ARTIST STATEMENT
“The Women of Pirate’s Alley”—Behind St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans street artists compete for fence-space and sell original artwork to French Quarter tourists. It’s a grimy, grueling job; artists must wake at 3:00 AM and lug their work through dark, quiet streets, empty of everyone save drunk revelers staggering off of Bourbon. For three years, I worked as one such artist. On any given day, anywhere from 12 to 20 artists worked the alley — 90 to 95% of whom were men.
Most days, I was the only woman on the fence. So when another woman set up her canvases, we were drawn to one another. We were a creative sisterhood. We looked out for one another: hanging our canvases from black fence spikes, standing from sunrise to sunset, battling the humidity and fending off the bees from the jacoranda trees. We helped each other haggle a fair price for our prints and canvases from tourists who routinely under-valued a female artist’s work; we grabbed drinks and jukebox tunes at Molly’s at the Market; we fended off the Bourbon Street drunks and frat boys who confronted us as we hung our work, alone on the empty early-morning streets.
There was Ricky, who took tintype photographs. Elsa threaded abstract string art. Courtney photographed the street poets and buskers. We sweat. We hawked. We hustled. This series of portraits honors the women artists who braved and loved that fence, who lived their NOLA days in the pursuit of a creative life.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Laura Hawbaker is a writer and artist based out of Chicago by way of New Orleans, where she worked as a street artist at Pirate’s Alley and the Frenchmen Art Market. She has exhibited work in Chicago and New Orleans, including the Bridgeport Art Center, Hokin Gallery, New Orleans Holiday RAWk, Crescent City Brewhaus, and Eat NOLA. She served as the Artist-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago’s Aesthetics of Research and—most importantly!—as a member of the Red Shirt Rebellion for the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus.
© Laura Hawbaker