Francis Cape: Behind the Levees

The Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts and Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University present 'Behind the Levees' an exhibition by Francis Cape

Behind the Levees brings together for the first time several bodies of work that center around the artist's ongoing engagement with post-Katrina New Orleans. Spanning five years, the exhibition begins with 'Waterline' an installation of framed photographs taken on a 2 1/2 hour walk through the city on November 6, 2005, just two months after the hurricane, and concludes with two new gulf spill pieces created specially for the Clifford Gallery.

This project and exhibition as a whole, far from being any sort of didactic prescription, is instead a proposition: how can we re-imagine forms and models of production in response both to historical precedent and current disaster. Cape uses this aesthetic space for considering a host of difficult issues relating not just to New Orleans but to a general cycle of American production and consumption, and to the legacy of modernist debates surrounding utility and ornamentation, social idealism and mass consumerism.

Francis Cape apprenticed with master carver Dick Reid before receiving his MFA in 1991 from Goldsmiths College, London. In 1993 he moved to the U.S. and now lives and works in Narrowsburg, NY. He has exhibited at the U.S. Biennial, Propsect 1, New Orleans; the St. Louis Art Museum; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; the Public Art Fund, NY; and Murray Guy, New York. He was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2001, and of a Henry and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship in 2003. Mr. Cape was appointed critic in sculpture at Yale in 2009. He is represented by Murray Guy in New York and by Andreas Grimm in Germany.

Francis Cape
Behind the Levees