Peter Halley: New Orleans, 1977–78
The U.N.O. Gallery is honored to present a selection of early gouaches by Peter Halley, created in 1977 and 1978 while he was enrolled in the University’s M.F.A. program in Fine Arts. Produced during his formative years in New Orleans, these rarely seen works are on view for the first time in the city where they were created. They illuminate the early development of an artist who would become a defining voice in postmodern art and one of the most influential painters of the past four and a half decades. New Orleans’s cultural richness and vibrant architecture shaped Halley’s sensibility, as did his travels to Central America and North Africa, where he engaged with pre-Columbian and Islamic art and architecture. In these compositions, the world he encountered is distilled into structured bands of color and softly edged geometric shapes. Subjects drawn from the natural and human world—a tree, a star, a standing figure, a Christian cross, a Plains teepee, and the Moroccan city of Fez—hover between representation and abstraction. Seen from today’s perspective, these works reveal the foundations of Halley’s later vocabulary of bold geometric abstractions and textured Roll-a-Tex surfaces—the “cells,” “prisons,” and “conduits” that, since the 1980s, have transformed the language of painting and mapped the conditions of contemporary urban and technological life.
New York-based artist Peter Halley (b. 1953) earned a B.A. in Art History from Yale University and an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans. A noted critic and educator, he served as Director of Graduate Studies in Painting and Printmaking at Yale School of Art (2002–11). Halley’s work has been exhibited at leading institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint-Étienne Métropole; and Lever House, New York. His paintings are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dallas Museum of Art; and many others worldwide.
Peter Halley: New Orleans, 1977–78 celebrates the artist’s selection as the 2025 College of Liberal Arts and Education Distinguished Alumnus of the Year. The exhibition was organized in close collaboration with the artist by Fine Arts Associate Professors Tony Campbell and Anna Mecugni, with generous support from the U.N.O. Foundation. The exhibition opens on November 8 and continues through November 30, 2025. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 8, from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12:00–5:00 PM.
Exhibition Dates: November 8th through November 30th.
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 8, from 6:00 - 9:00 PM
Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 12-5 or by appointment
UNO St. Claude Gallery | 2429 St. Claude Avenue
If you would like more information about this exhibition, please email UNO Gallery Director, Tony Campbell, apcampbe@uno.edu
Peter Halley, Man Tree and Star, 1977
Peter Halley, Landscape with Sky, 1977