Just as the recently renovated Renaissance Arts Hotel makes a strong statement about the relevance of preservation in New Orleans so too does Luis Cruz Azaceta’s mesmerizing Yellow Wall 2 that hangs in the lobby. Composed of 565 photos taken on and around Tchoupitoulas Street, the montage reveals the fortitude that is demanded in order to preserve New Orleans’ heritage.
Luis Azaceta, a warm and rational Cuban exile, doesn’t strike you as a man who would ever hold a gun or a knife to his own head or the head of anyone else. But he has done this. He tells the very funny story of posing before a mirror in his New York apartment with a gun and then a knife held to his head to get the right image for a painting dealing with urban violence. A woman in a nearby apartment in his Italian neighborhood observed him through the window and sent someone rushing to the rescue. It’s an amusing tale, but behind the humor is the ever-present specter of loss, chaos and alienation that has defined his work for the last thirty years.