At age 14, Rondell Crier joined Young Artists / Young Aspirations (YA/YA), a youth arts organization in his hometown of New Orleans. As a YA/YA artist, Crier worked on hundreds of art commission projects, traveled, and exhibited nationally and abroad. In 2002, Crier became the Executive Director of Programs at YA/YA, fulfilling an organizational goal to have directorship by a YA/YA alumnus.  Currently, he serves as the Creative Director of YA/YA, and continues to practice art through personal and group projects working in several mediums - wood, stone, metal, fabric, video, and graphics. He holds an Associates of Arts degree from Delgado Community College, and studied art at both Dillard University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About On the Streets

Crier’s experience on the streets of New Orleans after the storm was something he could not put into words. So he took pictures. Even the 500 plus photos he took were not enough to represent the mass destruction. He mounted a camcorder on his car and videotaped as he drove around the city; this still wasn’t enough to capture the devastation: things rusted from the salt water, ceiling fans with bent wooden blades from mold and moisture, houses in the middle of the street, a child’s toy doll laying in the street never to be played with again, broken plates from a kitchen bursting out of a huge crack in the corner of a house, a car buried under sand and dirt with only the roof exposed, and a beautiful tile floor of a home -- lit by the sun because the rest of the house was completely gone.

Looking through his viewfinder, Crier realized that while people were absent from his shots, life was not. He saw that life was in these things, all of them a part of our lives because we hand picked them and loved them. He realized that he could explain the magnitude and meaning of loss through objects, asking others to connect directly on a personal level.

Specifications

The piece measures at 14ft (W) x 21ft (L) x 8ft (H), and occupies 294 sqft of floor space. The car is cut into four sections, plus the back section, which could be excluded if the car is mounted onto a wall with the projector mounted inside the wall.

Floodwall Collaboration

Crier collaborated with Jana Napoli on Floodwall, breathing life into the drawers by creating a digital, interactive installation. He and Napoli have worked to identify many of the drawers’ owners and to gather their recollections. These oral histories form an audio component to Napoli’s installation.

 

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