Créolité: Andrew LaMar Hopkins
Curated by Alison M. Gingeras
October 7 - November 6, 2020
Opening: Wednesday, October 7th, 2:00 - 6:00 pm

Venus Over Manhattan
120 East 65th Street
New York, NY 10065

(New York, NY) – 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.

Créolité will be on view at Venus through November 6th. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated publication featuring important archival images selected by Andrew LaMar Hopkins, an introductory essay by Alison M. Gingeras, and an extended conversation with the artist.

Echoing the ideas of the literary movement, Hopkins’ créolité celebrates the cultural mixing of European, African, and mixed race peoples’ lives and material cultures, and asserts his own pictorial universe based on the histories of Creoles living in the South. Hopkins paints meticulous and lush depictions of quotidian life in antebellum New Orleans, paying particular attention to the lives of people to whom his own personal history is linked. Born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1977, the artist traces his lineage to a major Creole family descended from Nicolas Baudin, a Frenchman who received a Louisiana land grant in 1710. Largely erased by the Civil War, and subsequently underrepresented in the official historical record of the South, the complex histories of Creole cultures along the Gulf Coast are Hopkins’ central subjects. Informed by rigorous research and personal experience, his paintings project a uniquely focused historical imagination. As Hopkins explains, “When I walk around the French Quarter of New Orleans, I'm inspired by looking at the beautiful architecture of a street scene with buildings from the early 19th century and I let my imagination run: ‘What would this block look like 200 years ago?’”

A self-taught artist, Hopkins' self-professed “Creole” paintings elicit comparisons to the work of Clementine Hunter, Grandma Moses, and Horace Pippin. Rendering scenes in exquisite detail, depicting both free Creoles of color and white Creoles, he deconstructs and reimagines an idealized antebellum history of Southern port cities, often injecting overtly homosocial scenarios or references to queer culture. While the occasional Creole dandy or erotic male nude might appear anachronistic in Hopkins’ period depictions, they excavate the often-repressed histories of LGBTQ people in the antebellum South. Likewise, his queer characters echo Hopkins’ own biography and his parallel practice as a drag queen. Hopkins’ alter ego, Désirée Joséphine Duplantier, is a retro grande dame from New Orleans, and the subject of one of the artist’s most riveting portraits on view at Venus.

Over the past months, Hopkins has established a studio in Savannah, Georgia, where he has completed a number of new works on view in Créolité at Venus. Among these, Tiffany Christ (2005-20) is an opulent rendering of a devotional icon embellished and amplified through Hopkins’ recollections of his own Catholic upbringing within the Creole tradition.