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2020 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival April 23 – May 3rd!

"Henry Roeland Byrd 'Professor Longhair' at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival" by Michael P. Smith © The Historic New Orleans Collection. — “Henry Roeland Byrd ‘Professor Longhair’ at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival” by Michael P. Smith © The Historic New Orleans Collection.

The 2020 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is happening April 23 through May 3rd! The Historic New Orleans Collection will have their tent set up with Michael P. Smith reproductions available for purchase. We print hundreds of reproductions each year for this event. If you’re in New Orleans, stop by the tent to browse the beautiful and historic pieces by Michael P. Smith. Can’t go to the festival? Visit us online at RequestAPrint to browse our galleries, order pieces you love and have them shipped to you directly. Every sale financially benefits the museum! https://www.requestaprint.net/thnoc/index.php

Who was Michael P. Smith?
During his nearly forty-year career, photographer Michael P. Smith (1937-2008) immersed himself in the larger world of New Orleans’s musical culture. At public events, from music festivals and concerts to street parades both mournful and celebratory, Smith was there with his Nikon cameras and, in later years, a tape recorder. Beyond his public presence, Smith earned the trust of musicians and churchgoers who let him into their private lives. These relationships allowed him to create a photographic record bearing witness to often elusive cultural and spiritual events. Though documentary in style, his photographs transcend the mere description of their subjects, pushing viewers to consider the cultural diversity of the world around them.

“White Cranes Flying Over Breakers” by Ando Hiroshige

“Hiroshige’s artistic life may be characterized in several stages. The first was his student period, from about 1811 to 1830, when he largely followed the work of his elders in the field of figure prints—girls, actors, and samurai, or warriors. The second was his first landscape period, from 1830 to about 1844, when he created his own romantic ideal of landscape design and bird-and-flower prints and brought them to full fruition with his famed Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and other series of prints depicting landscape vistas in Japan. His last stage was his later period of landscape and figure-with-landscape designs, from 1844 to 1858, during which overpopularity and overproduction tended to diminish the quality of his work.”

Biography credit: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hiroshige

Order your own reproduction of this piece and many more by Ando Hiroshige from RequestAPrint! Custom sizing and framing available! https://www.requestaprint.net/worcester/itemdetail.php?work_id=329&gallery_id=5

John James Audubon: Birds of America

“Barn Owl” by John James Audubon. Peabody Institute Library

John James Audubon was born in Les Cayes, in what is now Haiti, on April 26, 1785. The illegitimate son of French plantation owner Captain Jean Audubon and his Creole servant Jeanne Rabin, he was given the name Jean Rabin at birth. However, when his mother died shortly after his birth, he and his sister were sent to Nantes, France, where they were raised by the captain’s wife, Anne. The couple legally adopted the children in 1794 and gave Jean a new name: Jean-Jacques Fougère Audubon.

The above image is available for custom reproduction from RequestAPrint. All sales benefit the Peabody Institute Library.

By 1824, Audubon had grown intent on finding a publisher for his work, but was unable to generate any serious interest in the United States. Two years later, he set sail for the United Kingdom, where he hoped to at least be able to find engravers skilled enough to properly reproduce his work. The decision immediately proved a good one. He exhibited his work in both Scotland and England to great acclaim, fascinating the public with his impressive drawing skills as well as some tall tales he relayed about life on the American frontier.

The success of his exhibitions would finally lead to the first publication of the book for which he is now best known: Birds of America. Featuring more than 400 plates of his drawings, the four-volume work was printed in London by Havell & Son in 1827 and serialized until 1838. Accompanying it was Ornithological Biography, which featured text about the lives and behaviors of his subjects as well as highlights about Audubon’s adventures. He followed these seminal works with 1839’s A Synopsis of the Birds of North America.

Throughout this period, Audubon traveled back and forth between the United States and Europe, overseeing the publication of his works and also selling them in popular serialized subscriptions to admirers who included King George IV and United States President Andrew Jackson. His fame and fortune firmly established, in 1841 Audubon moved his family to a large rural estate on the Hudson in upper Manhattan, where he began work on a more compact edition of Birds of America.

See the whole John James Audubon gallery from the Peabody Library Institute here.

(Information from: biography.com)

Individual Artist: David M. Band

David M. Band, a native of Portland, Maine, now lives in Texas. He has devoted the majority of his life to art as a painter, printmaker, educator and collector.

David is a member of Allied Artists of America, Inc., Audubon Artists, Inc., Watercolor USA Honor Society, Salmagundi Club, Artists Fellowship, Inc., and is a signature member of the National Watercolor Society.

His work can be found in the collections of the Butler Institute of American Art, Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Mo., Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Museum of Texas Tech University, Salmagundi Club, Dunnegan Gallery of Fine Art, and the United States Air Force collection.

He is the author of “Enrich Your Paintings With Texture”, North Light Publications.

To see David M. Bands collection visit this link: http://www.requestaprint.net/artist/gallery.php?gallery_id=20

Michael P. Smith (1937-2008)

During his nearly forty-year career, photographer Michael P. Smith (1937-2008) immersed himself in the larger world of New Orleans’s musical culture. At public events, from music festivals and concerts to street parades both mournful and celebratory, Smith was there with his Nikon cameras and, in later years, a tape recorder.

Beyond his public presence, Smith earned the trust of musicians and churchgoers who let him into their private lives. These relationships allowed him to create a photographic record bearing witness to often elusive cultural and spiritual events.

Though documentary in style, his photographs transcend the mere description of their subjects, pushing viewers to consider the cultural diversity of the world around them.

To view his collection of work go to RequestAPrint.net