded “on deep knowledge of both the African roots of African-American culture, and the European painting tradition.” Beginning in 2000, Birch removed all color from his palette and has since then continued to explore and expand the possibilities of grisaille in bodies of work which, following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, have been focused on the urban and natural landscapes of New Orleans.

In 2006, Birch co-founded the Porch Seventh Ward Cultural Organization, that would have a deep impact on the youth of this historical neighborhood, and he also founded the Old Prieur Street Project and Community Garden in 2015, which has engaged local artists, youth groups, and community members in the preservation of the culture of one of the oldest African American neighborhoods in the city. Birch has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was named the USA James Baldwin Fellow in 2014. Birch’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the country and a retrospective of his work, Celebrating Freedom: The Art of Willie Birch, was organized by the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, in 20016 and travelled nationally.
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