The CRAZY BIG, INSANELY COLORFUL, COMPLETELY FAR-OUT VISION of JAMES MICHALOPOULOS
A STAIRCASE HAS GONE MISSING— it was supposed to be over here, says the artist James Michalopoulos. He had marked the location on the warehouse floor the other day, and those marks had been erased or moved or something happened, and so he scouts around. “Oh, here it is,” he finally says, tapping a scuffed line with his toe where the stairs and their ziggurat landings will soon arise. He demonstrates with his hands how the steps will make their way to the second floor with an erratic determination, making a “pfft…pfft” sound at each pivot of the future staircase. It seems unduly complicated and taxes my imagination.
Nor does his description help us get to the second floor, so he and I scramble up a ladder, rung by rung. From the walkway above, we scan a sort of two-story indoor village of artist studios that Michalopoulos has been constructing within what he calls “the big hangar,” just one part of a sprawling 110,000-square-foot complex he acquired a few years ago. Sited next to a clamorous rail switching yard and a roadway overpass in a charmless section of New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward, the building was originally a brewery and then stored paper before it was occupied by artists.
We wander catwalks and narrow walkways that connect the soon-to-be second-floor studios. Walls vector this way and that; windows have been installed without benefit of a level. Obtuse angles abound. It looks like Pee-wee’s office park, assuming that Pee-wee eventually grew up.
Over the past thirty-five-plus years, Michalopoulos’s moody, heavily textured New Orleans streetscapes have made him one of the most recognizable artists in the city. In his fevered imaginings, buildings seem to dance and sway, the upper floors appearing to head in one direction. His paintings can forever change the way you see the city, and as such, his work has become almost inescapable—he’s been commissioned to paint six Jazz Fest posters, which is the New Orleans equivalent of getting a bird painting on a duck stamp. Notables such as the actors John Goodman and Sharon Stone have acquired his paintings, as have many corporate collections. In 2017, his work was the subject of a wide-ranging retrospective at the city’s Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
