Jim Steg: New Work

Works celebrating the life-spanning accomplishments of printmaker, war veteran, and professor Jim Steg will be on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art until October 8 in the exhibition, Jim Steg: New Work. Steg was the most influential printmaker to be based in New Orleans in the twentieth century. Throughout his life, Steg used almost every known printmaking method of his time, and even pioneered several of his own. Etchings, woodcuts, drawings, photo-resist etchings, Xerox toner works, and many other works that have never before been on public display are included in the artist’s first retrospective exhibition. Restlessly inventive, the exhibition reveals Steg as an artist at the forefront of several major twentieth-century movements and one of the nation’s most innovative printmakers. Among many of the notable chapters in his story, Steg served in the World War II division now known as the Ghost Army, which was responsible for deceiving the armies of the Third Reich by faking troop movements using inflatable tanks and other theatrical props and equipment. The Ghost Army was comprised of a number of soldiers with artistic or theatrical backgrounds, including artist Ellsworth Kelly and fashion designer Bill Blass. During the war, Steg produced dozens of graphite or watercolor portraits of civilians, soldiers, or refugees that he encountered along the way. It is likely that the refugees he depicted did not live to see the war’s end, making these drawings a haunting, but lasting, legacy. These works, and others, will be on display at NOMA, along with a full-scale replica of an inflatable tank, much like the tanks employed by The Ghost Army. (504) 658-4100 or noma.org.