Artist profile: Conjuring a Creole Past
Creole Love by Andrew LaMar Hopkins (1977–), 2021. All photographs courtesy of the artist. By any standard, the self-taught forty-four-yearold painter Andrew LaMar Hopkins has had a pretty good two-year run. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed him “a rising star” in the art world. The New Orleans Times-Picayune went one better, saying Hopkins was on “a rocket ride to stardom.” When all thirty-eight of his paintings in a solo exhibition were snapped up in three days, Galerie magazine described the sale as “a buying frenzy.” The New York Times published a lengthy profile, and New York magazine, Architectural Digest, Interior Design, Artforum, W, and NPR each trained a spotlight on him in one form or another. Hopkins’s elegant faux-naïf renderings of Creole life in nineteenth-century New Orleans have been the impetus for this sudden leap to prominence. Only a few years ago, his paintings fetched three hundred dollars apiece. Now they routinely command ten to twenty thousand. Last year, one painting sold for sixty thousand dollars. To top it off, the National Gallery of Art announced last year that it had accepted one of Hopkins’s portraits for its permanent collection. Creole Elegance by Hopkins, 2021. What’s going on here? Broadly speaking, while making a name for himself as an artist, Hopkins has single-handedly breathed new life into an all-but-forgotten corner of American art and culture—that of the free Creoles of color in antebellum New Orleans and its environs. “That’s my niche,” Hopkins says, adding with a smile: “Not a lot of artists are working in it right now.” As to the precise definition of the term “Creole,” there has always been some confusion, which is understandable, since the meaning has changed over time. Essentially, Creole can be said to include any Black, white, or mixed-race person whose lineage traces
