An Elevating Friendship

by

Forgive me for saying so, but I think that this is the best-looking issue of Country Roads we’ve put together in ages. Why? Because it’s about the visual arts! It stands to reason that it’s easier to make a magazine look good when its subject matter involves visually remarkable things. But I confess that when it comes to the mechanics of visual tension, unity, contrast, color theory, and the other processes by which good art is made, I am all at sea. After almost twenty years spent writing about artistic enterprise, I have no greater aptitude for the process of actually making things myself than I had on day one. I know beautiful things when I see them, but remain in awe of those with the vision, talent, and skills to actually bring them into being.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since getting to know a truly artistic person, while briefly distracting her from her true calling. As a participant in October’s Hunks in Heels fundraiser in Baton Rouge I had the good fortune to be teamed with Raina Wirta, LSU School of Art graduate, practicing sculptor, and co-founder of Elevator Projects—an organization dedicated to engaging artists and audiences around contemporary art in Baton Rouge’s public spaces. For Hunks in Heels, my task was to march up and down a catwalk at the Shaw Center wearing women’s shoes. Raina’s job was to take said shoes and convert them into works of podiatric art.

Too much has already been said about this and the only reason I bring it up is to illustrate that, while Raina was effortlessly building my magnificent heels (we won, by the way), what she was not doing was working on P.3+BR: Notes Upriver, the citywide contemporary art event set to engulf Baton Rouge this November, which Raina’s Elevator Projects is responsible for heading up. Now this is serious artistic enterprise.

For thirteen weeks in ten venues around the city, P.3+BR is staging invitational exhibits of challenging, thought-provoking, contemporary artwork by artists from Baton Rouge, around the state, and all over the country. More than two hundred artists are presenting work in every conceivable medium, exploring subject matter that ranges from serene, to thought-provoking, to downright disturbing. Scores of volunteers are working day and night to prepare spaces, hang work, and coordinate schedules. Dozens of businesses have contributed exhibit space, equipment, and supplies. All pieces are for sale, making for an unmatched collecting opportunity.

An outgrowth of the Prospect.3: Notes for Now contemporary art biennial underway in New Orleans right now, this vast undertaking is being coordinated by Raina and her cohorts out of an office on the ground floor of the Chase Tower in downtown Baton Rouge. They share this space with The Walls Project—another of the city’s most inventive art-capacity-building organizations—and together the two crews have created possibly the coolest and most incongruous workspace ever to have existed within a bank building. There, within plain sight of dour flocks of blue-suited bankers waiting for elevators of their own—amid riotous stacks of artwork, partially assembled bicycles and sculpture installations, audio and video equipment, turntables, and mannequins in various stages of undress—Raina & co. pursue Elevator Projects’ mission: to serve, educate, and engage artists and audiences by bringing thought-provoking, contemporary artwork into the public sphere.

Ingeniously, they’re finding ways of using art to initiate conversations, stimulate economic activity in vacant spaces, and establish relationships between businesses and non-profits. Indeed, one of P.3+BR’s largest exhibits occupies a sprawling vacant space on Chase Tower South’s fourth floor, where large-scale work by eighty participating artists was being installed at the time of writing.

Having seen it, I swear that no one who gets out of the Chase elevators on the fourth floor will ever think about office space the same way again. So in the process of putting P.3+BR together, Elevator Projects is carving out a larger space for contemporary art than has existed heretofore. They’re initiating conversations and partnerships and making Louisiana’s capital city a more visually stimulating, culturally inclusive place-of-promise than it was before.

Will it all be beautiful? No. Will it be thought-provoking? Absolutely. As Kim Howes-Zabbia, another artist-friend with whom I host Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Art & Travel Auction, maintains: art doesn’t have to make you feel good; it just has to make you feel.

Talk about making something beautiful. If the real value of visual art is to encourage us to seek new ways of seeing the world around us, efforts like Elevator Projects’ have the potential to achieve much more than just putting pretty pictures where people can see them. Oh, and it’s the coolest, most ambitious thing to happen in contemporary art in Baton Rouge, ever. So if you like the idea of seeing your city differently, of stretching its definition and expanding the conversation in new and interesting ways, come out and see some P.3+BR shows. You’ll be amazed at what you’ll find.

For a complete schedule of P.3+BR exhibits and activities in Baton Rouge, see the feature article here.