The Art of New Orleans

Ever since my friend Max moved to Cali, he's been posting awsome tidbits on the happenings around his way-the hip hop, the food, the events. But I think I appreciate the posts of random graffiti he finds the most. I just love graffiti. And I love getting to know a new city by checking out what it's street artists have to say. So I decided to share some of what I came across when I was in New Orleans last month.

This is the shoe of one of the cats from ACORN. He thought I was crazy for taking a picture, but I just thought it was awesome.

There was pretty good representation going down on the trains that were nearby the place we were staying. Unfortunately we mostly saw them at night though, so I don't have many pictures of that.

The factory across the street from the one we called "home" for the week.

Bathroom of the coffee shop we would frequent. It made my heart swell up to see this a bit. I don't know; there's just something so child-like and honest about it.

This was posted on a board in the Bywater section & I thought it was interesting for two reasons. One-the only other stencils I saw were in the Bywater neighborhood & they said things like "U.S. out of the Bywater." Second-everyone we spoke with hated Nagin at this stage of the game. From what we were told he sold the people down the river & has instead used his re-election to focus on corporate interests. You know, that old dumb rationale that "what's good for the economy is good for the people."

These pieces were in the St. Bernard Parish. They were especially poignant because right now, like many other neighborhoods in New Orleans, people are fighting for the right to return to their own homes. Over 5,000 units of public housing are due to be demolished despite the fact that many of them are repairable & so many people are still displaced.

This one in particular shows the St. Bernard projects, where families are just now starting to be allowed into their apartments to salvage some of their belongings. After the evacuation, large barb-wired fences were put up around the entire complex & families were not allowed to return. On MLK day, hundreds of people occupied the complex & protested for their right to return.

There really wasn't half as much graffiti as I was hoping for. The people of New Orleans have a lot to say and it's mostly being ignored. My mind was racing the whole time I was there with visions of how their emotions could be expressed visually. But mostly every where you went the only spray paint you came across was grimly reminding you of the search parties that came way too late.

Regardless of whether or not they were currently occupied, just about every home & building had these X's sprayed on them. A reminder of the date a crew finally got around to their home. Or TFW for "toxic flood water." Or 2 bodies found. Or dates almost a month & a half after the storm, where animals were found DOA (Dead On Arrival).And pleas. Soo many pleas just saying, "we are coming back," "this is still our home," or "we will rebuild." And I guess, in some ways, that was their graffiti. Their decleration of a community worth fighting for. No fancy colors needed.