ANDREW SHIIRA NEW ORLEANS FREE

In the wake of the storm, life in the city became unendurable. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit, the antiques business had mostly faded away. At 20, he and a friend opened an antiques shop on Magazine Street, filling it with furniture and decorative arts acquired on trips to France. Moving to New Orleans as a teenager was something of a cultural homecoming for Mr. He is shown as a young man in his salon here surrounded by neoclassical furnishings that strike an elegant yet matter-of-fact note. A more vivid account can be seen in a Hopkins painting, “Edmond Dédé Piano Recital,” of the fashionably dressed freeborn Creole musician and composer (1827-1901) who was raised in New Orleans and studied in Paris. There is, however, a house museum in the city, Le Musée de f.p.c./Free People of Color Museum, which has made a modest beginning at doing so. “It’s a wonderful topic, but a great deal of work needs to be done,” said Mel Buchanan, the RosaMary curator of decorative arts and design at the New Orleans Museum.

Neither the New Orleans Museum of Art nor the well-heeled Historic New Orleans Collection has mounted an exhibition resurrecting this culture. Despite many laws restricting their rights they played a significant role in civic life. Like white Creoles, some owned slaves, and some later fought for the Confederacy. Mostly French speaking, these artisans, shopkeepers and artists were in no small part responsible for the look of the French Quarter - its ironwork, decorative plaster, its architecture and fashionable shops.

ANDREW SHIIRA NEW ORLEANS FREE

Hopkins is fond of using for many of his creations, free Creoles of color in New Orleans owned some $15 million of property in the city. He was able to trace his paternal lineage back to a Frenchman, Nicholas Bodin of Tours, who received a Louisiana land grant in 1710. “I found that I was a part of all that,” said Mr. When he began researching his family’s history, he made an exciting discovery. “I was always in the library reading about neoclassical furniture and antebellum architecture.” He joined a local preservation society, made clay models of the furniture and architecture he admired and dreamed about France and the French connection to Creole culture. In the 1970s it was taken for granted there that a boy’s leisure time would be spent in boisterous street games. Mobile was the first capital of colonial French Louisiana, something the artist was aware of at an early age. Hopkins’s journey into Creole history began in Mobile, Ala., where he was born in 1978. And when the 6-foot-2 artist dons the high heels and 20th-century fashions that Désirée Joséphine Duplantier favors, he brings that history forward almost as if there had been no rift with the past. The carefully researched furniture, fashionable clothes and street scenes in his compositions present themselves as settled history. Hopkins has employed the conscious archaism of a folk art style to furnish the quotidian world of a culture mostly erased by the Civil War. Hopkins, says this artist “has used his work to interrogate Creole history.” He added, “He has deconstructed the past.”įor his part Mr. William Rudolph, the chief curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art and an early enthusiast about the work of Mr. “I wanted to do them justice.”Ĭreole is a long-embattled term, perhaps best defined now as a person whose background and identity is traceable to colonial French Louisiana and/or its Franco-African culture. Hopkins, 42, says of both white Creoles and Creoles of color in his work. “This is what these lives looked like, and no one else was doing it,” Mr. Placed alongside 18th- and 19th -century portrait miniatures in the booth of Elle Shushan near the entrance of the show, these small works portraying daily life in New Orleans, circa 1830, will enact their own sly magic, inserting themselves into the stream of art history as if the visual record of people and places in antebellum Creole culture had not been lost. 24 they will be making their first foray north. Hopkins’s paintings appear at the Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory on Jan. You can see these works in Nadine Blake’s gallery on Royal Street in the French Quarter, on the art-filled walls of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in Treme, and in the rooms of collectors like the designer Thomas Jayne and the food stylist Rick Ellis. His paintings, faux naïf renderings of 19th-century life in the city - particularly the vanished culture of New Orleans’s free Creoles of color - also keep good company.

NEW ORLEANS - Dressed as his alter ego, the modish matron Désirée Joséphine Duplantier, the artist Andrew LaMar Hopkins is a familiar presence on this city’s arts scene.

Andrew shiira new orleans