Willie Birch “Up on the Roof” at Fort Gansevoort, New York

Starting September 10, 2025, Fort Gansevoort presents Willie Birch’s “Up on the Roof”, the gallery’s second solo with the Louisiana-born artist and a quietly radical tour through the people, streetscapes, and architecture of his New Orleans neighborhood. The exhibition gathers twelve large-scale paintings—each shown for the first time—that extend a formal language Birch committed to in 2000: a distilled, high-contrast palette of charcoal and white acrylic on paper.

In Birch’s hands, black, white, and the smudged grays between become a full orchestra. Figures emerge as if from memory; porch rails and clapboard siding stack rhythm like bars of music; and everyday objects accrue into allegories with social bite. Willie Birch has long used observation to test the boundaries between document and symbol, mingling references to current events with the unvarnished cadence of daily life. Here, that ethic is unmissable: the works read as portraits of community but also as meditations on how communities withstand and remember.

Born in New Orleans in 1942, Birch earned a BA from Southern University and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work has been exhibited at major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Public collections, including Crystal Bridges and Harvard Art Museums, hold his work. In 2025, he received the Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant for career-long excellence, and his work will be featured in an installation at the Studio Museum in Harlem, honoring its Artist-in-Residence program, where he was a fellow in 1977–78.

Willie Birch: New Orleans Stories in Charcoal

A trio of anchor works frames the show’s range. “Melting Snow #3” (2025) freezes an extraordinary day—New Orleans under a rare January snowfall—and then lets it thaw, literally and metaphorically. Triangular trellis shadows ricochet across clapboard, nodding to pyramidal forms and the African diasporic currents that shape the city; a cross-shaped planter and reemergent blades of grass double as crossroads and renewal. Even in monochrome, the atmosphere is charged: Willie Birch captures climate anxiety and communal wonder without didacticism.

Occupying the entire second floor, the twelve-part “Procession for “Kidd” Jordan: A Fitting Farewell” (2023–2024) is both elegy and field recording. Birch runs the narrative right-to-left, against Western reading and against traffic, in step with the second line’s counter-time. Rain slashes through the panels; the crowd keeps moving. Repetition of frames sets a drumbeat, while haze and stark contrasts conjure grief and celebration as inseparable states—a visual equivalent of blue notes.

“Two Roofers and a Ladder” (2022) honors labor with art-historical fluency. Horizontal siding and ladder rungs become metronomes for manual rhythm; broad-brimmed hats wink at Courbet. The men pause in a heat-scorched instant that feels both specific to the Gulf South and timeless. From the roofline vantage, Willie Birch implies an ethics of perspective: to see clearly, you climb, you sweat, you look long.

“Up on the Roof” opens at Fort Gansevoort, New York, on September 10, 2025  and will remain on view through November 8, 2025. The exhibition underscores Willie Birch’s sustained experiment in seeing—one he began decades ago and sharpened when he abandoned chroma for charcoal.

This show also prefaces the touring museum retrospective “Willie Birch: Stories to Tell”, co-organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and the American Federation of Arts. Opening in 2026 at the California African American Museum before traveling to NOMA and MOCA Jacksonville—with a Yale University Press catalog—the retrospective promises a broader view of Birch’s project: dismantling received narratives of race and class while locating common ground in form, gesture, and lived experience. Fort Gansevoort’s presentation, intimate in scale yet expansive in implication, reminds us why Willie Birch belongs at the center of that conversation. The city is his subject; humanity, in all its contradictions, is his medium.