(That ruling, though, didn’t convince him to change his relationship with his partner of 14 years. Fein noted, at a time much changed by the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage. That show featured some of the same wood panel images he uses in the exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, which comes, Mr. 1, the contemporary art biennial in New Orleans that opened in 2008. He needed furniture and, realizing the streets were littered with wood from the flood’s flotsam, he started building wooden signs with imagery screen-printed on top.īlending woodworking and historical retelling, he went deep into the history of the UpStairs Lounge fire, putting together an art show for Prospect. A few months later, Hurricane Katrina upended his plans. He moved to New Orleans in 2005 and enrolled in college, pre-med. Fein, 50, who calls himself an accidental artist, wanted to change that. Fieseler points out that “the UpStairs Lounge fire had not been a turning point for homosexual rights in America.” It was quickly and largely forgotten. Unlike the rallying cry for labor rights after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire or for civil rights after the Birmingham church bombing, Mr. The 32 deaths were front-page news of The Times-Picayune for only two days. At the time, the governor of Louisiana did not immediately comment on the tragedy, nor did the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans. Several bodies were never identified, a fact that some people attribute to families being unable to accept the secret lives that the fire had laid bare. Fire trucks arrived within minutes, but it was too late. The bell for the bar was reportedly rung repeatedly when the bartender asked a regular patron to open the door and see who was there, flames engulfed the club’s interior. The fire department reported finding a can of lighter fluid at the base of the stairs.
Sexy ’70s tunes play from a speaker above. Fein calls “a fantasia of gay culture” - images of a chest-baring Burt Reynolds and the swimmer Mark Spitz that appeared in the original club are there, as wood cutouts, as are other bawdy pictures from the time. Through a glowing red doorway, visitors enter a room with tacky red wallpaper that recalls the bar’s original snapshots of victims and black-and-white prints of grisly newspaper photographs line the walls. The UpStairs Lounge was, by most accounts, a seedy dive, and the show’s power derives from its ability to place the viewer inside that world. It was there that New Orleans’s new mayor, LaToya Cantrell, announced the creation of an L.G.B.T. (As a point of contrast: His father, Moon Landrieu, the mayor at the time of the blaze, did not cancel his vacation.) And this year, on the attack’s 45th anniversary, a memorial service was held for the victims. In 2013, the city’s then-mayor, Mitch Landrieu, declared a day of mourning for the victims. Last month the Historic New Orleans Collection held a panel discussion on the incident, which some of the fire’s survivors attended. Over the past few years, two books, two documentaries and even a musical came out about the fire. Fein’s carnage-filled images and ribald tributes to gay life in the early 1970s.Ī renewed interest in the UpStairs Lounge tragedy has been in the air. And in connecting rooms there is a video footage of funeral processions, which references the Vietnamese diaspora in southern Louisiana, and Mr. Kasimu Harris’s photographs of young black students. In its two-story atrium, below the permanent collection’s European classical paintings, are L. It is part of a new show at the New Orleans Museum of Art, “ Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories,” a collection of seven projects that, through September, puts the city’s marginalized communities at the forefront of this institution. Now an exhibition by the artist Skylar Fein is shedding light on this macabre and overlooked episode. As time passed, little attention was paid to the victims. (The Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., which killed 49 people, took that grim title in 2016.) Long considered arson, the case remains unsolved the prime suspect, who was never charged, committed suicide a year after the fire.
Thirty-one men and one woman died in what was then the largest mass killing of gay people in American history. NEW ORLEANS - In 1973, the UpStairs Lounge, a bar in the French Quarter here, went up in flames one hot summer night.