The Claude Arts District is often considered a post-Katrina phenomenon--and it mostly is--but this show illustrates how deep the experimental Marigny-Bywater art scene's roots really are. Curated by Beau Tardy and Michael Fedor, themselves veterans of Fedor's former (1987--1990) Marigny-based Galerie Avant Gout, it also includes works by Patti D'Amico and William Warren whose Waiting Room Gallery in Bywater was active from 1997 to 2008. Both spaces catered to emerging artists, a tone that


Throw in Margaret Meinzer's adjacent expo of pop-expressionist dreamscapes like A Small Boat at Sea, above, and it's a weirdly wonderful show in the grand St. Claude tradition of ad hoc epiphanies by artists with eternally youthful attitudes--a sensibility that resonates neatly with French digital artist Nicolas Sassoon's Green Waves, a vast surround-sound and light environment of choreographed pixels in motion at the May Gallery in Bywater, and Irish artist Jane Cassidy's electronic music-video composition at Parse (see upper left sidebar). Both of these sublimely ethereal shows at two of the newer art spaces in town extend a long local tradition of experimental art in unlikely places. ~D. Eric Bookhardt
LaPopSexTVArtShow: Group Exhibition Curated by Beau Tardy and Michael Fedor, through June 1, Barrister's Gallery, 2331 St. Claude Ave, 710-4506