Gallery Highlight: Atchafalaya Actualized
After a summer of rising waters, an exhibition on all we have to lose
When I spoke with New Orleans artist Will Smith, Jr., he was just putting the final brushstrokes on his newest collection of paintings, soon to be on display in the solo exhibition Atchafalaya Actualized at Gallery 600 Julia.
Smith has spent years capturing the distinct, nostalgic allure of Southeast Louisiana wetlands—achingly detailed portraits of wild waterflowers on Pearl River, the gurgling splay of water making way for a swamp tour on Bayou Black, a well-used and weather-abused bait shop on the banks of Bayou Milhomme—all in hyper-photorealistic clarity.
This show, a collection of scenes along and within the Atchafalaya, represents a kind of endpoint for Smith. “This has been my goal, to sweep off all of Southeast Louisiana’s beautiful waterways and swamp life. I’ve covered places from Pearl River and the Honey Island Swamp all the way to here, to Morgan City and the heart of the Atchafalaya.”
An Imperiled Way of Life
Originally from Natchez, Smith was a child when he first became enamored with the amphibious communities on Louisiana’s many bodies of water. “I remember growing up, coming to visit New Orleans, I was always intrigued with the little houses on Manchac Swamp, on the water,” he said. “Like wondering, how do they get to the grocery store? To school?”
[Read this: Jonathan Mayers paints hard-hitting ecological allegories]
When he moved to New Orleans twenty years ago, Smith made fast friends with a family living in Lafitte—“where land’s end meets waters’ beginnings.” On a tour, Smith recalls going further and further out into the water, “and the less and less there was.” When they reached Manila Village, a historic Filipino settlement in Barataria Bay, Smith’s friend started to get choked up. “He hadn’t been there in so long, he didn’t realize there wasn’t a stick of it left.”
Capturing Water
When Smith started pursuing art as a career, he found a powerful, complicated subject in water. “Water is psychologically healing—to live on it, to be able to just see it,” said Smith. “To see it there, in flesh and blood, or even as an image. Your blood pressure drops. And it’s cross cultural, our connection to water, something all of humanity shares.”
Smith was drawn to photo-realism as an art form in hopes of creating work that sooths, that perfectly replicates this life-giving element and its qualities. But upon witnessing the dire state of Louisiana’s waterside communities and their way of life, capturing these scenes in photo-realistic detail became, even more urgently, a means of preservation.
“Water is the star of this show, you know. It’s about the humans who live on it, the undercurrent of us needing to pay more attention to the power of it, and the fragility of our relationship with it."—Will Smith, Jr.
“I call it poetry meets police report,” he said. “These places are beautiful, but at the same time I’m documenting them to share that these are the facts—these places are here, and for how much longer?”
In this show, Smith feels a particular sense of urgency following the remarkably high levels of the Mississippi River this year that almost prompted the opening of the Morganza Spillway, which would have brought potentially catastrophic flooding to the Atchafalaya Basin. “Then here comes Hurricane Barry,” he said. “It’s like, I hear you Mother Nature. I know this is important.”
Alongside his collection of trademark oil on canvas paintings, six of Smith’s paintings to be displayed in Atchafalaya Actualized are watercolor—a first for Gallery 600 Julia.
“Water is the star of this show, you know,” said Smith. “It’s about the humans who live on it, the undercurrent of us needing to pay more attention to the power of it, and the fragility of our relationship with it. So in these six paintings, I felt it only fit that I paint with water straight from the Atchafalaya. People will be looking at the painting of its waters, while looking at, and thinking about, the actual waters as well.”
Atchafalaya Actualized will be on display at Gallery 600 Julia from August 3–August 31.
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