could become the longest painting anywhere – featured nola.com
Tchoupitoulas Street mural
On Tchoupitoulas, a mile-long mural comes into focus. Written by Doug Mccash
Jamar Pierre says it’s one of the city’s great paradoxes. The Mississippi River is New Orleans’ reason for being.
Yet most of the time you can’t lay eyes on it, because the view is blocked. That’s especially true on
Tchoupitoulas Street, the Uptown thoroughfare that hugs the river’s edge. All you see on the riverside of
Tchoupitoulas Street is a long concrete levee wall.
For the past seven years, Pierre has made that endless gray wall his canvas. With the permission of the Flood
Protection Authority and other agencies, he’s been painting a colorful mural on a mile-and-a-half stretch of
the flood protection barrier. Currently segments of the painting are scattered from the Walmart to Ninth
Street.
Pierre believes it will be the longest mural in New Orleans. It may be a contender for the longest mural
anywhere, when he’s done. When he’ll be done is anybody’s guess, though.
The impossible dream
Pierre estimates the project is about 40% finished. There’s still plenty of wall to go. Plenty of wall. With brush
in hand, Pierre is a paint-speckled Don Quixote in a floppy sun hat and glowing yellow safety vest. The mural is
his “impossible dream.” At the start of the project, he mostly worked alone, over time he’s assembled a small,
talented crew of fellow artists lending a hand.
On Saturday afternoon, the drivers of passing cars honked in appreciation of the project and tourists on the upper deck of the Hop-On Hop-Off Bus applauded. The drive-by adulation inspired Pierre and his team: high school student Zion Mercadel, artist Rontherin Ratliff (of the Northern Ninth LLC art company), and realist painters Max Bernardi and Kalli Padgett. Compared to working in a private studio, Padgett said painting outdoors in the public view “is more real and more raw.” “People are shouting at us,” she said.
Artist Jamar Pierre began his encyclopedic mural project working alone, but he has since enlisted fellow artists, including painter Kalli Padgett, to help complete the enormous
artwork.
To complete the mammoth mural is going to take a lot of time and paint. And a lot of subject matter too.
Happily, Pierre has an inexhaustible supply of the latter. His theme is the history of New Orleans, the whole
history, from the Indigenous peoples of Bulbancha to the arrival of Bienville, the Battle of New Orleans, the
Baroness Pontalba, James Booker and beyond.
Pierre is currently adding a portrait of Edmond Dédé to the big painting. Dédé was a New Orleans-born 19thcentury classical composer who is credited with being the first African American to pen the score of an opera.
Black people, Pierre pointed out, “came here as cargo,” but contributed mightily to New Orleans culture.
“They made everything, from the bricks to the music to the food,” he said, and they are prominently represented in the big painting.
The mural will also include the influence of “the Irish, the Jewish, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish, the
Croatians, the Cubans, the Vietnamese, and the Haitians,” Pierre said. His goal is to “represent the diversity of
all the people who came together to make this city.”
Pierre’s artistic agenda is to “bring us back into our past.” He said he’s afraid that “people who grow up here
take their culture for granted.”
Pierre is 52, he grew up in the Voscoville neighborhood of Gentilly and attended John F. Kennedy High School.
He got his first taste of public art when he dabbled in graffiti as a teen. He later studied drawing and painting
with the renowned artist and professor Ron Bechet. But, he said, truth is, most of his professional art
education has been on-the-job training. For years, he’s made ends meet with painting commissions, teaching
gigs and art grants
What do the neighbors think?
Scott McKearn, owner of the Banana Manor rug shop near the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Eighth streets,
say’s he’s delighted with Pierre’s project. “I love it,” McKearn said. “I love that he does it in chronological order
and that I’m at the Ali-Spinks fight” — a championship heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and Leon
Spinks in the Superdome in 1978.