The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly Murals, College Students Lounge Along Bayou St
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VOLUME XXXVII The Historic New Orleans NUMBER 3/4 Collection SUMMER/FALL Quarterly SURREALITY: Piecing Together the Bygone Summer ON THE COVER French Quarter street musicians David and Roselyn (seen in black and white) appear against a postcard view of Audubon Park in the Tricentennial Wing’s new installation Land of Dreams. OPPOSITE: Palmetto-leaf parasols hang from the ceiling in Land of Dreams. FROM THE PRESIDENT CONTENTS I am grateful and humbled to be writing this message introducing the newest issue of ON VIEW / 2 the Quarterly. Although the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to delay production, it feels An new installation suspends good to be back in mailboxes around the country. summertime in the continuous past. The pandemic has upturned lives and plans around the world. At The Historic New With the opening of Cajun Document, Orleans Collection, we have been fortunate to be able to continue our work, thanks a look at the complex history of Cajun to the dedication of our staff and board and the generous support of our sponsors and and Creole identity members. Off-Site This issue of theQuarterly highlights that work, much of it made either in response to or despite the pandemic. The bilingual book Afro-Creole Poetry launched this BOOKS / 12 month; the graphic history Monumental, about the life of Oscar Dunn, was just sent Afro-Creole Poetry spotlights voices off to press; and staff have created and compiled a plethora of online resources available from the 19th-century foundation of the through our new web portal, History from Home. civil rights movement. Exciting things lie ahead: exhibitions are on view again in our Tricentennial Wing at 520 Royal Street, and we’ve found creative ways to do the regular programs that RESOURCES / 16 many of you look forward to every year. Internally, we have been immersed in a compre- History from our home to yours hensive strategic-planning initiative that will chart the course of our institution for years to come. RESEARCH / 20 None of this work would be possible without your support, and I am excited to Quarantine, yellow fever, and the announce a new member opportunity in collaboration with the Leona Tate Foundation “Octopus” of the banana trade for Change. On November 14, 1960, Leona Tate, together with Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost, became the first African American students at McDonogh 19 Elementary School. COMMUNITY / 26 Today, they lend their names to the Tate, Etienne, Prevost (TEP) Center, an exhibit space, On the Job: Building Monumental social justice education center, and senior housing facility that has acquired the very Staff News same McDonogh 19 school building and will open its doors in the spring of 2021. In Focus on Philanthropy commemoration of the 60th anniversary of New Orleans school desegregation, THNOC Donors will work with the TEP Center to create programs over the course of the coming year. Additionally, we are offering all THNOC members at the Merieult Society level and up On the Scene the option to designate $50 of their dues toward the Leona Tate Foundation for Change. Leona Tate made history, and we are proud to help tell her story through our programs ACQUISITIONS / 33 and holdings, which include Tate’s personal donations and other materials related to the Acquisition Spotlight: Dr. John’s final school-desegregation fight. Please join us in supporting her work to preserve that history. years come to The Collection —DANIEL HAMMER Recent Additions ON VIEW On Some Faraway Beach A new installation in the Tricentennial Wing turns New Orleans summertime into a historically informed dreamscape. A What are your favorite memories of summer? Biting into a cold snoball on a hot day? Running through a sprinkler? Reading a book on the couch during an afternoon down- pour? Maybe they’re tied to a specific place. Playing tag in your best friend’s backyard. EXHIBITION Riding the carousel at City Park. Hitting the beach somewhere along the Gulf Coast. Land of Dreams Of course, few of those simple pleasures were the same this year. The COVID-19 Through February 2021 pandemic made this summer unlike any other. Familiar routines were disrupted or Tricentennial Wing, 520 Royal Street shadowed by the coronavirus cloud of uncertainty. So many in our community faced Free unimaginable hardship and loss. People missed the in-person comforts of community Gallery furnishing generously and fellowship. provided by AOS Last winter, before the pandemic, THNOC commissioned artist Susan Gisleson to create an installation that would celebrate the joys of a typical New Orleans summer (mosquito-free, please). The display, installed in the Tricentennial Wing’s ground-floor John and Bernadina Scovern Gallery, was intended to provide an engaging space where people could relax and recharge indoors during their visit to the museum. That usage— and the entire concept of a typical summer—didn’t pan out as planned, but the installa- tion went up anyway, and on September 1 it finally opened to visitors. Entitled Land of Dreams, Gisleson’s murals form a swirling, lush dreamscape of summer pastimes, as well as a meditation on the power of memory. To inspire her work, Gisleson dove into THNOC’s holdings and was immediately drawn to the postcard collection—color-saturated views, many dating to the early and mid-20th A. Along the walls of the gallery, gumball machines are filled with found objects and century, of Bayou St. John, City Park, and Audubon Park. Gisleson used them to form the tchotchkes. backdrop for her installation, supplemented by images from Michael P. Smith, Jules Cahn, a remarkable scrapbook depicting African American university life in the 1920s, and more. B. Artist Susan Gisleson used hundreds of The result is a large-scale collage that occupies three walls of the gallery. Even without summertime images from THNOC’s hold- ings to create the murals that occupy three the pandemic, there is plenty to bemoan about New Orleans summertime—the heat, the walls of the gallery. humidity, the hurricanes—but the season is also a time of beauty and respite. In Gisleson’s B 2 The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly murals, college students lounge along Bayou St. John. A child eats an ice cream cone. Many will recognize Blaine Kern’s colossal statues of Neptune and a mermaid, which loomed over visitors at the 1984 World’s Fair. Water, a necessary relief during the hot summer months, is a theme. Two short film clips play on the fourth wall. One depicts scenes from the 1959 Grand Isle Tarpon Rodeo, the oldest sport-fishing tournament in the country, which is held along the rapidly vanishing Louisiana coast. The second clip, just a minute and a half long, shows the 1969 reopening of the Audubon Pool follow- ing years of fighting over its integration. Black and white children line the edge of the pool waiting for the ribbon-cutting ceremony to conclude, ready to dive in and escape the heat. A brass band leads a second line in celebration. Both clips invite us to look deeper: what are the dreams imbued in these two films? With its languid pace and extreme weather, New Orleans summertime can feel like the stuff of dreams, and Gisleson’s installation aims to capture its C small moments and big themes. It’s also a love letter to ephemera—postcards, playbills, scrapbooks stuffed with memories. These bits and pieces, lovingly saved and C. A bed draped in moss and foliage and now a part of THNOC’s holdings, remind us that, when faced with challenging times, piled with books stands in the middle of the gallery. life’s simple pleasures can still make a big impact. Outside the gallery, visitors are asked to reflect on this past summer: what did you miss the most during the shutdown? What new places and activities did you discover? Making sense of this bewildering time is no easy task, like piecing together an intense dream while still half-asleep. Our scraps of memory cannot tell the story of the pandemic on their own, but we can paste them together, learning from each other as we continue through this new land. —AMANDA MCFILLEN Summer/Fall 2020 3 ON VIEW Becoming Cajun As Cajun Document opens, the Quarterly traces the forgotten evolution of Cajun and Creole identity. A EXHIBITION What do we mean when we talk about Cajun Country? The simple answer is that the Cajun Document: Acadiana, 1973–74 term is synonymous with Acadiana, a 22-parish region settled in the mid-18th century by Through January 17, 2021 exiles from present-day Nova Scotia. About 3,000 Acadians arrived in South Louisiana 520 Royal Street from 1764 to around 1785, and now, more than 250 years later, their creolized name, Free Cajun (derived from the French Acadien), can be found everywhere: there’s the Ragin’ Cajuns, the athletic moniker of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL). There’s the Cajun Heartland State Fair, held annually (pre-COVID) on the grounds of the Cajundome. And countless small businesses, from Cajun Power to Cajun Fitness, Cajun Broadband, and Cajun Mart, use the term to ground their names in a sense of place. South Louisiana’s reputation as Cajun Country may seem as natural and inevitable as Spanish moss on a live oak tree, but it’s actually a fairly recent phenomenon, the latest twist in a long story about Creole identity and United States race relations. When photographers Douglas Baz and Charles H. Traub spent six months in South Louisiana in the mid-1970s, creating the work now on view in THNOC’s new exhibition Cajun Document, the region was only just beginning to be known as Cajun Country.