Rolland Golden grew up moving from
one Southern town to another, including Jackson and Grenada in mississippi,
Birmingham in Alabama, and finally back to his native New Orleans. His paintings
portray the remnants of the much larger but fading South—the post-Civil War and
early twentieth-century South of hard times, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers
who lived on the edge of survival. His work is filled with symbols of an earlier
rural and urban South consumed by change. At times melancholy, his work grips
contrasting images brought on by that change. A writer once described Golden's
paintings as an “evasive melancholy” that touches on the “faintly familiar.”
Rolland Golden, who studied under
noted regionalist painter and teacher John McCrady, is an artist with something
to say. When his anger is aroused, as in the late 1960s and 1970s during the
widespread demoition of nineteenth-century buildings in downtown New Orleans,
his work was biting. When he returned to the clarity of a rural Southern
landscape, his paintings were filled with symbols of a simpler but often harsher
rural life. M. Stephen Doherty, editor in chief of American Artist, says
“he offers a new way of seeing and understanding the places we inhabit.”
Rolland Golden's career as a
professional artist began in 1957. He is a three-time recipient of the National
Arts Club First Place Award, a two-time winner of the Thomas Hart Benton
Purchase Award, winner of the Winslow Homer Memorial Award, and many others. He
has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally, including a
one-artist show that toured the Soviet Union in 1976 and 1977. His paintings
appear in numerous private and public collections, including those of Columbia
Pictures, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the National Arts Club, and the Pushkin
Museum in Moscow.
Rolland Golden currently resides in
Folsom, Louisiana, with his wife Stella. Their daughter, Lucille, runs the
Crescent Gallery in the French Quarter. |