D. Eric Bookhardt

D. Eric Bookhardt (April 8, 1946 - November 8, 2019) or David Eric Bookhardt was an American art critic, curator, and photographer based in New Orleans. Bookhardt wrote for New Orleans' weekly publication, Gambit. He also wrote for OffBeat, Sculpture Magazine, and ART PAPERS, where he served as regional editor.

Early life and education

Bookhardt was born and raised in New Orleans. His father's family was from North Georgia and his mother's family from Belize. He attended the University of New Orleans and, in the late 1960s, moved to New York City, where he worked as an archivist at the Museum of Modern Art. When he returned to New Orleans, he pursued photography in the 1970s and 1980s. He also began writing art criticism for Gambit.

“Eric was among a handful of early contributors who helped establish Gambit as a leading voice for the arts in New Orleans," former Gambit owners Clancy and Margo DuBos said in a statement. "Through the years his columns gave art lovers valuable insights into the local art scene, and his critiques consistently raised the bar for galleries and artists. He was a gifted writer and a great friend to all of us at Gambit. He will be missed by all who knew him and by many more who read his columns.”

Career

Bookhardt covered New Orleans' art scene for three decades in weekly reviews and features, examining major exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the city. He chronicled the development of large-scale events such as Prospect New Orleans, the international art triennial, and the subsequent growth of the artist-run spaces in Bywater and Faubourg Marigny.

"Cataclysmic experiences may yield unexpected benefits, but they never come easily. The advent of numerous artist-run galleries along New Orleans’ St. Claude Avenue is perhaps the last thing anyone would have expected of a Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But with somewhere between twelve and eighteen collectives, co-ops, pop-ups, and collaborative artist-run spaces at any given time, it has become a predominantly artist-run arts district."

He first appeared in the pages of ART PAPERS as a reviewer in the November/December 1980 issue, and as New Orleans contributing editor in the September/October 1982 issue. He wrote regularly for the magazine until the Winter 2017/2018 issue, in which he reviewed the fourth iteration of Prospect New Orleans.

"Eric’s essays and reviews familiarized ART PAPERS’ geographically diverse readership with the contents and context of regionally distinct styles of contemporary art, specifically ones that responded to the creolized society of New Orleans and related portions of Louisiana. As a New Orleans native of Belizean background, he was singularly sensitive to the variety of cultures that met and mingled in a city whose art addressed challenging contemporary issues long before the disaster of Hurricane Katrina made other Americans recognize the complexity of a culture previously known mostly for Mardi Gras and the tourist pleasures of the French Quarter."

His last piece of writing for Gambit, published November 11, 2019, was a review of the work of New Orleans photographer Josephine Sacabo. In this short piece he reflected on the precarious nature of existence.

"What we see reflects what can happen when the imagination meanders through the dusky realms where cultural history and the psyche overlap and reveal veiled insights into the poetics of the feminine and the ever-shifting, sometimes elusive, nature of reality itself."

Publications and photographic archive

Bookhardt collaborated with New Orleans poet, critic, and writer Jon Newlin on a publication entitled Geopsychic Wonders of New Orleans (Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), 1978). Bookhardt contributed black and white photographs, while Newlin contributed writing. The first edition was published following Bookhardt and Newlin's ongoing research and documentation of the city's most compelling unknown monuments. The evidence of their investigations was published in Figaro newspaper, under the headline "The Eight Wonders of New Orleans." After a few years, there were more than eight and the project led to the creation of Geopsychic Wonders of New Orleans, organized by a consortium of individuals and institutions under the name Center for Gulf South History and Culture. In 1992, a faithful recreation of the first printing was published by Temperance Hall Limited.

His photographic archive includes photographs featured in Geopsychic Wonders of New Orleans as well as those his lesser-known publication, Mirages:  Photographs of New Orleans (Aurian Society Press, 1975). Bookhardt's photographs were presented in A Century of Vision/Un Siècle de Vision:  Louisiana 1884 - 1984, organized by Herman Mhire, at the University Art Museum at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette in 1986.

Bookhardt's archive consists of hundreds of negatives as well as black and white photographic prints. Most photographs were shot in New Orleans, but also in San Francisco and New York City in the 1970s. Several photographs of celebrities and musicians such as Frank Zappa, Bonnie Raitt, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Little Queenie are included. The Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) has several photographs by Bookhardt in their collection.

Curatorial projects

Bookhardt's curatorial forays include Radical Photography at Nexus Gallery (now Atlanta Contemporary Art Center) in 1984, which included New Orleans' photographer George Dureau alongside his more well-known contemporary, Robert Mapplethorpe. Bookhardt's writing makes clear that Dureau's life and work so greatly influenced Robert Mapplethorpe that Mapplethorpe restaged Dureau's early photographs as a form of homage.

He wrote, curated, and edited Inventing Reality:  New Orleans Visionary Photography (Luna Press, 2013), as part of PhotoNOLA's festival of photography. It includes a forward by Russell Lord, former Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The project included artists such as David Halliday, Deborah Luster, and Josephine Sacabo.

"In photography, this city and the surrounding region have long been a spawning ground for visionary or magic realist imagery dating to Clarence John Laughlin's surrealist works of the 1930s," writes Bookhardt. "Today a coterie of younger emerging artists, often reflecting alternative socio-cultural milieus, have in concert with their more established peers expanded this visionary vocabulary."