Wayne Amedee is a New Orleans artist with a career spanning more than four decades. Wayne is represented in NOMA’s permanent collection, has helped establish Loyola University’s permanent sculpture garden and is continuing his efforts through the Frere Joseph Cornet Archive to establish a chair in African Art History at Loyola. In 2014, Wayne was selected by the Louisiana Office of Cultural Development to receive the Artist of the Year Award at the 2014 Louisiana Culture Awards. He is one of the founders of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, actively involved with the New Orleans Museum of Art and Loyola University of New Orleans, a trustee of Longue Vue House and Gardens and a board member of Antenna, a not for profit artists’ collective in the St. Claude Arts District.
In sculpture, collage, painting, and printmaking, I reflect my experiences through the lenses of emotion and abstraction, punctuating this abstraction with more direct anchors to the real world. Drawing from materials and moments in my life, I find inspiration in poetry, the natural world, architecture, and encounters. I draw inspiration from artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Jackson Pollock, and Paul Klee. The titling of my work has long involved auto-biographical material and information from literature as varied as American poetry to the Psalms.