Andrew LaMar Hopkins, Self Portrait of the Artist as Désirée, 2019
Artforum
Andrew LaMar Hopkins: Venus Over Manhattanan
Maximalist splendor was in full effect across the thirty-two paintings in Andrew LaMar Hopkins’s solo exhibition here, “Créolité".
By Charity Coleman
Despite Hopkins’s historicism, there is an insistence upon imagination rather than exactitude—period details are always embellished in the artist’s distinctive style. Take his Self Portrait of the Artist as Désirée, 2019, a beguiling portrayal of his glamorous female persona.
Créolité: Andrew LaMar Hopkins
Curated by Alison M. Gingeras
October 7 - November 6, 2020
On October 7, 2020, Venus Over Manhattan will inaugurate its new gallery space at 120 East 65th Street by opening an exhibition of new paintings by Andrew LaMar Hopkins, curated by Alison M. Gingeras. Entitled Créolité, the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York features more than fifteen works, including new portraits, miniatures, and the artist’s signature architectural tableaux, that all relate to the complexity of Creole identities and the antebellum history of the Gulf States in the American South.
Andrew LaMar Hopkins portrays the significant role Creoles played in the civic life of New Orleans. “Edmond Dédé Piano Recital” (2019) shows the freeborn Creole musician and composer in his elegant salon.
The New York Times
A Painter Resurrects Louisiana’s Vanished Creole Culture
Andrew LaMar Hopkins celebrates the rich contributions of 19th-Century New Orleans in his folk art style (and drag).
By Elizabeth Pochoda
NEW ORLEANS — Dressed as his alter ego, the modish matron Désirée Joséphine Duplantier, the artist Andrew LaMar Hopkins is a familiar presence on this city’s arts scene. His paintings, faux naïf renderings of 19th-century life in the city — particularly the vanished culture of New Orleans’s free Creoles of color — also keep good company.
Installation view of The Bed Chamber of Marie Catherine Laveau, in "Painting is Painting's Favorite Food," curated by Alison M. Gingeras, South Etna Montauk, 2020.
W Magazine
The Return of the IRL Gallery Show
Works by John Currin and Rachel Feinstein hang across the room from canvases by Andrew LaMar Hopkins, a self-taught artist from New Orleans who creates historical fantasies of free Creole people in the 19th century.
by Andrea Whittle
“They’re really beautiful paintings, but I also think it’s so interesting how he uses his identity as a Black, queer man living in New Orleans to revisit the past, and it’s a past that is certainly not spoken about in mainstream historical circles,” Gingeras said.
Read more
Portrait of Andrew LaMar Hopkins
Andrew LaMar Hopkins (b. 1977 in Mobile, AL) paints meticulous, lush, minute depictions of 19th-century interior scenes and architectural set pieces based on the histories of free Creole people in New Orleans, the city he has called home for over a decade. Growing up in Alabama, Hopkins was particularly fixated on the Southern Creole culture to which his family is linked, and which the Civil War largely erased; Hopkins can trace his lineage to a major Creole family, descended from Nicolas Baudin, a Frenchman who received a Louisiana land grant in 1710. Drawing from this history and his expertise as an antiquarian, Hopkins carefully researches the architecture, material culture, and daily life of Creole populations in Southern cities circa 1830. Hopkins’ more recent works are set in Savannah, Georgia, where he currently resides. The self-taught Hopkins' pictorial compositions visually recall the paintings of Clementine Hunter, Grandma Moses, and Horace Pippin. Rendering interiors and exteriors with exquisite detail, and depicting both free Creoles of color and white Creoles, Hopkins deconstructs and reimagines an idealized antebellum history of Southern port cities—often injecting overtly homosocial scenarios or obvert references to queer culture, that excavate the often repressed histories of LGBTQ people in the antebellum south. Likewise, these queer characters echo Hopkins own biography and his parallel practice as a drag queen: his alter ego, Désirée Joséphine Duplantier, is a retro grande dame from New Orleans.
NOLA.com discusses Andrew LaMar Hopkins's work and career
Andrew LaMar Hopkins work will enter the National Gallery of Art as a promised gift.
The Fowler welcomes painter Andrew LaMar Hopkins and photographer Fabiola Jean-Louis, two artists renowned for works that reclaim and reimagine Black histories that have been forgotten or silenced.
The city’s creative soul endures, from Bevolo’s lighting to Andrew Lamar Hopkins’s portraits
Maximalist splendor was in full effect across the thirty-two paintings in Andrew LaMar Hopkins’s solo exhibition here, “Créolité,” which was organized by art historian and curator Alison M. Gingeras.
In an unfinished painting, the artist Andrew LaMar Hopkins depicts an interracial couple in 1830s Alabama.
“My main focus is the free people of color because their voice has been forgotten.”
Andrew LaMar Hopkins at Venus Over Manhattan and the historical significance of "créolité"
Isn’t power a drag? Isn’t it a show, a performance replete with costumes and character roles and play-acted identities?
A self-taught artist, former antiques dealer, and history buff, Andrew LaMar Hopkins centers the often difficult-to-categorize nature of creole identity.
As early as age nine, painter Andrew LaMar Hopkins was busying himself at the library among books on architecture, interiors, and fashion.
The gallery show features new portraits, miniatures, and architectural tableaux, all related to the complexity of Creole identities and the antebellum history of the American South
Andrew LaMar Hopkins has his first solo New York show. ‘He paints the world through a rose-colored glass, but I like his power of positive thinking.’
Works by John Currin and Rachel Feinstein hang across the room from canvases by Andrew LaMar Hopkins, a self-taught artist from New Orleans who creates historical fantasies of free Creole people in the 19th century.
The Winter Show — an annual antique and art exhibition — is on view this week in New York City. Paintings by Andrew LaMar Hopkins, a self-taught folk artist based in New Orleans, are on display.
Andrew LaMar Hopkins celebrates the rich contributions of 19th-Century New Orleans in his folk art style (and drag).
