Photo by James Fox-Smith
Ed Pramuk retired from the LSU School of Art in 2000. But really, this former professor has never stopped teaching. “I have to recommend a show by Mary Ann Caffery at the Baton Rouge Gallery,” he enthused to a visitor recently. “She’s produced a terrific group of landscape photographs and really outdone herself. ‘Find a poet,’ I said to her, ‘and this thing could really become a book!’”
Teaching, encouraging, and promoting the contemporary art and artists of Baton Rouge and South Louisiana is what Ed Pramuk has been doing ever since first arriving in Baton Rouge to teach at LSU more than fifty years ago. So it stands to reason that Pramuk was named Forum 35 Art Melt’s Louisiana Art Legend Award recipient for 2014 when the exhibition opened at the Capitol Park Museum on July 19. And although he is a lifelong artist and educator who ran away from Akron, Ohio, to run with Jackson Pollock in New York in the ‘fifties; came to LSU to teach art in the ‘sixties; was a founding member of Baton Rouge Gallery; and has nurtured generations of Louisiana artists and had exhibits of his highly influential work presented around the country, Pramuk was characteristically humble about the award. “I really never saw it coming,” he said, “because I really think of myself as coming in from another place. But what I’ve invested here has come back to me tenfold.”
During his time in Baton Rouge Pramuk has seen the artistic side of the city develop from the ground up. “When we came here the cultural life of Baton Rouge was almost non-existent,” he noted. “There was almost no place for young artists. But you want to know the difference between then and now? The door is open! There are structures and places and audiences that allow you to come out of yourself.” Whether he’s willing to take credit for that or not, Pramuk played a fundamental role in building those structures, then ushering the artists and the audiences inside. During his tenure, the LSU School of Art went from being a BA liberal arts degree to a BFA degree—a development that paved the way for a contemporary art tradition to take hold in Baton Rouge. “We had a great director in Jack Wilkinson who said ‘The reason the art department should exist is to create the audience of the future,’" noted Pramuk. “We brought in visiting artists from New York. And we began to send talented graduates away to schools like Penn and Columbia and Pratt and the New School. So we began to have an impact that reached beyond Louisiana. But the LSU School of Art also had an impact in the students who graduated and stayed here. They became the young art audience for Baton Rouge. Before, nothing like that existed here.”
So fast forward forty years and it makes perfect sense that when a crowd of thousands pours into Baton Rouge’s Capitol Park Museum to see a show of contemporary Louisiana art, they would also see one of of Louisiana’s founding fathers of contemporary art honored as a Louisiana Art Legend. After all, they are the “audience of the future” that Jack Wilkinson spoke of, and that Ed Pramuk has had such a hand in bringing into being.
The 2014 Art Melt exhibition closed on August 28. See more of Ed Pramuk’s work at edwardpramuk.com
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