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ACQUISITIONS
The Historic New Orleans Collection encourages research in the Williams Research Center at 410 Chartres Street from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday (except holidays). Cataloged materials available to researchers include books, manuscripts, paintings, prints, drawings, maps, photographs, and artifacts about the history and culture of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Gulf South. Each year The Collection adds thousands of items to its holdings. Though only selected gifts are mentioned here, the importance of all gifts cannot be overstated. Prospective donors are invited to contact the authors of the acquisitions columns.
Curatorial
For the fourth quarter of 2012 (October— December), 35 groups consisting of approximately 520 items were accessioned.
I Through a generous contribution from Mr. and Mrs. R. Hunter Pierson Jr., The Collection acquired a series of 28 costume drawings in various color media by New Orleans artist Dawn DeDeaux. They depict the principal characters in a play based on John Kennedy Toole’s New Orleans-set novel A Confederacy of Dunces, which was published by LSU Press in 1980 and awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. While the play has never been produced, costumes based on these darkly humorous drawings were part of the critically acclaimed, surrealistic, nighttime exhibition The Goddess Fortuna and Her Dunces in an Effort to Make Sense of It All. The installation, part of Prospect.2—the 2011-12 incarnation of the Prospect New Orleans international art festival—was hosted in The Historic New Orleans Collection’s Brulatour Courtyard.
Among those depicted in the colorful drawings are the eccentric central character Ignatius J. Reilly, sporting his
trademark hunting cap, and his widowed mother, Irene Reilly, who wears a typical early-1960s dress, knee-length coat, and pillbox hat in Irene Shops at D. H. Holmes. Irene’s hapless romantic interest, Claude Robichaux, wears a rumpled suit in Claude Looking for Love, while her good friend Santa Battaglia dons Santas Oyster Shucking Dress—With Matching Slippers. Darlene, a stripper at the Night of Joy, a low-class French Quarter establishment, is pictured in a hoop and bustier as Darlenes Pleasure Machine-, in Darlene as “Puppet Dancer” in Ring and String Dress, she wears a hoop skirt with rings that attach to marionette strings. The owner of the club, Lana Lee, who also runs a pornography ring, is shown in a gold lame jumpsuit in Material Skin Suit “Goldfnger, ” while Burma Jones, the club’s janitor, is depicted as The “No Fool” Court Jester. Gus Levy, who owns the pants factory where Ignatius works, is ironically attired in Action Wear For Action Man (or The Joe Nammoth [j/c] Sport Look). Miss Trixie, Levy’s elderly, senile secretary is seen in The Standing, Sleeping, Miss Trixie Work Coat . . . With White Socks. In another drawing, The “/ Am Beautiful” Miss Trixie Dress, her bow-festooned red dress and bouffant hairdo capture the aging secretary’s utter indifference at being made over (see image above). The collection
also includes several studies of dunces wearing conical cages over their heads. (2012.0388.1-.28)
I From Mr. and Mrs. F. Macnaughton Ball Jr. comes a photograph providing a view of the 5900 block of Hurst Street in Uptown New Orleans (see image below). The image was taken sometime during the winter of 1893-94 by an anonymous photographer. It looks toward St. Charles Avenue from the river side of Hurst, along which stands a row of five matching houses built in 1891. (Three remain standing today.) These houses are not visible in the photograph, but the foreground captures an ironwork fence, no longer extant,
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The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly 17