The new St. Claude Arts Park

The new St. Claude Arts Park

During the pandemic, Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge added drive-in movies, screening films on the side of its building just over the parish line in Arabi. Now, that wall is covered by a purple mural by Kalli Padgett, and the lot has been built into the St. Claude Arts Park, a brand-new outdoor venue and art market space. The official ribbon cutting is this week, and there will be two concerts in the park, both free of charge, courtesy of the Jazz Foundation of America.

Cellist Helen Gillet will perform at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 21, and Jonathan Freilich’s Naked Orchestra will perform at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22.

The park is a project of the Meraux Foundation, which owns the land for the two-block arts district that now includes the park. Meraux is a private family foundation that supports various initiatives in St. Bernard Parish, including projects in coastal restoration, economic development, arts and culture, education and more. The arts district includes Zeitgeist Theatre, the artist studio and exhibition space St. Claude Arts and the consulting, design and framing business Art Conscious.

“We want to leverage arts and culture as an economic driver,” says Chris Haines, who is a member of the Meraux Foundation board. “It’s organically growing into a nice destination.”

The St. Claude Arts space has made affordable studio space available to artists. Its 11 studios are currently filled with artists working in painting, mixed media, photography, printmaking, woodworking, furniture refurbishing, vintage clothing and more. Christopher Ryan runs Arabi Visual Arts in the space and curates some of the exhibition area. The foundation also commissioned 10 muralists to paint large-scale works on the walls at the arts district and a couple other locations.

St. Claude Arts Park has almost 10,000 square feet of open space with palm trees, lights strung overhead and a covered area for bands or performances. From the street, there’s a building façade at 6609 St. Claude Ave. that maintains the commercial look of the street, but that building is only deep enough to house restrooms and storage space. Its back is a black wall which will be used for outdoor movies. The park will be used for art and farmers markets, and it’s available for private events.

Zeitgeist founder Rene Broussard is in charge of programming for the park. He’s working with the UNO Creative Writing Workshop to host its literary festival and book fair on Dec. 17 in both the park and Zeitgeist space. Those spaces also will be used for a reception for PhotoNOLA, the citywide photography festival Dec. 7-10. Broussard is planning on holding a photography-themed art market during the festival.

Zeitgeist will celebrate its 36th birthday in November. In the official opening of programming in the St. Claude Arts Park, there will be an album release show on Nov. 2 for Shaking Souls, a collaboration between Gillet and Swiss percussionist and electronic musician Simon Berz. The two first collaborated together a decade ago at a series hosted by Zeitgeist in which musicians created and performed with instruments they built out of found objects.

There will be an outdoor screening of the film “Man With a Movie Camera” with a live, original score by the Austin, Texas, band Montopolis on Nov. 9. Dziga Vertov’s landmark 1929 silent film documents a day in the cities of Moscow, Kyiv and Odesa. Montopolis, which is on tour with the film program, is an indie chamber group that includes members of the Austin Symphony, Polyphonic Spree, Okkervil River and other groups.

For more information, visit zeitgeistnola.org, stclaudearts.org and merauxfoundation.org.

Cheese Nazis, women’s prison scenes, castration shots, gushing blood and gratuitous inclusions of backdrops featuring the Matterhorn.

The play is set against the backdrop of the landmark 1892 General Strike.

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Email Will Coviello at wcoviello@gambitweekly.com

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