President, David Schulingkamp, to exhibit his personal collection of break bulk cargo ship paintings by New Orleans artist, Joseph Wilhelm, at The Port of New Orleans from October 13-28, 2011.

Joseph Wilhelm is widely hailed as one of the premier maritime artists of his time, painting cruise ships, cargo ships and tugboats, as well as building model ships. Over the decades, he documented his lifelong love affair with the Port of New Orleans, by photographing the ships bringing in and taking out cargo from around the world, which he would later paint.

In Mr. Schulingkamp’s collection, Wilhelm’s oils capture the height of the break bulk shipping era in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s, when cargo was still moved by crates, casks, boxes, and bales, and thousands of longshoremen loaded and unloaded cargo to and from the ships, barges, trains, and trucks. From rust stains running down a hull to a yellow, a.k.a. “muddy,” Mississippi, Wilhelm’s meticulous approach to detail gives these paintings a photo-realistic quality, creating snapshots in time.

Mr. Schulingkamp discoverd the paintings at the By the Bay Nautical Gallery in Harbor Springs, Michigan near his summer home on Walloon Lake. MBLX continues to handle much of the same cargo that formerly arrived in New Orleans on ships like the ones in the paintings and was then distributed to the heartland.

The exhibit, which is open to the public, is being held in the first floor lobby of the Administration Building of the Board of Commissioner’s of the Port of New Orleans from October 13 to 28 from 9:00am to 6:00pm Monday through Friday.