Probably two months ago or so, by way of one of my other projects (mlkblvd.wordpress.com), I became familiar with the work that Anthony DelRosario has been doing in documenting, preserving, and building some appreciation for the creations of a New Orleans artist named Lester Carey.
Carey’s work appears on buildings, but he is not a “street artist” in the sense that that term has become popular: He paints commercial signage, sometimes on actual signs, sometimes on walls, but basically always at the behest (and in the service) of business owners, in New Orleans.
As I clicked through DelRosario’s massive Flickr set of Carey work, I was struck by how much of it I remembered, and in fact had photographed myself, in an incidental way, without ever really giving thought to who painted it. After a brief Flickr/email exchange, DelRosario shared with me a paper he wrote, “Corner Businesses in New Orleans and the Naïve Commercial Art of Lester Carey.” He also gave me permission to summarize here some of what’s in that paper.
Post-Katrina, DelRosario was spending a lot of time biking around New Orleans, and was introduced to Flickr by a friend named Christopher Kirsch. He started varying his bike route: “My new muse of capturing the unfortunate sights of the flooded neighborhoods led me to places that I never would have ridden my bicycle before the storm.” Among other things, he started to notice commercial signage, often on abandoned businesses. Many seemed to be the work of one person: “Fortunately, the artist signed his name on a few works,” including a mural in the Magnolia projects: Lester Carey.
As the title of his paper indicates, DelRosario explores the role of the corner store in New Orleans neighborhood culture, as well as its endangered status thanks to a variety of economic and social forces. However, I’m not going to deal with that here. The point that relates to this post is that corner stores often have hand-painted signs. Who paints them? Guys like Lester Carey, often. And you have to be paying a lot of attention to pick up on the fact that there’s a single artist involved in making a mark of sorts all over a city. “The signs of Lester almost hide in plain sight,” DelRosario writes. “Unless one is consciously on the lookout for his works or interesting signage in general, one would naturally be unaware of these signs.”
In February 2008, DelRosario began looking for Carey himself. He asked the owners of businesses that sported Carey’s work — an auto repair shop on South Miro, a corner store in Central City, and so on. Eventually he asked a guy sitting outside a tire shop on Felicity and Clara. “To my astonishment,” DelRosario writes, “he told me that Lester was probably just down the block at the Keller Market.” And indeed, there he found a man sitting by “a milk crate of what looked like art supplies,” who turned out to be Carey himself. The painter took DelRosario (and Kirsch) on a two-hour walking tour of Central City, pointing out his works here and there.
Carey, a native New Orleanian, apparently got a degree in commercial art from Delgado, and then spent the better part of 15 years in the military or the reserves. He started the sign-painting work in 1982, and one of the first stores he painted, it seems, was the Project Food Store on MLK. (When I lived in New Orleans, I was somewhat obsessed with the Project Food Store.) In addition to painting signage all over town, he worked for a while for an “environmental non-profit,” called the Green Project, DelRosario writes.
Carey spent a few months in San Antonio after Katrina, and although he got back to New Orleans, he had nowhere to live. “Since his return he has been mainly living on the streets making money by recycling aluminum cans cans and other metal.” He still finds commercial painting gigs as well — “occasionally.”
Having documented quite a bit of Carey’s work, DelRosario is in a position to analyze it stylisticallly. He notes the “triangle meat po-boy” as a recurring visual motif, possibly Carey’s “defining icon.” He also examines Cary’s block-lettering style, and its unique quirks. It’s pretty clear that DelRosario has take a very personal interest in Carey, helping out with art supplies and a few bucks when he can — and starting another Flickr pool, Society to Preserve The Art of Lester Carey. (As New Orleans is reconfired in the post-Katrina era, a lot of the buildings Carey painted on are being painted over or demolished.) Carey himself is living a “rough life,” DelRosario notes, and commercial sign painting is “a dying trade.” It certainly seems a worthy cause to bring attention to the man and his work — he’s left a mark on New Orleans, literally, and deserves some recognition. If you’ve lived in New Orleans in the past 10 or 15 years, I think you’ll recognize at least some of his creations.
As noted above, Carey isn’t a “street artist” in the sense of being a tagger (“bomber”), or a even a graf-style piecer, of the sort that is celebrated on trend blogs or courted by corporate marketers. But he’s certainly as “authentic” — a word those folks tend to be obsessed with — as it gets. And I was amused by his answer to one of DelRosario’s questions that made me think of the street-art context: Graf guys are always going on about being “all city” and so on, meaning their work is everywhere in town, or (in the old days) on every subway line. The question DelRosario asked was which neighborhoods featured Carey’s work.
Carey’s proud reply: “I’m citywide.”
Hey Rob, this is turning into one of the Top 5 Coolest and Most Interesting Blogs I have ever seen.
I did this (sorta) with “Since I Fell For You” –only at a fraction of the fractionating so so to speak. It started after I heard about the 10th version of that Classic.
Needless to say, we’ve hung you onto today’s Ladder and of course our list of Stitch’hikas.
Thanks youz,
Editilla~New Orleans Ladder
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[…] The story of a New Orleans sign-painter: Artist Lester Carey – Carey’s work appears on buildings, but he is not a “street artist” in the sense that that term has become popular: He paints commercial signage, sometimes on actual signs, sometimes on walls, but basically always at the behest (and in … Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. « Commercial sign […]
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You just gave me one of those moments where you had to stop for a bit and realize that I have been blindly driving past these wall art wonders for how long… I’ve just become aware of them again and now that I think about it I can definitely start recalling what I’m SURE is some of Casey’s work. It really is like he says, city-wide.
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