March 27, 2025
WOODROW NASH speaks to MARYSE PHILIPPE DEJEAN in an interview at the Opening and of his and MICHELLE GAGLIANO’s Show in the ANGELA KING GALLERY of New Orleans, February 7, 2025. He speaks of how he came to know that “artist” would be his “lifetime.” Please see below for the sculptor’s majestic “African Nouveau” of figures vivid as if characters from Myth, and for the poignancy and steadfastness of children who still stand for life among the Plantation-enslaved.
Much thanks to CHARLIE STEINER of WWOZ for his work in improving the sound post-recording!
Click HERE and on the frontispiece below to view the AKG Catalog for the Woodrow’s Show
The AGK link to this latest and ongoing Show of Woodrow’s work.
WOODROW NASH Artist of Empathy, Spirits and ‘African Nouveau’
Woodrow Nash was born in the late 1940s. He grew up in Akron, Ohio, about 40 miles south of Cleveland. Akron was then “the Rubber Capital of the World” and is still home to Goodyear. From childhood on Woodrow drew. He drew not his family or ancestors, however. “Woodrow,” one teen-aged girl in a Class asked, “why do you always draw White people?”
Woodrow Nash’s statues of enslaved Blacks stand like sentinels on grounds of the Whitney Plantation Museum, nearby the Mississippi River and its 21st-century Container-Ships’ and petro-chemical Freighters’ steady roll through River Parishes. Black slave children there poignantly represent pathos, resourcefulness and courage in their cocked, unsighted stances.
Around one decade ago Woodrow Nash felt another calling, as he tells Maryse. His focus shifted to earlier ancestors, ancestors free in Africa. He found the words “African Nouveau” to term them, his new creations/companions.
Regal. Visionary. Wise.
Each one as steadfast as the slaves whose forms had emerged under his hands as he contemplated their 19th-century America. But now—free—as elaborate and majestic as their many-ribboned and bejeweled culture.
“The clay has a mind of its own,” Woodrow tells Maryse. Yet—without exception in his creation—each figure is informed with Spirit that must have as Prime Source Woodrow’s own capacity to “feel with” them—as D.H. Lawrence endorsed Walt Whitman’s invoking of ’Sympathy’ among his Americans and as Thomas Mann advised be our rule—“Sympathy for all things’—in his 80th year.
“This place,” Woodrow says to Maryse about New Orleans, “has spirits in it that I feel whenever I’m here.”
Please visit the Angela King Gallery’s Catalogue of Woodrow Nash’s works.
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