In his latest work that recently closed at the Ogden museum, Ecuador-born artist Jose Torres Tama explored the lives and times of a group of pre–20th century New Orleanians. Titled "New Orleans Free People of Color & Their Legacy," Torres Tama visually recreated a group of people of great achievements but scant recognition. Using expressionistic colors and heavily textured paper, Torres Tama imbued their portraits with perspective, emotion, and gravitas. He furrowed their brows so we could see them ponder. He turned their heads upward so we saw their hope. His brush strokes captured their pride, uprightness, tiredness and defiance.

The exhibit on the fifth floor gallery of the Ogden Museum appeared as an assembly of selected members of the gens de coleur libres, or free people of color. The exhibit included male and female educators, authors, philanthropists, musical prodigies, entrepreneurs and other contributors to the arts, science and politics. Locked by law into a marginal existence between slavery and freedom, they were anomalies in a society rooted in Black, White, master and slave. Still, their achievements belied the doctrine of racial supremacy. After the Civil War, many set aside their personal goals in pursuit of the American promise of equality for all.

“I was looking for individuals who were actively involved as artists, musicians, cultural and political contributors, writers and activists,” Torres Tama says.

Examining the portraits provided insight into their world of the 1800’s. In one painting, entrepreneur Rose Nicaud sold coffee from an antique pot to a passerby on the streets of old New Orleans. In two portraits that featured Marie Laveau, the city’s renowned Voodoo priestess wore the tignon – a headpiece enforced by the authorities to denote caste. In another rendering, author and newspaper editor Rodolphe Desdunes appeared to worry about the future and the whittling away of the civil liberties gained during Reconstruction.

Torres Tama’s fiery palette added mood to his source material. He carefully studied 19th century photographs, written descriptions, and old drawings to construct the images of selected individuals. Using pastels, he transformed flat black-and-white photographs into colorful images and gave the subjects a renewed life and emotional strength. His layering of different colors added dimension and depth to their character and put blood in their veins.

For context, he added artifacts from their lives. Thus, Marie Laveau’s portrait included candles and the scrawls of “X”’s that are elements from her actual tomb in St. Louis Cemetery Number 1. The Rose Nicaud image contained broken chains that symbolized her perseverance. Above philanthropist Thomy Lafon’s head were the words “le code noir” – the Black Codes that narrowed his position in society. Each head-shot was framed with a reddish-orange aura that depicted passion and dynamism. The outer border of the images presented a headstone which at once offered a symbolic memorial to their passing, recognition of their legacies, and a prayer for their souls. Many free people of color are buried in the three St. Louis Cemeteries.

Born in Ecuador in the then gritty coastal city Guayaquil, Torres Tama’s and his family left that small South American country when he was seven years old and settled in the New York/New Jersey area. In 1984, he moved to New Orleans which he now considers his spiritual home. Here, he entertained visitors and residents with his performance art in Washington Artillery Park across from Jackson Square, in the shadow of St. Louis Cathedral, and a few steps away from the marker that denotes the founding of the city. As a resident of the Faubourg Marigny in downtown New Orleans, he became aware of the strong influences of free people of color as brokers, builders, mathematicians, musicians, religious figures and activists in this historic district. Today, a plaque on Elysian Fields across from Washington Square and markers on a number of the homes recognize their presence. According to Architecture in New Orleans, the Creole Faubourgs, 70 percent of the properties in Faubourg Marigny and 80 percent of the properties in Faubourg Treme were owned by free people of color at one time or another. As a mixture of Spanish, native Quichua, and German Torres Tama found an affinity with the free people of color, many of whom were also racially mixed.

“I lived catty-corner to the house of Charles Laveau, Marie’s father, at 1427 Dauphine Street for 17 years," the artist says. "Who knows if she ever traversed through that house, dated to have been built circa 1860-70’s?”

In 2006, Torres Tama engaged students at the Bishop Perry Middle School in Faubourg Marigny with a three-week art performance project as part of the Ogden’s community and outreach program. Students Louis Johnson and Curtis Marks created renderings of Thomy Lafon and Rose Nicaud. Torres Tama formed a collage from their drawings entitled Ode to the Free People of Color and the Marie Couvent School which was also featured in the exhibit.

“The Marie Couvent piece is the only one that is a pure creative leap for me as it is a composite from my head based on descriptions of her…and using an old painting attributed [as] an unknown free woman of color,” Torres Tama says.

The compelling and epochal story of Marie Couvent perhaps best represented the complexity and depth of New Orleans free people of color. The only native of Africa in the exhibit, she was taken as a slave to St. Domingue (Haiti) at the tender age of seven in the mid 1700’s. She later arrived in New Orleans and married a New Orleans freeman named Bernard Couvent who was a builder in the city. She died at her home on Barracks Street in 1837. After a St. Louis Cathedral funeral, she took her final rest in the tomb that housed Bernard Couvent in Saint Louis Cemetery #2, then a 14-year-old Archdiocesan grave yard just outside the city proper. The inscription on her tomb reads “ici repose M. BERNARD COUVENT natif d’Afrique”.

Though parentless as a child, childless as a woman, and unable to read or write, she became a patron for orphans and literacy. An African woman’s desire to establish a school for people with African ancestry in the ante-bellum south seemed unthinkably radical. Still, her last will and testament proffered such an institute at Dauphine and Touro for the “colored orphans of the Faubourg Marigny.” Throughout its history under various names such as the Catholic School for Indigent Orphans, Couvent Institute, Holy Redeemer, and Bishop Perry Middle School, the corner of Touro and Dauphine in Faubourg Marigny has educated children of African descent since 1848. Currently, it is the site of the St. Gerard Majella Alternative School.

In her portrait, her eyes revealed an emptiness signifying those lost years as a seven-year old being taken into bondage never to see her home or parents again. The cross around her neck reflected her piety, her slumped shoulders captured her diminutiveness, and her wrinkled face conveyed a tired but fruitful life. She wore a red and white tignon – humble in comparison to the fierceness and ostentation of the Marie Laveau image.

Another insightful figure in the exhibit was Arnold Bertonneau – a free person of color of powerful words. After the outbreak of the Civil War, his regiment joined the Union army as reinforcements and Bertonneau became active in the movement to expand suffrage for people of color. In response to restrictions on their citizenship rights, in 1864 Bertonneau and others organized a petition drive in favor of voting rights for free people of color that was delivered to Abraham Lincoln and the United States Congress.
In an 1864 speech in Massachusetts, he delivered a powerful speech entitled “Every Man should Stand Equal Before the Law”.

“In order to make our state blossom and bloom as the rose, the character of the whole people must be changed. As slavery is abolished, with it must vanish every vestige of oppression. The right to vote must be secured; the doors of our public schools must be opened, that our children, side by side, may study from the same books, and imbibe the same principles and precepts from the Book of Books, learn the great truth that God ‘created of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth’; so will caste, founded on prejudice against color, disappear.”

The exhibit also paid homage to other free people of color.

• Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez published L’Union and the New Orleans Tribune - the first daily newspaper published by African-Americans in the United States.

• C. C. Antoine served a term as Louisiana’s third and final Black Lieutenant Governor who rendered his pronouncements in as an associate editor of the Black Republican in the same time period.

• Rodolphe Desdunes became an editor of the Crusader newspaper in the 1890’s. . His 1911 book “Our People and Our History” explored the role of Creoles of Color in the building of New Orleans.

At the symposium, Torres Tama and his wife, classical singer Claudia Copeland, performed an ode to Edmond Dede. Dede was a violin prodigy and composer who was born in New Orleans on November 20, 1827. His parents were immigrants from the French West Indies. In his youth, Edmond studied music under a New Orleanian free person of color named Constatin Debergue. He supplemented his income working as a cigar maker.

As a conductor in Bourdeaux, France for 27 years, Dede composed numerous dances, songs and string quartets and was accepted as a full member of the French Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers. Dede died in 1901 in Paris. His works are available as part of the American Classics series.

Section 40 of the Louisiana Black Codes From the Journal of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Torres Tama’s work focused on individuals from this group through different eras and occupations as their dreams and tragedies intersected with the high and low points of American history. Even with proscriptions, the legacy of free people of color endured in military, scientific, musical, carpentry, sculpture and other settings. In New Orleans, free status in New Orleans was obtained by purchase by a relative or self, manumission by a parent or owner, or migration from other countries such as Martinique or Haiti that countenanced free Black populations. After the Haitian revolution of the 1790’s and the ceding of Louisiana to the United States in 1803, many settled in the New Orleans’ historic downtown districts.

Other free persons were offspring of White men and women of color whose children received inheritance and surnames. Then, there were slaves purchased by relatives who filed emancipation petitions on their behalf. Free persons of color were instrumental in the founding of St. Augustine Church in Treme, St. Mary’s Academy, and other institutions.

Despite an 80 percent literacy rate, under Louisiana’s caste system, free people of color could not vote, establish organizations without permission or patronize the city stores or restaurants. They appeared on legal documents as gens de coleur libres. The saga of free people of color in Louisiana has taken them from the heights of achievement to the despair of persecution. In the years before the Civil War, one newspaper called for their expulsion. In 1890, despite all evidence to the contrary, an anti-interracial marriage article in a local newspaper stated that “the negro type occupies the lowest position, physically, mentally, and morally”, and has never “produced a man of science, a poet or an artist”.

“I made a natural creative decision that these individuals needed to be rendered in expressionistic colors to … bring them alive and give their portraits emotional strength,” Torres Tama says.

His effort is part of a revival of remembrance and recognition of the role of free people of color since the 1960’s. In 1973, Sister Dorothea Olga McCants published a translation of Rodolphe Desdunes’ Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire that provided an English account of his 1911 book. In "The Free People of Color of New Orleans: an Introduction," writer Mary Gehman further explored their world.

Torres’ work was also influenced by works by Dr. Laura Rouzan of Dillard University that focused on Dr. Charles Roudanez – the doctor/activist who was a towering figure in New Orleans during Reconstruction. Caryn Cosse Bell’s Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana examined their activist role. Archivist Lester Sullivan of Xavier University unearthed numerous articles from stacks in Xavier University’s library that shed new light on the New Orleans-based Crusader newspaper and its editor Rodolphe Desdunes.

The American Classics released "Edmond Dédé: Orchestral Works," a compact disc retrospective of a New Orleans free person of color who prospered to become the conductor of the orchestra at Bordeaux, France. Sybil Kein’s "Creole" offered a series of essays that deeply explored the role of free people of color in the making of Louisiana. Bliss Broyard’s "One Drop" told her story of a family’s quagmire of caste.

With the growing interest in genealogy, Torres Tama provided a visual context for family researchers. Organizations such as La Creole Research Association assisted interested individuals in navigating the available material in the city’s archives. Likewise, Greg Osborn at the Louisiana Division of the public library steered researchers through the many available tools for examining the lives of their ancestors. La Creole researcher and St. Augustine High School student Jari Honora retrieved information on Rodolphe Desdune’s son Daniel who left Louisiana to teach music at Fr. Flanagan’s Boys Town in Nebraska.

Standing in the gallery surrounded by Torres Tama’s assemblage provided a look into their lives of centuries past. Despite their diversity in different eras and circumstances, their faces chanted in unison. “Remember,” they seemed to say. Their eyes looked back at us.