The Tchoupitoulas Floodwall Mural

Written on the Walls

The Tchoupitoulas Floodwall Mural Project Transforms an Infrastructural Eyesore into a Mile-Long Canvas of New Orleans History

Story and photos by Alexandra Kennon

Alexandra Kennon

Despite its route tracing the Mississippi River, Tchoupitoulas Street— with its industrial warehouses on one side and practical, bare cement floodwall on the other—has never made for a particularly scenic drive. But that is changing, as vibrant tableaux illustrating New Orleans’s earliest history have begun appearing in paint along the busy corridor. These are evidence of the earliest stages of a massive undertaking involving much of the community: The Tchoupitoulas Floodwall Mural Project.

When the mural is completed, it will extend more than a mile down Tchoupitoulas, covering not only a vast twelve-block stretch of the floodwall, but more than three hundred years of New Orleans history—from the Native Americans who lived on the land once called Bulbancha all the way through to the present day.

“It’s just the beginning,” said Jamar Pierre, the Seventh Ward/Gentilly-raised lead artist, project manager, and founder of New Orleans International Muralist LLC (NOIM), who emphasizes that a project of this scale and quality will take significant time, funding, and community involvement to complete. “It’s going to take a village for this one.”

The idea to transform the Tchoupitoulas floodwall into a cultural and artistic monument first struck Pierre when he was selected by the city to be the official tricentennial artist in 2018. For the occasion, he created a painting incorporating many important local cultural themes titled “Resilience.” The wall, he said, serves as a kind of extension of that initial concept—“something that’s historical and monumental for the city, uplifting and bringing everyone together.”

Community involvement has always been a pillar in Pierre’s journey as an artist. As a teenager in the eighties, he benefitted from various local programs, including a New Orleans nonprofit called YAYA, which stands for “Young Aspirations Young Artists,” founded by local artist Jana Napoli in 1988 when her studio was across the street from Rabouin High School and she realized many students had an interest in the visual arts, but no outlet to pursue them.

Though the earliest official YAYA participants all attended Rabouin, and Pierre went to Gentilly Terrace, Pierre was frequently present at YAYA programs because he was friends with members of that inaugural class of young artists. “Jamar is absolutely an honorary YAYA,” effused Meg Miles, YAYA’s current executive director who is also on the steering committee for NOIM. “Jamar did not go to Rabouin, but he was always around YAYA and friends with the early generations of kids. He was sort of in this collective of people who were part of the organization, even though they were at other schools. And so he has been really involved with us for a long time.”

“[Programs like these] gave me the opportunity to see that a young African American artist can be a professional artist,” he said. “It kind of molded me as a youngster. That’s when I made the transition from being a graffiti street artist to doing murals to uplift the community, and teaching art.”

Alexandra Kennon

Since those early days, Pierre has embarked on a thirty-year career as a fine artist and arts educator, which has included creating artworks for international exhibitions in Iceland, Costa Rica, and Canada; in addition to having work featured in exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, and most recently Longue Vue House and Gardens. He has been honored by the National Public Radio broadcasting group and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Institute for his contributions to the art world, as well.

Besides all that, he has retained his commitment to community development and arts education, which included stints teaching painting classes at YAYA. Pierre considers the Tchoupitoulas Floodwall Mural Project part of his larger mission to educate and empower young artists, like he once was. After he started securing funding for the project, YAYA students (or “YAYAs,” as they are called) became his first hires—assisting with design and painting as part of a paid mentorship program.

“Part of our model is working with professional artists and giving young people a chance to experience what it’s like to be a professional artist, and what careers in the arts can be like,” explained Miles. “So [Pierre] has worked with us on a number of projects over the years. And really since he started this mural project has almost at every turn included us, which is incredibly generous of him.”

Pierre admitted that by nature of the mural’s size and the complexities that come with selecting a canvas that is also an infrastructurally-crucial floodwall along a busy thoroughfare—the process has been a learning experience for him as well. “I want to be vulnerable and tell people that I am learning it all. I’ve been an art educator for years, but for this project I really, really had to surrender to being a student,” Pierre said. “It’s humbled me … it made me realize that collaborating makes me a better person, and a better artist.”

From permitting, to fundraising, to research, to design, to logistics—there are certainly plenty of learning opportunities for all involved. “A lot of our program is about the intersection of the arts and entrepreneurship,” Miles explained of YAYA’s mission. “So, especially with a project of this scale, there’s so much to consider when it comes to budget, logistics, legal, everything. And so, it’s a great opportunity for the YAYAs to learn public art.”

NOIM and YAYA’s partnership is in the process of becoming more formal as Pierre and YAYA finalize plans for Art Boot Camps in the fall and spring, which will provide a more defined structure for young artists to be paid to work on the mural and learn about business aspects of public art in the process. In addition to YAYA, students from the Arts Council New Orleans’ Young Artist Movement program (YAM) will also participate in Pierre’s Art Boot Camps. “It becomes something that can go on resumes, it becomes something that is really, really tangible, concrete skill building, which we love,” Miles said. “And then there’s also the sort of less tangible piece of it, which is being able to take this pride in driving down Tchoupitoulas and seeing something that you made be part of a permanent installation in our city.”

As more sections of the mural are funded, researched, designed, and painted, Pierre hopes to educate the whole city—not just himself and the young artists he works with—on what goes into creating public art and its importantance. “This is an education for the community that artists are entrepreneurs, and we need to collaborate with philanthropy to make the city a better place,” he said.

After over a year of battling to secure permits from the state and Flood Protection Authority, the mural’s first nine thousand square-foot block or “Phase 1”, which can be seen near Walmart and the intersection of Jackson Avenue, took nearly two years to complete between research, design, and the painting itself. This first section presents New Orleans’s earliest history, from the Native Americans to the French and Spanish arrivals in New Orleans. “We’re not doing like, quick street art type work,” Pierre emphasized. “We’re layering it. We’re researching it, and we’re making sure it’s accurate, it’s detailed.”

As opposed to “traditional” street art’s aerosol, Pierre is committed to using professional water-based mural paint and brushes (just prior to our August interview, he had officially secured a sponsorship from Golden Paint in New York). This requires a great deal of washing and priming of the wall that must be completed before painting even begins. “There’s no water out there,” he said. “There’s no electricity. We’re dealing with the elements. And we deal with funding. Even if somebody gave us a million dollars, which is what we estimate the project is going to [cost], we still can’t paint it that fast.”

Pierre posits that even in such a highly-unlikely fantasy scenario, where the project gained all of the necessary funding overnight, it would still take a bare minimum of five years to complete the prepping and painting—and even that might not be enough time, given New Orleans’s unpredictable weather. “Quality, always, over quantity. We’re not trying to do that quick, cartoony, Blaine Kern Mardi Gras look,” Pierre said. “I’m going for something a little bit more sophisticated. I’m not a classical Rembrandt-type painter, but I’m trying to go for something more historical.”

In an absence of written historical records and photographs to reference for the earliest section, Pierre relied on insight from Native American and African American elders, antiques, and artifacts, along with his own intuition as a New Orleanian with Native American and African American roots. “So this whole thing of talking to people, and working with different people, this is something that has to be known is just now starting, as we get into the mid-late 1800s and 1900s, where people have records of all of those stories and histories,” he said. Phase II, highlighting the history of the 1800s New Orleans, will feature depictions of moments like the Louisiana Purchase, the Battle of New Orleans, the origins of early ragtime jazz and characters like the Baroness de Pontalba, Marie Laveau, and Rose Nicaud. Pierre estimates this section and the early 1900s—which brings in Louis Arm- strong, Jelly Roll Morton, Mahalia Jackson, and more—will be completed by April 2023.

For more recent and better-recorded eras of New Orleans history—Pierre is directly involving local cultural organizations with personal stakes in aspects of the city’s history, to get individuals and groups involved in sharing their and their ancestors’ stories. He hopes to collaborate with leaders within New Orleans’s diverse cultural landscape— representing the heritages of the city’s Jewish, Italian, German, Vietnamese, and other communities in the mural. He also has plans to feature key moments in New Orleans history in the realms of medicine, education, and sports—he’s already got spaces reserved for Charity Hospital (where he was born), Touro, and Ochsner.

Jason Kruppa

Pierre described his cultural exploration as a call to action: “Let’s have those dialogues, let’s have those roundtables with those different diverse communities that represent New Orleans as a gumbo.” He said that even more impactful than the fundraising initiative is the opportunity for communities to have a say in how their stories are told—particularly from the perspective of visual art.

“I think the great thing about Jamar is that with a project this big, he feels not only a desire, but a responsibility to make it as community oriented as it can be,” Miles said. “I love the idea of different sponsors sponsoring different pieces of the history and getting to be part of that as it unfolds ... He’s really walking the walk of community engagement.”

This community engagement extends to Tchoupitoulas Street business owners, too. “We are super excited that JP is the lead on this project, as we have worked with him many times in the past and respect his work a great deal,” said Dylan Lintern, president and COO of NOLA Brewing Company, which is located on Tchoupitoulas. “For us, it’s all about taking an eyesore and turning it into something beautiful that the whole city can enjoy.”

“This was the opportunity for me to do something monumental for my city, you know: create something that’s our Statue of Liberty, that’s our Eiffel Tower,” Pierre said. “But I can’t tell the story by myself, because you have to collaborate with all of the diverse communities in New Orleans to create public art.”

Considering that the Crescent City was founded for its location, nestled into a curve of the Mississippi River, and that Tchoupitoulas Street is named for a Choctaw word meaning “those who live near the river,” Pierre’s monument to New Orleans could not be more profoundly at home. “Because of the Mississippi River, we’ve been able to carry our traditions … not just merchandise, up and down the river to the world, but things from our cultural landscape: our food, our music, our art. And we’ve been a really, really, really significant part of American history, even before the Louisiana Purchase, for three hundred years,” Pierre said. “So, I think that’s something that deserves a large space, and something that deserves a twelve-block, one-mile-long mural.”

On October 8th, NOLA Brewing Company will host a fundraiser for the Tchoupitoulas Floodwall Mural Project Project called “Tchoup it Up,” featuring music by Mechiya Lake and other musicians, a silent auction, raffle, and specialty beer just for the night called “Tchoup Coast” with proceeds going toward the Floodwall Mural.

To donate to the Tchoupitoulas Floodwall Mural Project as an individual with opportunities to win raffle prizes, or to donate or get involved as an organization, visit noim504.com.