What's Up?
"I am a Citizen of the World, a Son of New Orleans. Culture plays a mighty role as my art is so heavily intertwined with its subjects. It is their vibrance, their vitality, their motion and their stillness that evokes something deeper from me to seek to educate, inspire and melt antiquated stereotypes using bold colors, a rich histories and dynamic contrasts, all in paint. My art is, essentially, a translation of the rhythms of the life around me. In part it is soul, in part it is heart, and in full it is love."
Life & Work
Bio:
There’s no genre, word or descriptor that can quite delineate New Orleans native J. Pierre’s style. Different industry jargon is fitting such as texture, outlines, abstract, expressionism, boldness, surrealism, conceptual, Rodrigue-esque and juxtaposition…however while all elements encompassed in Pierre’s strokes there is no single genre - bending word that totally enunciates the dynamic themes of vitality and vibrancy throughout J. Pierre’s art. It simply has and attracts joy to it, further invoking an emotional response from appreciators and his subjects alike. It is something that cannot be whittled into a label. It radiates life.
With over twenty years of professional visual art experience, Pierre has curated exquisite masterpieces for fine art exhibits both stateside and internationally in countries such as Iceland, Canada and Costa Rica. Most recently, he is featured in the Library of Congress for the NOLA Foundation’s historic choice of Pierre to create the city’s official Tricentennial Celebration artwork. Pierre has also been recognized by both the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Institute and the National Public Radio broadcasting group for his contributions to fine art. From his numerous previous showings including in the Houston Museum of Fine Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, to his current Citizen of the World Series at the Longue Vue House and Gardens, to his commitment to storytelling through art with the NBA All Star program, Pierre has a joie de vivre like no other.
Pierre’s passion for cultural advocacy and commitment are clear drivers of his work, including the likes of Pierre’s involvement with New Orleans’ own annual Jazz and Heritage Festival, his juried exhibitions for Red Bull and Prospect 3 and 4, as well as his work hanging in all corners of the world - especially in those of the host countries of his completed highly competitive artist-in-residency programs.
From his roots as a New Orleans graffiti artist, to his elite technique in painting original works, J. Pierre also channels his talent into live performance paintings, community murals and commissioned works.
This past summer, artist and muralist Jamar Pierre teamed up with Young Audiences and the New Orleans Recreation Department to work with students at Abramson School to create a unique mural about New Orleans culture.
Still footage from the Painting for Peace Project with 50 children from the Institute for Maximum Human Potential under the direction of New Orleans Artist in residence Jamar Pierre.
Human creativity is everywhere. From Brazil it's all being connected in a manner allowing one to move from any creator to any other creator in just a few steps. Artificial Intelligence & algorithms not necessary. Real intelligence, yes.
Raymundo Sodré Global
Via Matrix, artists like Raymundo Sodré (who was crushed under Brazil's dictatorship) can inspire around the world. Sodré's (and Jorge Portugual's) A MASSA is a Brazilian anthem exhorting the powerless to stand up to the powerful.
THE MATRIX IS THE MOTHER SHIP (it carries people to culture; per above, it carries culture too)
THE MATRIX IS CULTURAL DIFFUSION ON A PLANETARY SCALE (Bahia is Ground Zero)
THE MATRIX IS THE INTEGRATED GLOBAL CREATIVE ECONOMY (matrixed economist, Dr. Darius Mans, presents the Africare Award to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — Brazil's current president — in 2012)
Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix. — Susan Rogers (personal recording engineer for Prince; recorded "Purple Rain", "Around the World in a Day", "Parade", and "Sign o' the Times"; now director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory)
Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched! — Julian Lloyd Webber (most highly renowned cellist in the United Kingdom; brother of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats...)
This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :))) — Clarice Assad (pianist, composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world)
This Matrix was built by an ex-royalty "rescuer" (Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and many others) so that deep Brazilian culture, much of it otherwise impossible to find if one is not right there where it is made, might also (via an alternative to major media) be discoverable from all around the world. To do this it integrates this immensity into a system whereby ALL CULTURE EVERYWHERE — from small villages in Africa to Grammy-winning artists in Los Angeles — writers, filmmakers, painters... — can be found from anywhere on the planet.
The Matrix uncoils from the Recôncavo of Bahia, Brazil, final port-of-call for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history and from where some of the most physically and spiritually uplifting music ever made (samba and its precursor chula, per the Saturno Brothers above) evolved...
WHAT IS THE RECÔNCAVO? The peninsula upon which Salvador is situated is like the thumb of an open and grasping hand, what is normally thought of as the Recôncavo then being defined by the curved index finger. This way of definition developed when agricultural products were brought to Salvador by boat, sometimes making their way first down the Paraguaçu river after having been carried overland from the sertão (backlands) to Cachoeira, the river debouching into the Bay of All Saints at Maragogipe. The city of Bahia (as it was usually called then) was crouched on the bay, comprised of a commercial district much smaller in area than today (landfill has increased it greatly), the area around the upper section of the elevator, and what is now called Pelourinho.
Much of the remainder of the peninsula was given to sugarcane plantations, and dotted within the Atlantic rainforest were countless quilombos (Afro-Brazilian villages founded during the age of slavery); both are attested to today in commonly used city names. The neighborhood of Garcia was once Fazenda Garcia (fazenda being a farm or plantation), and this denomination is still used today to distinguish one end of Garcia (fim-de-linha) from the other (the Campo Grande end). Neighborhoods Engenho Velho de Federação and Engenho Velho de Brotas are so called for the old mills (engenhos velhos) which pressed the caldo (juice, so to speak) from the cane so laboriously hacked out of the fields. The neighborhood of Cabula is named for an nkisi (deity) of candomblé angola (the first candomblé -- a West African religious belief system -- to arrive in Bahia)...whose rhythms comprise the basis for samba, meaning that the rhythms to which so many in the world inexpertly swayed as Stan Getz's saxophone soared and João and Astrud Gilberto sensuously intoned -- this paragon of suave Brazilian sophistication -- was born in the rough senzalas (slavequarters) of Bahia. Ironically enough, the barefoot senzala version was/is far more sophisticated than the sophisticated version.
But times have changed, and Cabula is now a crowded, non-descript middle-to-working class Salvador city neighborhood (plenty of candomblé around though), and Engenhos Velhos de Federação and Brotas are swarming working class neighborhoods (ditto the candomblé); the senzala samba, the samba chula and samba-de-roda have disappeared. A simplified version -- Bahian pagode -- is heard everywhere in Salvador, but the real-deal stuff has died out here in the big city. It remains, however, a potent force on the remainder of its native ground, the Recôncavo proper, where it is danced to upon pounded earth, under moonlight broken by banana, palm and mango leaves, lifting the souls of its participants almost like something religious, which it was, and gods aside, is (again, per the Saturno brothers in the clip above).
By the same mathematics positioning some 8 billion human beings within some 6 or so steps of each other, people in the Matrix tend to within close, accessible steps of everybody else inside the Matrix.
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles — jungle and desert and dense urban centers — both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn.
Brazil absorbed over ten times the number of enslaved Africans taken to the United States of America, and is a repository of African deities (and their music) now largely forgotten in their lands of origin.
Brazil was a refuge (of sorts) for Sephardim fleeing an Inquisition which followed them across the Atlantic (that unofficial symbol of Brazil's national music — the pandeiro — the hand drum in the opening scene above — was almost certainly brought to Brazil by these people).
Across the parched savannas of the interior of Brazil's culturally fecund nordeste/northeast, where wizard Hermeto Pascoal was born in Lagoa da Canoa (Lagoon of the Canoe) and raised in Olho d'Águia (Eye of the Eagle), much of Brazil's aboriginal population was absorbed into a caboclo/quilombola culture punctuated by the Star of David.