UNH Culture & Sustainability discussion

I was curious as to whether the politics implicit in the description of the mural in the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal originated with the artist, with Dave Eggers, or with Zeitoun himself. My conclusion is that it is almost certainly what the artist, Conrad Albrizio intended when he created it in the early 1950's. He was a New Deal artist who studied the works of Diego Rivera in Mexico before starting this piece.

It may say something about the politics of New Orleans - in particular, the populist legacy of Huey Long - that this potentially controversial mural, one of the largest in the country at the time, was apparently well-received at the height of McCarthyism. It's a fate which Diego Rivera's work sometimes did not share - but of course Albrizio was much subtler, as well as more pleasing to the eye.

Ed, thank you SO much! Somebody has posted some decent photos on Flicker. If we're lucky, Bill Ross (our Special Collections librarian, who's spent a lot of time in NOLA and teaches a course on it) might chime in here. It seems clear, at least, that the mural is available for a variety of interpretations: I wonder how other residents respond to it.

Also, my friend Jocelyn Donlon had this to say about the mural: "when [her husband] Jon and I were working as consultants in cultural interpretation for the State of Louisiana, we did a project documenting the WPA murals in the post offices of Louisiana. We didn't document the New Orleans mural, and it's been years, so I can't really speak to it. But I can say that Albrizio was certainly left-leaning in his politics and believed in a benevolent government. He worked with his students at LSU, who were sometimes responsible for the content of the murals.Lots of images of farming, industrialization, benevolent social services."

I now own Albrizio's house in the French Quarter, my wife and I have been here 20 years. It has a giant mural in the front hall, and an elderly neighbor (also an artist) said that all the figures in it, all masked and in costume for Mardi Gras, were all neighbors. I knew several of them, and it is true. After we bought the house, we found out that a good friend of ours grew up in it and knew Albrizio well! Her mother was an artist and evidently he was quite a charmer. When renovating this house (in the 1950's) he went to Italy to buy Venetian glass and tile, etc. He rode back on the cargo ship with all the stuff and when they arrived at the port in Houston there was a strike...and he refused to get off the ship! He was worried his things would be stolen or lost. So there he stayed for several weeks until the stike was over. My friend has many tales, I only hope Carolyn Bercier and Elise Grenier, both Albrizio scholars, get around to writing the book they have so long talked about writing.