Previously on Piety derives its name from 617 Piety Street, the Bywater address where the original exhibition took place. A raw warehouse space temporarily converted into a makeshift exhibition site, 617 Piety's impressive length and ceiling height made it possible for the artists involved to develop highly ambitious works that, while not site-specific, would have been extremely difficult to realize in a more conventional gallery setting.

Featuring New Orleans artists Gerard Caliste, Rondell Crier, Jan Gilbert, Jana Napoli, and Rontherin Ratliff, each will be represented by a single large-scale installation, originally shown together as a Satellite Exhibition for Prospect.1.

The five installations in Previously on Piety share a reference to New Orleans in the immediate post-Katrina era, and some deal directly with the aftermath of the flooding and its effect on families, homes, and neighborhoods. Of these, the best known is Jana Napoli's Floodwall, a freestanding wall made into 32-foot sections, into which the individual drawers from hundreds of individual chests of drawers, scattered and/or strewn about by the hurricane and subsequent floodwaters, have been salvaged and positioned as part of a continuous façade. Although widely exhibited and written about since 2007, Previously on Piety will mark the first time Floodwall has been exhibited in New Orleans in an institutional setting.

In Gerard Caliste's work Walking on Water, the walls and floor of a single room are painted to give the visual impression of a neighborhood in which the inhabitants are gathered around the periphery, holding vigil while a house sinks into the water. A single hand reaching from a hole in the house's attic attempts to grasp at a rope suspended from a helicopter - the latter indicated only by a hole in the painted clouds on the ceiling.

Rondell Crier's On the Streets is a two-part installation consisting of the wooden outline of the Honda Passport that he drove around New Orleans during his first trip home post-Katrina. The wooden silhouette, which has been painted on one side and left bare on the other, contains a hole in the car's window through which a video projected onto an adjacent wall, documents the artist's journey through the mostly uninhabited streets of New Orleans, before the cleanup following Katrina's devastation had begun.

Jan Gilbert's Biography of a House takes the form of a cyclone made up of dozens of family photographs that combine to suggest the funnel and spout of the destructive winds. Illuminated from within so that the photographs are visible from the outside, the work achieves a striking contrast between the unstoppable force of nature and the human impulse to preserve a family's collective memories.

In Rontherin Ratliff's large-scale sculpture Rooted, a single tree is used to symbolize the deep historical roots of a family home. Combining elements of domestic architecture (windows, a fireplace grate, chandeliers), tree branches, and even the sidewalk in front, the visual blurring of motifs from family life and nature proposes that the narrative of people inhabiting a place is itself a kind of natural history.

(On view in the First Floor Galleries.)

Gallery Hours: Thurs.-Sun. 11am - 4pm

Admission: FREE through July 12

For information, call (504) 528-3805