A Colorful World of Louisiana Art, Her Way and His Way

With thick strokes of red, green, yellow, and blue paint, the artist Clementine Hunter shared scenes from her rural Louisiana world in the early 1900s: women stirring boiling pots and hanging laundry to dry; sharecroppers shaking pecans from trees; big colorful zinnia bouquets bursting from clay jugs.

Against electric blue-sky backgrounds and with pops of goldenrod and fuchsia, the Mobile, Alabama–born, New Orleans–based artist Andrew Lamar Hopkins paints visions of free people of color, wealthy Creole families, and antique furniture—subjects that are also deeply a part of Southern history.

Now, for the first time, an exhibition in New Orleans pairs their work, with new pieces by Hopkins interpreting some of Hunter’s most famous subjects. Her Way, His Way: Andrew LaMar Hopkins in conversation with Clementine Hunter opens May 2 at Orleans Gallery at 603 Julia Street.

Alison M. Gingeras curated the exhibition, which includes Clementine Hunter pieces from gallery owner Cayman Clevenger’s collection. “This is a show Andrew has been working on since the gallery opened a year ago,” Clevenger says, adding that twelve Hunter pieces and fifteen Hopkins pieces will be on display (and most are for sale) including Hopkins’s portraits of himself and Hunter. Through his lens, her humble flower jugs get swapped out for fine French porcelain; her broad-stroked renderings of Melrose Plantation are reinterpreted through his eye for architectural details like roof tiles, corbels, and porch balusters. But both artists’ signature bright colors shine through in clouds, trees, and flowing dresses.

In the decades after Hunter’s death in 1988, a young Hopkins worked as a museum tour guide and at an antiques shop in New Orleans. As he began selling his paintings on the side, fans kept comparing the vibrancy of his work to Hunter’s. “Like Clementine’s, my stuff was naive, as a self-taught style is sometimes called,” Hopkins says. “And I thought, who is this woman using these bright colors, and I just dove down the rabbit hole of discovering how amazing she was.”

Hopkins learned that Hunter’s depictions of daily life in the Cane River region earned her the first solo show by an African American artist at the Delgado (now the New Orleans Museum of Art). “That was in the 1950s, a time when Black people couldn’t even go into City Park,” Hopkins says. “She might not have been able to attend her own show.”

Throughout his twenties and thirties, Hopkins immersed himself in the study of Creole history, with a particular focus on Louisiana’s wealthy and free people of color during the time of slavery.  He also began traveling to Europe for antique hunting trips, spending weeks in Paris. Through it all, he never stopped painting, developing both his eye and his skills. In 2020, Hopkins’s first solo show, Creolité, opened at Venus Over Manhattan in New York. In 2024 Garden & Gun placed Hopkins on the cover of its first arts issue, and inside the pages, Jessica B. Harris, one of Hopkins’s earliest and most prolific collectors, wrote a piece about the pair’s Champagne-fueled lunch in Paris.

At the time, Hopkins was living part-time in Savannah, Georgia, and visiting collectors in Charleston, South Carolina, regularly. Now working primarily back in New Orleans, he continues to travel. Just after Her Way, His Way opens, Hopkins and other artists from the Orleans Gallery will travel to Italy for an exhibition at the historic Palazzo Mora on the Grand Canal, running concurrent with the Venice Biennale (which is also celebrating New Orleans artists in a big way this year).

“I’m a poor black person from Mobile who got the opportunity to travel and educate myself, to work in museums and read books and grow,” Hopkins says. “But I know that I stand on the backs of greatness. To be paired with Clementine Hunter, and to take all the beauty that she brought and expand on it—that’s an honor.”