Art by Zee

Norman Laliberte’ is a North American artist who was born in Massachusetts, raised in Montreal, and educated at the Institute of Design in Chicago where his teachers included the likes of Buckminster Fuller, Groplus, and Mies Van der Rohe. His skills include teaching, painting and illustration. He has written, designed, or illustrated some 35 books, and taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, Boston College, Notre Dame, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Influenced by such artists as Marc Chagall, Rauschenberg, and Rouault, Laliberte’ has amassed an impressive body of work in his six-decades long career. His work has appeared in hundreds of shows and has been honored by five retrospectives, including at the Chicago Public Library and the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal. His major public works include banners for the 25th anniversary of the Chicago Lyric Opera, aluminum panels for the International Terminal at Logan Airport, and large scale projects for the New York State Bar Association, Standard Oil, IBM and Alcan Corporation.

Next up for the accomplished artist is a new retrospective of his work including textural paintings on tar paper, handmade books and a variety of mixed media pieces. Animals, flowers and various whimsical figures populate his abstract expressionism style.

Laliberte’: 60 Years of Joyful Creation opens March 5 with a Gallery Walk Exhibition and runs through April 9 at Gallery DeNovo in Ketchum.

Happy Fat Tuesday!

Cities all across America celebrate Mardi Gras but no one does it quite like New Orleans. Huge floats in huge parades attract revelers for one of the biggest parties on the planet. One of the most popular features of these parades is a tradition that dates back to the 1830s: the tossing of beads from float goers to their clamoring audiences begging: “Throw me something, mister.”

This simple plea used to be enough to have a chance at scoring some of the highly-prized beads, but as Tom Jacobs reports in this piece for Miller-McCune, University of Louisiana, Lafayette criminal justice department head Craig Forsyth took his toddler son to Mardi Gras and couldn’t figure out why no one would give the kid some beads until a nearby woman explained that there’s no catching beads when the female flashers are around.

Forsyth interviewed 51 women and 54 male float riders about stripping for beads. His conclusion? “Some forms of deviance apparently do ‘work,’” he concluded, “and parade stripping is one of them.”

Check the story’s links for more details on the social science tied to Mardi Gras.