Keith Duncan, Southern University Marching Band, 2023, Acrylic, marker and fabric on unstretched canvas, 74.5 x 108 inches, © Keith Duncan. Collection of the artist and Fort Gansevoort, New York
(New Orleans, LA) – Ogden Museum of Southern Art announced today that an exhibition highlighting HBCU Marching Bands will open winter of 2025. The exhibition, Battle of the Bands, features New Orleans artist Keith Duncan’s most recent body of work that celebrates the vibrant tradition of Historically Black College and University (HBCU) marching bands. Opening February 15, 2025, the exhibition will include large-scale fabric paintings of fifteen HBCU bands, human- scale fabric paintings and smaller works on paper depicting each band’s drum major.
Growing up in Plaquemines Parish near New Orleans, Duncan was familiar with the cultural importance of marching bands. New Orleans has a strong marching band tradition in public schools, and these bands are the soundtrack and soul of the city’s Mardi Gras parades. Members of the high school marching bands often become members of HBCU marching bands, as well as the celebrated brass bands that play the streets and clubs of New Orleans and beyond.
While attending Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, Duncan became familiar with Southern University’s Human Jukebox. Duncan explains, “While attending LSU for my undergrad, we would go over to Southern University at times to go check out the Greek shows to watch the step teams and watch the [football] game. But the main event wasn’t the game, it was the Battle of the Bands. Everybody wanted to see the bands go at each other, so that was something that was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to create a narrative about.”
Although Battle of the Bands has its roots in Southern’s Human Jukebox Marching Band and Grambling’s Tiger Marching Band, Duncan broadened the lens of his focus to include fifteen of the top Southern marching bands in the HBCU tradition. The bands included in the exhibition are: Bethune-Cookman University’s Marching Wildcats, Florida; Florida A&M University’s Marching 100; Grambling State University’s Tiger Marching Band, Louisiana; North Carolina State A&T University’s Blue & Gold Marching Machine; Jackson State University’s Sonic Boom of the South, Mississippi; Norfolk State University’s Spartan Legion, Virginia; South Carolina State University’s Marching 101; Tuskegee University’s Marching Crimson Pipers, Alabama; Southern University’s Human Jukebox, Louisiana; Texas Southern University’s Ocean of Soul; Howard University’s Showtime Marching Band, Washington, D.C.; Morehouse College’s House of Funk, Georgia; Alcorn State University’s Sounds of Dyn-O-Mite, Mississippi; Alabama State University’s Mighty Marching Hornets; and Tennessee State University’s Aristocrat of Bands.
The full pictorial force of Keith Duncan’s work in this series is realized in the 15 large-scale depictions of the bands themselves. His masterful conveyance of the grand pageantry of HBCU marching bands is expressed through rhythmic compositions of each band around the central figure of the drum major. His use of negative space and broad fields of background color around the figures accentuates the feeling of movement conveyed through painterly gesture.
Duncan’s layered integration of wallpaper and textiles is deliberately drawn from the influences of ancestral heritage, Southern tradition and contemporary aesthetics of material exploration. His ancestral heritage is explored through allusion to African textile traditions, while Southern traditions in handcrafts—like the quilting traditions of Black folk artists, especially the quilters of Gee’s Bend—provide inspiration for the patchwork upon which he builds his paintings. His formal practice is also informed by the collage work and material exploration of artist including Faith Ringgold and Mickalene Thomas, while his gestural figuration and painterly style can be compared to artist such as Willie Birch and Robert Colescott.
“I saw these drum majors as like these symbols of African Warriors dancing in front of the king or the queen, and a pageantry, a royalty of ceremonious splendor,” Duncan explains. “I saw them in that light, and it’s part of our heritage beyond New Orleans, and I saw that in these figures.” In some way, these singular portraits almost deify the drum major as a spiritual leader within the cultural community, illustrating the impact of another early and lasting influence upon Duncan’s painting practice: Renaissance religious paintings of Western Europe.
“With Battle of the Bands, Keith Duncan displays his full formal acumen and narrative prowess as a painter,” shares Bradley Sumrall, Curator of the Collection, Ogden Museum of Southern Art. “Like all of Duncan’s work, it is figurative, personal and rooted in the celebration of his community. Through telling this story, he focuses the viewer’s attention on the cultural significance of the HBCU marching band tradition. It also opens dialogue around the rich history of the South’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the increasingly important role they play at this moment in American history.”
A limited print catalog will accompany Battle of the Bands and will be sold in the Museum Store and online. Special exhibition-related programming will be announced closer to the exhibition open date. For questions about the exhibition, please contact Capri Guarisco, Marketing and Communications Manager, at cguarisco@ogdenmuseum.org or 504.539.8170.
About Keith Duncan
Keith Duncan is a contemporary figurative artist and educator based in New Orleans, Louisiana. A visual storyteller, Duncan draws inspiration from personal narrative, community engagement, news media, art history, Black culture and the traditions of New Orleans. While his studio practice is firmly rooted in painting and drawing, his process is expansive, adroitly incorporating paper collage and textile art.
Duncan was born in New Orleans in 1964, and grew up in Empire, Louisiana – a small coastal fishing village in Plaquemines Parish near where the mighty Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. He received a BFA from Louisiana State University, and an MFA from Hunter College (CUNY) New York, NY. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at CUE Arts Foundation, New York and Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi, among other gallery spaces throughout the United States. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Thelma Golden’s Black Romantic at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Prospect.2 curated by Dan Cameron. His work is included in the permanent collections of Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Flint Institute of Art.
His awards and accomplishments include the Camille Cosby Fellowship, The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and in 2001 his work was commissioned for NASA. Residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME. Duncan has taught art for over twenty years in New York and New Orleans and currently resides in New Orleans and is represented by Fort Gansevoort, New York.
About Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Located in the vibrant Warehouse Arts District of downtown New Orleans, Louisiana since 1999 and open to the public since 2003, Ogden Museum of Southern Art invites visitors to experience and learn about the artists and culture of the American South. Ogden Museum is home to a collection with almost five thousand works, making it the largest publicly available and most comprehensive repository dedicated to Southern art in the nation, with particular strength in the genres of Self-Taught art, Regionalism, Photography and Contemporary Art. The Museum is further recognized for its original exhibitions, public events and educational programs, which examine the development of visual art alongside Southern traditions of music, literature, culinary heritage and craft and design.
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