Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 32)

Bachemin, Benny Jones, “Bubble,” “Dut,” “Hot,” “Eyes,” “Toe Toe,” “Stinky,” “Ratty,” “Mr. Google-Eyes,” “Spike,” “Tuba,” “Ice Cream,” and other street friends: especially Johnny “Kool” Stephenson and Sylvester Francis, who document the culture from within. A LASTING LEGACY In the 1980s, alongside the photographs he would select for A Joyful Noise, Smith was branching into color work with the Mardi Gras Indians. His larger aesthetic sensibility was now immersed in history — trying to understand what the moments meant. As a lens moves in wide angle, Smith’s vision grew with his reading, an effort to situate the black Indians of Carnival in an older tradition of African-inspired dances and performances of a cultural memory. He produced a long, intelligent, footnoted essay that accompanied Mardi Gras Indians for that 1994 book: “Abstract, sculptural, African styles of masking among the various black Indian gangs are more typical of “downtown” Indians,” he wrote, referring to the groups from downriver neighborhoods, particularly the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Wards — areas that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, eleven years later. “Uptown gangs normally follow the American Indian style of dress, featuring the elaborate beaded pictorial scenes — now usually ‘cowboy-and-Indian’ visions of the American West. This uptown/downtown difference (and now midtown and “back of town” differences) can also be found in tribal music styles, as well as in costume design, sewing styles, and materials used. There is little of the narrative reportage you would expect of a longtime witness to that rolling drama of black men dressed as Indians parading along scarred streets of back neighborhoods in New Orleans. But that was Mike: in his later years he was proving to academics and historians that he could deliver the goods in which they dealt. The essay proves he had done the heavy lifting expected of a librarybound scholar — a tad ironic, that, in light of the countercultural lifestyle led by Smith and his significant other, video documentarian Karen Snyder, during the years when he was immersed in the culture of the streets. In 2007 The Historic New Orleans Collection purchased his collection of 500,000 slides, many of which have yet to be processed. Beyond assuring that his work will continue to appear in scholarly journals, the popular press and media, this new archive affords THNOC the opportunity to publish Smith’s work with the aesthetic standards largely absent from his published books. For the last several years, as the neurological illness overtook him, Mike Smith was mute, literally unable to speak. For a man of such drive and creative productivity, the inability to articulate words must have been an enormous sorrow, an ineffable frustration. With a gallantry borne of love, Karen made a point of taking him to functions where friends and colleagues could sit and visit with him; but one-way conversations are never easy. One THE ENDURING PERFORMANCE OF Al Green at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 1983 32 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2008-09

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 Contents Friends Editor's Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Prospect.1 New Orleans The Historic New Orleans Collection The Enduring Performance of Michael P. Smith Jazz Notes Louisiana Foodways Birds of a Feather: Windfowl Carvings in Southeast Louisiana Louisiana Association of Museums Louisiana Architecture O. Winston Link in Louisiana The Ogden Museum of Southern Art The Colfax Massacre Louisiana State Museum Unlocking the History of Greek Key Architecture Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

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