A New Orleans studio paints the city’s contrasts, from struggle to rebirth
| New Orleans
Brandan Odums, also known as BMike, strides with an air of calm through StudioBE, his warehouse art space in New Orleans’ historic Bywater neighborhood.
A massive mural of a girl on the warehouse’s exterior is a city fixture, her angelic gaze a mix of wonder and courage. Inside, the studio bustles with activity. Pastel-splashed faces – portraits of everyone from Mr. Odums’ friends to the late Rep. John Lewis – peer down from their canvases. Visitors meander through the large space, and welding beams flicker against walls as workers build a mobile display stage.
A born New Orleanian, Mr. Odums began by painting in the city’s forgotten places, driven by the community’s difficult experience during Hurricane Katrina and its struggle to rebuild. One result of the unequal rebuilding process is a city in which income inequality is greater than anywhere in the United States except Atlanta.
Why We Wrote This
StudioBE, whose exhibits tell the stories of Hurricane Katrina, civil rights leaders, Black history, and contemporary culture, sprang from an audacious exhibit that artist Brandan Odums launched more than a decade ago. Now, he says, it “has become part of the conversation about what New Orleans is, what it means, and why it’s important.”
New Orleans “is No. 1 on a lot of wrong lists,” Mr. Odums says. “So this studio has become part of the conversation about what New Orleans is, what it means, and why it’s important.”
StudioBE, whose exhibits tell the stories of Katrina, civil rights leaders, Black history, and contemporary culture, sprang from an audacious exhibit that Mr. Odums launched more than a decade ago. He used an abandoned apartment complex called DeGaulle Manor as a canvas for his intensely vibrant spray-paint art. Thousands of people showed up to that exhibit’s opening. The demolition of DeGaulle Manor a few years later wasn’t met by tears. Instead, Mr. Odums says, the wrecking ball reflected the reality of a city in continual transformation.
Today, Mr. Odums provides younger New Orleanians, many of whom have spent their whole lives in Hurricane Katrina’s long aftermath, the tools they need to create art. Eternal Seeds, a nonprofit he founded, has worked on a range of projects – including, recently, painting small Bloom Fist sculptures cast from Mr. Odums’ own hand. These pieces went on sale recently during the city’s Jazz & Heritage Festival to benefit Eternal Seeds, which gives young artists experience in producing and managing artistic projects.
Mr. Odums says Eternal Seeds is geared in part at showing emerging artists how to make a living in a city of “beautiful contradictions.”
“Our purpose,” he adds, “is to go beyond the very limits of imagination and find a way to make peace with the present.”
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