“Gatah-base” #1: “Beyonce”
I never really intended to make alligators. What I wanted to do was make ONE white alligator. I was listening to the song “Formation” off the album Lemonade on repeat in 2016 and there is a line from that song that mentions albino alligators and I creatively latched on to it as a means to make a folk art tribute to Beyonce. She was all about New Orleans at the time, and the entire aesthetic of Louisiana as sort of a primitive, mystic, dystopia was in abundance. It was a few years after Beast of the Southern Wild and right in the middle of True Detective Season 1 and Bey featured a lot of Southern Gothic imagery in the digital accompaniment to Lemonade. I thought a white alligator might be the best way to contribute to this artistic movement.
Except everyone who saw it wanted a green one. So, never one to disappoint my muse of industry, I made a promise to myself to create a green one once this white one sold, which it did within a few days of us opening the doors of Chartres and Dumaine. “Beyonce,” the white gator will always be the first piece of art sold at 901 Chartres. She paid our first month’s rent. Thanks Beyonce.
The man who bought it had been bugging me to make alligators for years but my muse of inspiration (who always has the final say) blew him off. So, when he walked by and saw “Bey” he bought her after a little negotiation. I wanted one price and he wanted a lower one which I agreed to. He wished it was green but I talked him into the white. Later, when I made a green one he wanted to trade them out but I would only do so if he matched my original price which he never did. “Beyonce” is now displayed at The Great New Orleans Alligator Museum on Magazine street which has become a bit of a curiosity to locals over the years because it has never opened. And yall, I have been inside and it is indeed cool as hell in there. When it does open, go in there and see a true museum quality artifact, the fist gator I ever sold, the first piece ever sold out of Deurty Boys Gallery, and a tribute to Beyonce Knowles.
