ExhibitBE: Fearless graffiti masterpiece 5 years later

NEW ORLEANS – ExhibitBE came to a triumphant close on Martin Luther King Day, five years ago. Some of the original murals that crowded the walls of the derelict five-story DeGaulle Manor apartment building are still intact, though some have been tagged over or altered. The building itself is still a sprawling unoccupied shell, sprouting weeds and strewn with trash, old mattresses and other debris. The hazardous site is no longer open to the public.

ExhibitBE (sometimes spelled Exhibit Be) remains the most important New Orleans artwork of the 21st-century. Brandon ‘bmike’ Odums, the 29-year-old mastermind behind the project, billed it as the largest street art exhibit in the American South. But it came to represent much more.

The random collision of dozens of enormous artworks by area graffiti writers and street artists transformed the forlorn architecture into a collaborative surrealist masterpiece that no museum could contain. More importantly, Odums’ portraits of civil rights heroes from Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King Jr. to Muhammad Ali, made it a Crescent City icon of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Though the DeGaulle Manor had closed before Hurricane Katrina, the ruined building tapped into the post-flood gestalt perfectly. It symbolized the displacement of much of the population, particularly of lower-income African Americans.

During the creation of ExhibitBE, Odums said that it was very characteristic of New Orleans to change a blighted environment into something beautiful.

“Whether it’s the food, the music, the jazz funerals, we find ways to make something out of nothing. That’s true to street art. That’s true to graffiti in general. That’s true to hip hop in general, but I feel like New Orleans has always done it with a certain effortlessness.”

When ExhibitBE was created in 2014, thousands made a pilgrimage to the desolate site to see the wild, monumental artwork and acknowledge all it represented. Erykah Badu sang at the official closing of the show. Odums, a NOCCA grad and former UNO student, instantly became a New Orleans star.

As he planned the big project, Odums said he’d been advised that it would be impossible to get the “lone wolves” of the graffiti scene to co-operate. Happily, the paint-spattered renegades must have recognized that the moment had come to prove once and for all that graffiti was the most important contemporary visual art form.

“I’m happy for what it represented; what can happen when the community and creative people come together,” said Odums in a recent telephone conversation.

Odums said he’s not surprised that some of the original art has been painted over.

“That’s the natural organic lifespan of street art,” he said. “That’s to be expected.”

One of the most striking images in all of ExhibitBE was Odums’ haunting 50-foot painting of a teenage murder victim. In recent years, someone has replaced the realistic eyes in Odums’ mega-portrait with cartoonishly doleful eyes that turn what was poignant into something maudlin. Odums said he thinks the face may have been altered for a movie shoot.

His magnificent suite of portraits in the apartment complex’s former rec room remain untouched.

The fate of the deteriorating apartment complex, which is owned by Granaio LLC, according to the New Orleans Assessor’s office website, is unknown. Odums has moved on to other projects, such as his current solo exhibit at the Newcomb Art Museum on the Tulane University campus.

Looking back on ExhibitBE after five years, he was a bit rueful.

“If anyone can go back to their younger self, they’d see they had a lot more courage. There was a lot of fearlessness in that moment.”