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Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick August 18, 2006
(Photo by Kathy Anderson)
Think of it as the art world's Olympics. The Venice Biennale is the oldest and most revered international art exhibition in the world. And in 2015 two New Orleans natives, husband and wife photography team Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, have been invited to show their work.
"It's an experience of a lifetime, McCormick said in a telephone call, "an artists dream."
An exhibit of McCormick and Calhoun's documentary photos of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola were a compelling component of Prospect.3, New Orleans' art festival, which closed Jan. 25.
McCormick said that she and her husband were aware that Okwui Enwezor, the curator of the 2015 Venice Biennale, had attended their exhibit at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. But they didn't imagine it would lead to international exposure.
Word came in January, McCormick said, that the couple's Angola series was chosen for the Biennale, but the news had to be kept hush-hush until the official announcement of the lineup was announced on Wednesday (March 4).
"It was like a high," said of her reaction to the announcement. "We're just happy to know that the curator was interested in our work. It's a beautiful, great feeling."
The suite of work that McCormick and Calhoun will ship off to Italy has a 30-year history. In the 1980s, Calhoun began a series of documentary photos of laborers along the Mississippi river, including dockworkers and sugar field workers. That series led him to photograph the prison farm in Angola, where inmates labor in the fields under the supervision of mounted guards.
"Angola is still pretty much run like a plantation," Calhoun said.
Through the 1990s and into the 21st century, Calhoun and McCormick returned to the penitentiary time and again to document conditions, sometimes working for publications such as Louisiana Cultural Vistas and the New Orleans Tribune.
As Calhoun explained, the photos illustrate Louisiana's prison industry. Which, McCormick said, inevitably involves inmate's loved ones.
"Through the years we met families, children of incarcerated people," McCormick said. "It became a project about the effect on the family and on children. In your mind you're in there too."
Many of their Angola photos were damaged during the 2005 flood, which inundated their Lower Ninth Ward studio. But with careful cleaning and restoration, most of the negatives survived.
McCormick and Calhoun are currently enjoying a prestigious Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency on Captiva Island in Florida.
"It's like a paradise," McCormick said. "Very few artists have this much space to work in and a staff to help you do what you want to do. The studios are wonderful. We can't ask for anything better."
The couple will travel to the opening of the Venice Biennale in May.