LAFAYETTE.- The Acadania Center for the Arts presents the exhibit Celebrating Freedom: The Art of Willie Birch. The show tells the story of American freedom from the African-American perspective. Through a distinguished group of large-scale works on paper, Birch explores cultural "retentions," that is, the symbols encoded in the body language and rituals that make up the contemporary African-American experience.

Willie Birch was born in New Orleans, LA. He received his B.A. from Southern University in LA and his M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Birch's commissions include the Municipal Collaborative Project for downtown Winston-Salem; a mural at the 135th Street and Lenox Avenue subway stop, commissioned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority's Arts for Transit program in New York; and a mural at the Philadelphia International Airport. Among his awards are the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1993), the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest International Artists Fellowship (1992), fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1989-90, 1984-85), and a New York State Council on the Arts grant (1989-90). His work has been widely exhibited in the United States as well as in Mexico City, Havana, Moscow, Bologna, and Paris. And is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, among others.

Celebrating Freedom: The Art of Willie Birch is organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. The exhibition is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, and the Edward Wisner Fund.