Over the next few blogs, I thought it would be fun to take you behind the scenes of Louisiana Through Wild Eyes, the traveling exhibition I created with wildlife photographer Dave McNamara.
If you aren’t familiar with the project, Louisiana Through Wild Eyes pairs Dave’s Louisiana wildlife photography with my watercolor interpretations of his photographs. Each photograph hangs alongside the painting it inspired, so you get to see the same animal, the same moment and the same scene through two very different artistic perspectives.
One of my favorite parts of this entire project has been watching how people react to the pairings. Some people are immediately drawn to Dave’s photograph. Others gravitate toward my painting. Some love them both together. We’ve even had people purchase both the photograph and painting, which I think is pretty neat.
The project has been so well received that I thought it would be fun to go back to the beginning and share a little about each stop, what happened behind the scenes and what Dave and I learned along the way.
And it all started in Eunice, Louisiana.
Stop #1: Eunice
Our first Louisiana Through Wild Eyes exhibition was at the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center, part of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, in Eunice.
Eunice is a small, quiet town, and the center itself is fairly small, but it is a really interesting and educational place. I learned quite a bit just from spending time there.
As far as exhibition openings go, however, this was not exactly a blockbuster.
I think we had maybe six or eight people at our opening. We didn’t sell anything. Financially, it certainly wasn’t our most successful stop.
But looking back, I think Eunice was exactly what we needed.
Figuring It Out Together
Before this exhibition, Dave and I had obviously been collaborating creatively. I was using his photographs as inspiration for my paintings, and we had spent plenty of time planning the overall concept.
But we had never actually hung a show together.
There are a surprising number of little decisions that come with putting together an exhibition like this. How should the photograph and painting be positioned in relation to each other? How much space should be between them? How do we keep everything consistent throughout the gallery? What order should the pieces go in? What stories do we want to tell during our artist talk?
In Eunice, we got to figure all of that out.
It became our dry run.
Because it was a smaller, quieter opening, we had the opportunity to work through those details without the pressure of a huge crowd. We figured out how we worked together, how we wanted the exhibition to look and how we wanted to talk about the project when people asked questions.
And thankfully, Dave and I discovered that we work pretty well together!
Success Doesn’t Always Mean Sales
As a professional artist, it is really easy to judge an exhibition by how much you sell. Did paintings sell? Did prints sell? Did you make enough money to justify all the work that went into getting there?
If I judged Eunice only by those standards, it wouldn’t have been particularly successful.
But it was.
The exhibition stayed there for a couple of months, we received some really nice feedback, and the staff and people we met were incredibly kind and supportive.
More importantly, we left Eunice knowing a lot more than we did when we arrived.
We knew how we wanted Louisiana Through Wild Eyes to look. We knew how we wanted to present it. We knew more about what worked and what didn’t. And we were much more comfortable talking about the project together.
Our little exhibition had officially become a traveling show.
And that was important because our next stop was going to be very different.
About a month later, Louisiana Through Wild Eyes was headed home to New Orleans, where we would be exhibiting at WYES Studios, premiering our documentary and introducing the project to a much bigger audience.
Eunice may have been quiet, but it made us ready for what came next.
If you have a space the Louisiana Through Wild Eyes should travel to next, contact me!