Hey Blake,
Your recent column on the Harahan industrial area got me thinking
about an old building in the area with a huge mural painted on one
side. It looks like a depiction of an early New Orleans street scene.
It is now all but impossible to see it due to surrounding newer
buildings. The plant in which the building is located, situated at the
end of Sam's Avenue, is long abandoned. This is such a beautiful work
of art. Do you know who did it or who commissioned it?
Robert Smith
Dear Robert,
The seven-story work of art you so admire was created by
Robert Dafford in late 1993. It is a trompe l'oeil of the New
Orleans French Market around the turn of the century.
The mural was commissioned by Sal Peraino, the owner of
Dixie Produce Company. He had intended to simply repaint the company's
grain silo in Jefferson's Elmwood Industrial Park, but after seeing
Dafford's work in New Orleans, he opted for the mural.
The talented artist was born in 1951, and has been doing
murals for more than 30 years. He studied art at the University of
Louisiana in Lafayette and served three years as a naval illustrator
and draftsman aboard the USS Independence in the
Mediterranean.
Dafford's first public mural was a 20-foot rainbow trout
he painted in 1969 for a fish market. Since then he has painted more
than 250 murals around the world. One is a giant mural of a horse-drawn
coffee wagon at the corner of Girod and Magazine streets. This is the
corner where you can find the Crescent City Farmers Market every
Saturday morning. My favorite Dafford mural is the 150-foot-tall
clarinet painted on the side of a Holiday Inn hotel on Loyola Avenue.
This mural was dedicated in May 1996.
One of his most important works of art is the floodwall
murals created for communities in the Ohio Valley. These communities
— Paducah, Ky., Cincinnati and Portsmouth, Ohio — use art
and history to save old downtown areas. The project in Portsmouth has
been dubbed "2000 Years of History/2000 Feet of Art."
Located in St. Martinville's Acadian Memorial is a
wonderful Dafford mural titled "The Arrival of the Acadians in
Louisiana." It measures 12 feet-by-30 feet. Its figures represent
actual Acadian refugees who arrived in Louisiana from about 1764 to
1788 and settled in different parts of the state. Some models are
direct descendants of the figures they portray. This mural's twin is in
Nantes, France, also painted by Dafford, which depicts the departure of
Louisiana-bound Acadians from the port of Nantes in 1785.
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