Photos by Kim Ashford
(Pictured below) Of the original eight founding Baton Rouge Gallery artists, James Burke, Ed Pramuk, and Jim Jeansonne are the only ones still living in Baton Rouge.
“In the mid 1960s, when many of the first artist members came to Baton Rouge, we found a quiet southern town that revolved around politics, LSU, and the oil business. For the most part, the art scene outside of LSU consisted of frame shops (with their small galleries of local artists), Audubon prints, and paintings of plantations, magnolias, and swamp scenes. If we were going to show anywhere but at LSU we’d have to do it on our own. We did, but only with the support of the townspeople who put their money where their hearts were.”
— James Burke, The Art & Artists of Baton Rouge Gallery
It all started with eight young artists who wanted to exhibit and sell their work—contemporary art that was largely abstract.
“There was no place in town to show our work,” recalled Ed Pramuk during a recent visit to his studio. Pramuk, an abstract painter, was one of eight artists who opened the Unit 8 Gallery in June 1965. “Most of us were recently arrived LSU faculty members—the young Turks.”
The idea had originated with Jim Jeansonne, a printmaker, and Don Thornton, a sculptor who managed the Crafts Shop at the recently opened LSU Union. They added painters Pramuk and Russell Guirl, photographer Fred Packard, printmaker James Burke, sculptor Bob Wiggs, and potter John Goodheart. “Don and I had the idea, and we got it started within months,” said Jeansonne, who had recently graduated from LSU and served as the gallery’s manager. “Our intention was to have a place to show our work. Once you left LSU, there was no place for young artists to have a show.
“We found a place on North 19th next to the Baton Rouge Clinic. Some student architects were renting it. They called themselves Unit Design. They said we could use the front half of the building. We fixed it all up, painted it, and got good lights. Our wives made punch and hors d’oeuvres for the grand opening.”
“If you wanted to hang a show, you picked up the keys,” recalled Burke.
Burke said the artists’ work was “experimental and unusual,” which didn’t stop it from selling. “We had a lot of attendance and sold a lot of art.” Besides their own pieces, the gallery showed the work of painter Janice Sachse and renowned printmaker Caroline Durieux, who had recently retired and been replaced by Burke at LSU.
According to Pramuk, “We had total control. The rent was cheap, thirty or thirty-five dollars a month. We hung our shows, had receptions.” By early 1966, the gallery was showing “explosive” works by “controversial” artist Shirley Reznikoff, a rabbi’s wife. Burke recalled that the local sheriff or district attorney insisted on the removal of one painting.
Scuffles over “obscenity” aside, the Unit 8 Gallery was doing well. But LSU faculty member Paul Dufour thought the for-profit gallery would work better as a nonprofit with an expanded roster of artists. At Dufour’s suggestion, said Pramuk, the Unit 8 artists met at the home of Victor Sachse and his wife Janice. “Victor and Janice had been collecting our work,” said Pramuk. “They represented a new spirit of established people in Baton Rouge collecting modern art. Victor was incredibly urbane and civilized. He laid out a plan for how the gallery could change. He thought it should have a broader scope. It would have a board of directors.”
Although the other members agreed that a nonprofit was the way to go, Pramuk preferred the original Unit 8 operational model. “I was starting to show my work in New Orleans,” he said. “I liked the simplicity of the artists’ cooperative where we controlled everything.
“When Unit 8 became the Baton Rouge Gallery in 1966, they opened the doors to other artists, mostly our students. It was better for community relations. As the art school evolved, BRG became a place whose artists were mostly graduates of the LSU art school. Other local artists were from Southern University. It was a democratic space.”
BRG’s first show opened in July 1966 at 227 Convention Street in the King Hotel building. The exhibit featured the work of seven members—Sachse, Dufour, Burke, Wiggs, sculptor Frank Hayden, and painter Edgar Dayries.
Within a year, the gallery had moved to 401 North Boulevard, across from the City Club. Reznikoff was a founding member. But by late November 1967, following another kerfuffle over her work, she resigned from the gallery, citing “extreme pressure being placed on me and my family.”
About 1972, the BRG went to 205 North Fourth Street, where it remained until 1983, when a Christmas freeze burst pipes in the ceiling, flooding the artwork with water. Kornmeyer’s furniture store downtown offered the artists space for their next three shows. They then relocated to 711 Jefferson Highway, but the hunt was on for a bigger space that would be permanent.
In 1984, gallery representatives met with officials from the Baton Rouge Recreation and Parks Commission (BREC), which owned City Park Pavilion. Built in the 1920s, the structure had served primarily as the clubhouse for the City Park pool. That ended after integration inspired park officials to close the pool rather than admit African Americans. For some twenty years, the building sat vacant, save for a pro shop for players using the nine-hole City Park golf course.
Before BRG could occupy the Pavilion, it needed $136,400 in repairs, which was scraped together with grant monies, individual and in-kind donations, and an auction whose star attraction was an Arabian gelding. BREC funded a new roof, termite abatement, and other structural repairs and agreed to maintain the exterior and grounds.
In December 1984, the BRG had an opening reception in its new home, where it remains today. Besides hanging a dozen shows a year by member artists, the gallery sponsors such popular local events as Movies and Music on the Lawn; artists’ gallery talks; Sundays@4, featuring poetry and prose readings, music, and dance; and its annual Surreal Salon Soiree and national juried exhibition of surrealist art.
A poster, featuring the eight original founding members of Unit 8 Gallery, advertising an opening reception for the gallery’s first exhibition.
The BRG-BREC partnership has been a mostly smooth relationship, save for a clash over censorship in the spring of 1994. Artist Roberta Cohen had offended the sensibilities of a visitor who found two of her drawings obscene. Rather than remove them, Cohen took down all her work, as did the other two artists in the show, her husband Greg Elliott, a sculptor, and ceramic artist Bobby Silverman. The gallery shut down for three weeks and was the subject of heated debate over censorship and community mores.
From 1984, when it had twenty-eight artists, the gallery has grown to encompass more than fifty member artists, including Burke, the only Unit 8 and original BRG artist still a member.
Pramuk credits the gallery with encouraging a more sophisticated appreciation of the visual arts than he found when he came to Baton Rouge in 1964, when tastes leaned toward moonlight and magnolias. “The Sachse family and Ava and Cordell Haymon were among the earliest patrons buying our work,” he said. “And John Griffith with the Griffith-Menard Gallery alerted corporate collectors to our work. We all did very well selling to banks and insurance companies.
“The lively overall Baton Rouge art scene is most likely the outcome of the doors that Unit 8 and Baton Rouge Gallery opened.”
Executive Director Jason Andreasen said the BRG will celebrate its fifty-year anniversary in July with a big retrospective show featuring fifty works by founding artists, member artists of note, and contemporary member artists who are helping to shape the gallery today.
“It will be a survey of five decades of the Baton Rouge art scene, a bird’s-eye view of art in Baton Rouge over the last fifty years, including today,” he said. “The usual First Wednesday opening reception will double as a birthday bash—First Wednesday on steroids.
“It’s a way for the artists to celebrate their involvement in the gallery and for Baton Rouge to celebrate its own local artists.
“We are lucky that the city has evolved and lucky that local sophistication has evolved in our three-decades-plus partnership with BREC,” said Andreasen. “As the city evolves and progresses, so does the gallery.”
To watch a video profile of Baton Rouge Gallery, tune in to Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s Art Rocks show, airing at 5:30 pm June 18 and 4 pm June 19. lpb.org/artrocks.
