Baby-Boom Daydreams: The Art of Douglas Bourgeois

by David S. Rubin

Although he was raised on a small farm in the rural southern Louisiana community of St. Amant, Douglas Bourgeois grew up at a time when living in a remote area did not necessarily mean isolation from the cultural trappings of the big city. Located in Ascension Parish, St. Amant is only a thirty-minute drive from Baton Rouge, the state capital, and less than two hours from New Orleans, a dominant cultural hub of the South. Like most post-World War II baby boomers, Bourgeois had ready access to comic books, popular magazines, television, movies, and music, all of which contributed to shaping the values and attitudes of American youth in the 1950s and 1960s. Rock ”n” roll was particularly significant in this respect. As the cultural historian Paul Friedlander has observed, “Rock music became a catalyst for teens to form their own group identity—a comradeship of those who felt good about, and identified with, the music.” In Bourgeois’s case, it provided a form of salvation, an escape from the pressures of religious studies at a private Catholic school. Ironically, much of the music he listened to also validated the sense of moral conscience that his education was nurturing. Ultimately, it would contribute greatly to defining his artistic identity.

The eldest of six children, Douglas Bourgeois was born in 1951 to Doyle (Pomp) Bourgeois, a barber and sign painter and Catherine Daigle Bourgeois. Living on fourteen acres of land, Douglas was assigned childhood chores that included mowing the lawn, trimming hedges, weeding, and growing vegetables. Religion was an integral part of his daily regimen. Although he attended public school for grades one and two, he was enrolled in St. Teresa of Avila Catholic School in nearby Gonzales for grades three through eight. Between the ages of nine and fourteen, he was an altar boy, serving at funeral masses and weddings. When he entered St. Joseph Cathedral Preparatory Seminary in Baton Rouge at age fourteen, Bourgeois had every intention of becoming a priest.

Aside from his religious training, Bourgeois’s childhood was fairly typical for the baby-boom era. His family regularly gathered around the television set to watch I Love Lucy, The Roy Rogers Show, The Lone Ranger, and Your Hit Parade. One of his favorite programs was The John Pela Show, a regional variant of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, which featured teenagers dancing to the latest hit records and live performances by many New Orleans acts. When the family TV broke around 1958, young Bourgeois entertained himself by reading comic books or watching comedies and epics at the movie theater in Gonzales.

Although the nuns at his grammar school may have been grooming Bourgeois to become a man of the cloth, they were also the first to recognize his artistic talent. Under their tutelage, he learned to use tempera paints, crayons, and colored pencils, and they frequently chose him to decorate bulletin boards for class projects, which usually involved religious subject matter. Because his family did not visit art museums, Bourgeois learned about Old Master art secondhand—for example, by seeing “dime-store” reproductions of Leonardo’s Last Supper, which were hanging in many Catholic homes. He also remembers admiring statuary and stained glass windows in churches and the painted murals of Dom Gregory Dewitt, an eccentric local priest. Bourgeois was introduced to modern art as he leafed through issues of Look and Life magazines in his father’s barbershop; it was in these periodicals that he first encountered reproductions of works by Joseph Cornell and Jackson Pollock.

The rigorous curriculum at St. Joseph Cathedral Preparatory Seminary was highly academic but included no art courses. Although students were required to follow a dress code and lights out was promptly at 10 P.M., Bourgeois and his classmates often wore “mod”-style clothes and sneaked transistor radios under their pillows at bedtime. The artist remembers being “sucked into pop culture” as he listened nightly to the music of the Beatles, the Kinks, the Association, Sonny and Cher, Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, and other hit makers of the mid-to-late 1960s.

Back home on the farm during summer vacations, Bourgeois made collages on plywood from magazine cutouts, a practice he continues today. As fascinated with popular culture as he was with religion, he struggled with the conflicts between his spiritual calling and his desire to be an everyday, ordinary teenager. By his third year at the seminary, the latter impulse prevailed, and in 1968 Bourgeois enrolled as a senior at a public high school in Gonzales. Later that academic year, he attended his first rock concert, which featured Credence Clearwater Revival just as the group was beginning to receive national attention.

Bourgeois entered college during the turbulent years of the Vietnam War. Fortunate enough to have won a high number in the draft lottery, he enrolled as an English major at Louisiana State University (LSU) in 1969, dropped out the following year, and returned in 1971 to pursue at last his ultimate desire—to become a painter. At LSU, he studied with the Louisiana painters Michael Crespo, Ed Pramuk, and Robert Warrens. Warrens, who was painting figurative satire at the time, set an important example for Bourgeois by validating the acceptability of nonacademic subject matter. Other influential instructors included two visiting professors from New York, Anthony Santuoso and Yvonne Thomas, both of whom excited Bourgeois about living the romantic life of an artist. Santuoso inspired him through his sheer passion, while Thomas impressed her student with stories about the art-world social scene and her friendships with Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol.

During his college years, Bourgeois experimented with various styles of figurative drawing, culling subjects mostly from the hippie culture of the day. Influenced by the sexually provocative movies of Federico Fellini, Ken Russell, and sexploitation filmmaker Russ Meyer, the artist also produced a series of watercolors depicting strippers, executed in a style reminiscent of the early-twentieth-century German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Following graduation in 1974, Bourgeois looked for mundane daytime jobs in Baton Rouge, assuming he would concentrate on art after hours. Unexpectedly, his first position turned out to be life altering. While working as a daytime janitor at a bar, he was held at gunpoint during an attempted robbery. As he pleaded for his life and “prayed like hell,” he managed to thwart the robbers, who fled the scene convinced that he didn’t have the combination to the safe. After giving notice that night, he moved to downtown Baton Rouge, where he worked as a file clerk for the state by day and made oil paintings by night. For entertainment, he continued to watch his favorite TV music programs, including American Bandstand and Soul Train, and listen to the latest records.

One evening, while listening to the 1973 album Peaches by the rhythm and blues legend Etta James, Bourgeois imagined the singer performing on Soul Train and was inspired to make what he believes to be his first painted tribute to a pop performer. In Little Etta (1974), James occupies the center of the painting and is shown wearing a tight evening gown, dangling earrings, and heavy makeup. She is totally engaged in her music and snaps her fingers rhythmically. Crammed into a contained space behind her, energetic African-American dancers move about in sexually suggestive positions—a holdover, perhaps, from the artist’s stripper watercolors of the previous year. A theatrical, decorative framing device also serves as a symbolic pantheon; filled with images of naked black male and female angels, hypodermic needles, and peaches, it refers to the hedonistic culture known simply as “sex, drugs, and rock ”n” roll,” as well as to James’s own history of drug addiction. Taking his cues from the design conventions of album covers and rock “n” roll posters, Bourgeois felt free to ignore traditions of rational picture space.

With Little Etta, Bourgeois planted fertile seeds, in terms of subject and style, for the mature work that would define his direction in the 1980s. At this early point in his career, however, he pursued a variety of subjects. He remembers, for instance, painting a tribute to the singer-songwriter Laura Nyro, a self-portrait, and portraits of movie stars. Ava with Burning Cheeks (1975), for example, is based on a photograph of Ava Gardner wearing lipstick at age thirteen. Although Bourgeois was not a devoted fan of Gardner, he found the photograph interesting because she exhibited such extraordinary maturity at so young an age. In his painting he exaggerated Gardner”s adult qualities by adding rouge to her cheeks, and he surrounded her with angels, as he had done with Etta James.

After a brief hospitalization in 1975 for a chronic back ailment, Bourgeois followed the lead of a close friend and moved to an apartment in New Orleans, just outside the French Quarter. Although he initially found employment in the display department of a department store in suburban Metairie, he soon gravitated toward the seductive nightlife of the Quarter, where he worked as a busboy and waiter and spent much of his leisure time immersed in the local party scene. Except for a respite in a quiet residential neighborhood in San Diego from July 1978 until February 1979, Bourgeois continued to revel in an unrestrained lifestyle until late 1980, when he confronted the limits of excess. Recognizing that he was jeopardizing his proficiency as a painter, he moved back home to St. Amant where he has lived and worked ever since.

During his French Quarter period, Bourgeois maintained a close friendship with George Febres, a New Orleans painter he had met when he was a student at LSU. In his capacity as a mentor, Febres continually encouraged his friend to paint and to exhibit, and in 1978, he invited Bourgeois and several dozen other artists to participate in a project that resulted in a 1982 exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, entitled My Cousin the Saint. In late 1977, Febres had traveled to Rome to attend the beatification of a distant cousin. On returning to New Orleans, he handed each artist a picture postcard of his cousin, Brother Michael, and suggested that each create an artwork about his cousin”s sainthood. In Bourgeois’s contribution, The Temptation of Brother Michael (1978), the saint dominates the center of the composition. Rendered in slight caricature, he is embraced by a halo of glowing light. In the lower foreground, Febres and members of his family appear as awestruck witnesses amid bearded male angels, while two female angels with fiery wings, one scantily clad and one nude, hover above. In scale, the witnesses are much smaller than the sainted figure, who looms over them as if projected on a movie screen. In what would become a signature device, Bourgeois neatly integrated secular elements, such as contemporary clothing and extreme hairstyles, with religious references—a pairing that suggests the conflicts he himself was experiencing as he tried to reconcile his Catholic roots with his 1970s pop-culture lifestyle. Similar iconography is evident in Blessed Virgin Appears to a Woman (1978), one of the artist”s first apparition paintings. In this genre, holy figures are shown as dreamlike visions before common lay people in everyday settings. The source for the virgin was an image from Bourgeois’s collection of holy cards, which he began gathering in the early 1970s; he copied the kitchen from a book on home decorating.

Early in his career, Bourgeois frequently found inspiration in his collection of pop-culture artifacts, which in the early 1970s also included vintage postcards, toys, children’s books, celebrity biographies, and high school yearbooks. A fascination with the latter gave impetus to his painting Twilight High Yearbook (1978), which portrays a page filled with head shots of students from the yearbook of a fictitious high school. An avid people watcher, Bourgeois has always been interested in faces and, as the son of a barber, with hairstyles, which he considers a form of self-expression. In inventing the student body for the painting, he chose hairstyles of the 1950s and 1960s, taking care to distinguish each student from the others. Parodying the stereotypical hoodlum teenagers from movies such as Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, he gave them satirical names, such as Bambi Stiletto. Philadelphia Johnson, and Chinchilla Melancon, and, in keeping with this tone, depicted the young men as tough and unshaven. More important, however, he provided a socially relevant subtext by dividing the group racially into half Caucasian and half African American, a ratio that could not have existed in the segregated South of the pre-civil rights era. For Bourgeois, African-American culture as reflected in popular music has always been something to cherish.

Over the years, Bourgeois’s musical tastes have been fairly eclectic, but African-American artists dominate his “top-ten” list, which includes James Brown, Missy Elliott, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gave, Al Green, Billie Holiday, Sly and the Family Stone, and Womack and Womack. At age five, Bourgeois first encountered a homogenized form of black music in Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.” Like many early rock ”n” roll hits, Presley’s 1956 version was a cover of a song originally recorded by a black rhythm-and-blues singer—in this case, by Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton in 1953. As Presley became increasingly popular, radio stations began playing singles by black singers such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and the New Orleans native Fats Domino. By the time Bourgeois was a teenager, black music was widely accepted within white middleclass culture, in the early 1960s, black women singers gained in status as members of such “girl groups” as the Shirelles, the Crystals, and the Ronettes.

By the early 1980s, Bourgeois was nearing his decision to return home to St. Amant. Around the same time, his paintings became nostalgically focused on the music he had so enjoyed growing up there. In one of the last paintings done prior to his move, he commemorated Martha and the Vandellas, the Motown girl group whose top-selling 1964 hit, “Dancing in the Street”, is a spirited anthem about worldwide celebration and unity. Based on a publicity photograph of the group performing for an all-white audience, Untitled (Martha and the Vandellas) (1980) blends the festive tone of Little Etta with the social awareness of Twilight High Yearbook. Although Bourgeois was fairly faithful to the source photograph in rendering the singers’ poses and clothing, he caricatured them as a stereotypical girl group, and he made significant alterations that call attention to the racial inequities that sparked the organized protests of the civil rights era. For example, he exaggerated their stylized hairdos and sophisticated clothing, which were trademark attributes of performers in the Motown stable. As a tactic of marketing the label’s black singers to white America. Motown founder Berry Gordy sent his female artists to a finishing-and-modeling school to learn the etiquette and beauty conventions of the white middle class. Motown’s girl groups, the most successful of which was the Supremes, appeared with straightened hair or wigs, wearing lavish gowns. In the painting, Bourgeois focuses on the incongruity between Martha and the Vandellas fabricated white image and its members” African-American heritage. Reflections of light on their dresses reveal that they are made from expensive, shimmering fabric, while a brown foreground camouflages the singers’ dark-skinned legs and causes their white shoes to stand out in sharp silhouette. A similar effect is noticeable in the contrast between their sparkling white teeth and their faces. In depicting the audience, Bourgeois departed entirely from the source photograph, inventing an integrated crowd of college-aged fans—the alumni, perhaps, of Twilight High School.

After Bourgeois left New Orleans, he began using his father’s former workshop as a studio. Now he had plenty of time to listen to records, read celebrity biographies, and make art stimulated by these pastimes. Inspired by a black-and-white photograph of Elvis Presley he had come across while reading a biography of the singer, Bourgeois painted Blue Christmas (1981). Titled after a song from Presley’s 1957 Christmas Album, the small painting is a romanticized fantasy about loneliness and longing during the holiday season. Other than the pose itself, which he copied from a photograph of Elvis asleep on a couch, Bourgeois invented everything in the painting and positioned the sleeping subject like a seductive odalisque on a lush bed of rippling, deep blue drapery folds. This pointed reference calls attention to the singer’s status as a sex symbol, as well as to the sensuous nature of his music and performance style. The generous use of the color blue is an obvious link to the song “Blue Christmas,” while the juxtaposition of guitars and Nembutal tablets in the curtain patterns alludes to the disparities between Presley’s public image and his ultimately fatal dependence on drugs.

Early in his career, Elvis was an electrifying performer whose gyrating movements, characterized by Paul Friedlander as an “energetic sensuality, caused television-network censors to prohibit camera shots of him below the waist. Bourgeois celebrated this extraordinary dynamism in Elvis and Dice Curtains (1981), a painting based on a black-and-white photograph he found at a flea market in which Presley appears onstage before a curtained backdrop, immersed in his music. Using a pictorial device reminiscent of art-historical prototypes such as Bernini”s sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1645-52), in which the intensity of Theresa”s passion is expressed in the turbulent movements of her drapery folds. Bourgeois animated his composition so that everything, from the swirling folds of the singer’s pants to the dice-patterned curtains, vibrates in response to the music. The force is so powerful that it makes the curtains move about as if furled by an electric fan, shaking the dice free from the cloth.

Over the years, rock ”n” roll singers have often been described in terms that suggest they are royalty or clergy. Presley for example, came to be known as the “King of rock ”n” roll,” while Aretha Franklin has been identified as the ”Queen of Soul.” As Bourgeois expanded his repertoire of rock ”n” roll portraits, he, too, began to glorify his subjects— blending formal and iconographic conventions, once reserved for portraits of regal or saintly figures, with the graphic design techniques used on album covers and posters. Aretha, Mysterious Lady of Sorrow (1981) is based on a color photograph of the soul diva from the jacket of a record album featuring her signature single, “Respect.” Although Otis Redding wrote the song and released it as a single, Franklin’s version was the bigger hit. Today, it is considered a liberation anthem for blacks and women, credited with helping “to preserve and perpetuate black identity”, as well as ”being about respect for individuals generally.”

In translating the record-sleeve image into a painting, Bourgeois enlarged Franklin’s proportions and exaggerated her lavish makeup and clothing. Having once watched her play the piano on The Tonight Show, he used a piano-keyboard motif to create architectural pillars that frame her compositionally, while alluding metaphorically to her strength and endurance. Behind her, a pattern of interlocking chains refers to the emancipation she sang about in “Respect” as well as to her subsequent hit “Chain of Fools.” Lastly, a sacred-heart pendant and crown of thorns over her bodice sanctify her; like that of many black soul singers, Franklin”s music was rooted in the traditions of gospel music.

In 1981 Bourgeois’s career received a major boost when he was selected as the southern-region recipient, of the Awards in the Visual Arts Fellowship, administered by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The program recognized artists from around the country by granting them a fellowship and organizing an exhibition with an accompanying catalogue. Bourgeois was chosen the first year the awards were given. The winners were showcased together in a group exhibition at the National Museum of American Art in Washington. D.C. The sudden national attention came as something of a surprise to this unknown artist from Cajun country, impelling him to reflect about the unpredictable nature of fame. Consequently, most of the subjects of his paintings from 1981 through 1985 are lesser-known players in the entertainment industry. Every king and queen must have a court: in this context, courtiers were the musicians and singers whose fame was transitory, those still waiting to be discovered, and those whose fame was cut short by tragedy. In Bourgeois”s pantheon of the early 1980s, these included one-hit wonders such as Little Eva, who will forever be identified with her 1962 hit, “The Locomotion;” a young Jody Wattley, a member of the group Shalamar, who did not become a star until she went solo a few years after Bourgeois painted her portrait; and Tammi Terrell, Marvin Gaye’s duet partner, who died of a brain Tumor in 1970.

Other tragic figures enshrined in the artist’s paintings at this time include the poet Sylvia Plath and the actress Inger Stevens, both of whom committed suicide. Poet in Her Kitchen (1982) is based on a photograph of Plath from a book on the lives of tragic people. The poet killed herself by putting her head inside a gas oven during the winter of 1963. Bourgeois set her portrait in a kitchen, with a stove and a window framing a snowy landscape behind her, and decorated the wallpaper with an allover pattern of flames. Wanting to downplay her vulnerability, however, he shows her poised and confident, and he refers to her literary legacy by including a vase of red poppies and potatoes, items mentioned in several of her poems.

For Inger and the Hitchhikers (1982), Bourgeois took a slightly different approach. While still relying on symbolic references to memorialize a figure whose biography he had read, he now ventured into the territory of narrative. Best known as the star of the wholesome mid1960s television series The Farmer’s Daughter, Inger Stevens had in 1960 appeared in a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone that the artist had watched as a child. For the painting, Bourgeois invented a scenario based on the episode “The Hitchhiker,” in which Stevens plays a woman who repeatedly encounters the same hitchhiker as she drives across the desert, only to find out that he represents death—and that she has been dead all along, killed in a car accident. Bourgeois learned from her biography that the actress had failed relationships with both Bing Crosby and Burt Reynolds, so he incorporated them into the painting. Crosby appears framed within a circular wreath of cactus at the upper left, while Reynolds is shown twice in similar fashion at the upper and lower right. In the remaining cactus wreath at lower left is a hand arranged in a hitchhiker’s gesture, a symbolic reminder of the link between the Twilight Zone episode and Stevens”s barbiturate-overdose suicide in 1970. To memorialize the actress with reverence and dignity, Bourgeois painted her portrait in four small frames, collectively configured to suggest a cruciform, and graced the landscape setting with a field of desert flowers.

The artist’s sympathy for tragic figures can be connected to the music he grew up with specifically to lyrics that expressed humanitarian themes. When Bourgeois was a teenager, he, like many baby boomers, found inspiration in “message” or ”protest” music that raised generational consciousness about issues such as prejudice and social injustice. According to Friedlander, “Nineteen sixty-seven was a watershed year. Lyrics covering the Vietnam War, the search for a new humanistic morality, and the fight for minority rights emerged in the days rock/pop music.” Among his personal favorites of 1967, Bourgeois lists Janis Ian”s “Society’s Child,” a hit single Friedlander describes as “a poignant tale of a stifled integrated romance,” and the album Bob Dylan”s Greatest Hits. He also acknowledges that Dylan”s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was probably the first message song that ever affected him. Friedlander considers the song to be “the rough jewel that reveals Dylan’s songwriting genius. Dylan uses the poetic devices of allusion, symbol, metaphor, and imagery within an abstract framework of questions about issues of war and peace, justice and injustice.” Some twenty years after he first heard this Dylan classic. Bourgeois employed similar poetic devices to make visual art.

In 1986 Bourgeois’s focus began to shift, from merely recognizing those who had shaped his belief system to expressing his personal point of view. While poring over books with fine reproductions of Joseph Cornell’s box assemblages, Bourgeois decided to try that format himself. Ball of Confusion (1986,) is one of the artist’s first shadowbox constructions. In contrast to the Surrealist poetry suggested by Cornell’s boxes, however, it is a social commentary based on current events, specifically the protracted Iran-Iraq War. Although the construction”s title comes from a popular 1970 Temptations song about urban unrest and the Vietnam War, its central image is of a fallen Iranian soldier of the mid-1980s, copied from a magazine photograph the artist had seen.

Bourgeois approached the task of making the assemblage as if he were constructing a miniature theater set, and he combined found objects with painted cutouts on which he utilized his skills as a painter. The symbolic narrative in the main window is composed of painted cutouts of the dead soldier; a diapered infant, representing the sanctity of life; and a large globe with a sad face, alluding to the grimness of war. Fragility and bleakness, signified by a real wilted tree branch in the center of the scene, are contrasted with the hopeful, spiritual implications of the starry, moonlit sky that serves as a backdrop. Beneath the central scene, a section resembling the predella of a traditional Renaissance altarpiece contains several real objects that reinforce the metaphors of the imagery above. These include a stopwatch, symbolizing mortality; a miniature boom box, referring to the present day; and several globe-shaped pencil sharpeners turned in different directions to suggest the political instability of our world.

From 1986 to 1988, Bourgeois experimented with various assemblage formats. In addition to making Cornell-style boxes, he produced mixed-media sculptures that resemble theater sets or altars, each housed within an architectural framework. One of these is Alien Cabaret (1988), which expresses the artist’s response to the interim confinement of Cuban boat people in detention camps in Florida and Louisiana. In Bourgeois’s fictional narrative, a painted cutout of a svelte Cuban chanteuse appears behind prison bars made from the rusted shelf of an old refrigerator. Microphone in hand, she appears elegantly poised and ready to perform. To suggest that she was a celebrated figure in her own country, Bourgeois dressed her in a manner reminiscent of Motown royalty and created a palatial stage using real satin curtains and a gold-leaf exterior. The Little Child Inside I (1988) and The Little Child Inside II (1988) are a pair of altar-like configurations about accepting one”s adulthood by healing the wounds of childhood. In these constructions, Bourgeois combined the structure of a triptych with that of a child’s dollhouse. In the central niche of each work is an adult figure—one female and the other male— with open doors in their chests that reveal images of their younger selves. Childhood symbols are present in tiny dioramas at the sides filled with toy furniture, dolls, candy cigarettes, and other nostalgic memorabilia of youth.

By the late 1980s, Bourgeois was venturing in multiple directions. While relying increasingly upon his own imagination to create socially conscious narratives, he still returned occasionally to the rock ”n” roll pantheon of his earlier work and added more contemporary music makers to the mix. Aretha Franklin, for example, reappears in Mystical Aretha (1988), regally enshrined within a sculptural triptych, and he celebrates 1980s hip hop artists in paintings such as Spin, Salt-N-Pepa (1988) and Queen Latifah’s Party (1990). After 1990, however, actual performers rarely appear in Bourgeois oeuvre. Since then, he has concentrated instead on social issues that include urban crime, domestic violence, homelessness, and the endangered environment.

In the shadow box Horoscope Stress (1988) and paintings such as St. Anthony Appears to Tony (1989), and The Kitchen (1990), Bourgeois displays an existentialist uneasiness over daily life in a troubled world. Horoscope Stress, titled after a cover headline Bourgeois saw in the National Enquirer (visible on the floor to the right), shows a disheveled man resting. His life is in shambles, as reflected in the disarray of letters, spilled coffee, and discarded food cartons surrounding him. Staged in similarly cluttered settings, St. Anthony Appears to Tony and The Kitchen reveal what might happen to this fellow when he rises from his bed. Returning to an iconographic device introduced in his 1978 painting Blessed Virgin Appears to a Woman, Bourgeois confronts the everyday Joe with apparitions of holy figures, spiritual leaders who will guide him out of his misery. The naked black man in Mistaken Identity (1991) may not be so lucky, however. While working on the painting, which was initially intended to portray another holy vision, Bourgeois had an apparition of his own: Recalling his experience of being held up at gunpoint in 1974, he imagined a white policeman pointing a gun at the black man”s head. He then painted a commentary about racial tensions between white authority and Louisiana”s large black population.

Although Bourgeois does not consider himself a political activist, he came of age during the Vietnam War, marched with other baby boomers against the war, and, as noted, was deeply affected by the music of that period. The early 1970s songs of Marvin Gaye, in fact, address themes that run through Bourgeois’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the black urban experience and threats to the environment. In the late 1980s, Louisiana politics rekindled the artist”s interest in public issues. The 1989 Republican gubernatorial candidacy of David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, was especially alarming to Bourgeois. Duke attacked single mothers in his campaign speeches by accusing them, in the artist”s words, of “having welfare babies to get a bigger check.” Although Duke lost the race, Bourgeois’s thoughts about what might have happened had he been elected moved him to paint the nightmarish Scapegoat Cabaret (1991). Using a theatrical setting like those introduced in his mixed-media constructions, he shows an integrated trio of single-parent families. The parents and their children stand onstage in a manner that recalls the southern tradition of presenting slaves for sale: in the foreground, several indifferent members of an audience chat with one another. Props on the stage include a flaming cauldron and instruments of torture laid out on a white table. Duke, represented by a jackal-like creature bearing his likeness, is shown at the front of the stage, obviously approving of the cruelties about to be inflicted on the families.

Since the mid-1990s, Bourgeois’s sympathies for those victimized in contemporary society have been obvious in his art. Domestic abuse, for example, is the subject of Out of Here (1995), a woman in a disorderly bedroom is hurriedly getting dressed while her three children wait. The dark sky visible through the window indicates that it is the middle of the night, and her black eye and the luggage on the floor suggest she is preparing to escape from a prison of domestic abuse. On the wall is a poster showing a spirited unicorn sprinting in the moonlight, a hopeful sign that the woman and her children will find refuge: a taxicab in the distance will provide them transport. Another painting, Change of Address (1996), implies that the homeless find comfort only through a sense of community. The disenfranchised and dispossessed gather together in an arched outdoor square, surrounded by their open suitcases and ragtag belongings.

As a longtime aficionado of radio and television, Bourgeois is also sensitive to the ways the broadcast media infringe upon the privacy of people in the news. He addressed this problem in Under the Lens (1995) by canonizing a “fictional everyman” as a Christ-like black man. Wearing a crown of thorns, the man is posed with dignity under an imposing arch of microphones, tape recorders, and guns pointed at him. Beads of blood dot his forehead as he calmly accepts his fate with closed eyes; a bird drinks the blood from his flesh wound. The metaphor of Christ as victim also appears in Daily Cross (1997), a work inspired by the artist’s response to news coverage of the September 1996 murder of the actor and rap singer Tupac Shakur. This compassionate tribute to all who have suffered from senseless brutality expands upon ideas introduced in Under the Lens. Here, Christ is shown twice, once in traditional garb carrying the cross and also as a contemporary young man in a striped T-shirt. In both instances, he is depicted as the victim of a mugging. Other details include sections appropriated from Old Master portrayals of Christ by Bellini, Guercino, Palmezzano, and Raphael; sacred hearts touched by bleeding hands; an exploding butterfly; an infant positioned between its doll and a gun; an abandoned tricycle and child”s shoe; and at the bottom of the composition, Shakur”s grieving mother holding a photograph of her dead son. Tying these disparate images together is a faux frame of decorative patterning that suggests the exterior of a religions reliquary; some areas of the frame are peeled away to reveal meticulously painted fragments of news clippings that tell horrific stories about recent violent crimes.

Of all the causes for which Bourgeois has been an artistic spokesperson, the most important to him is preservation of the environment. From the time he learned to garden as a child to the present day, he has held a deep affection for the lush landscape of his native St. Amant, to which he eagerly returned in 1981. Today, he lives surrounded by flowers, fruits, and native trees that he plants himself, yet he is keenly aware that many parts of the landscape in his parish have been lost to encroaching urbanization. His concern about the effects of pollution dates back to the early 1970s, when he traveled daily to Baton Rouge past “the chemical corridor,” an area along the Mississippi River that has been lined with chemical plants since the 1950s. According to the artist, the arrival of these plants after World War II ”changed the Delta from being agricultural to a place of well-paying jobs. On the one hand, this raised the quality of life and brought more income to the state. On the other hand, it endangered health.”

The struggle between nature and industry has been a constant theme in Bourgeois’s art since the late 1980s when he introduced an image of the chemical plants into his art as a metaphorical tool. He painted Nightflame (1988), for example, to express sympathy for the families of “the Missing,” the male political prisoners in Chile who were abducted from their homes in the 1970s during the regime of Augusto Pinochet. Bourgeois represents the chemical plants as visual sirens, lighting up the night sky visible through the windows behind a woman who wears both a tattered evening gown and, around her neck, a photograph of one of the Missing. This idealization of dark-skinned feminine beauty would be the artist’s prototype for the nature goddess in Woman from. St. Gabriel (1991). Like St. Amant, St. Gabriel is a rural community, but because it is situated closer to the Mississippi River, it is more seriously jeopardized by the chemical plants. The proud heroine of this later work appears covered in “the flora and fauna of indigenous Louisiana,” displaying an optimistic smile as if to suggest that nature will be the ultimate victor over the chemical plants, which are barely visible through the lush vegetation.

In addition to the goddess, Bourgeois has invented several other characters similarly responsive to nature’s battle with modernization. In The Development (1993), a painting in which a simple fence forms a dividing line between natural and urbanized landscapes, a lone figure appears to live in the house on the undeveloped side. In Dreaming of Home (1993) and The Traveler (1993), traveling saleswomen are shown as victims of “nature deprivation.” While they sleep in hotel rooms, their only sources of environmental nourishment are cacti in a drawer and bell jar or trees growing up out of an open suitcase. In more recent works, such as Chlorophyll Pulse (2000) and Aperture (2001), the dream has become a nightmare. Painted in muted grayish tones to suggest the bleakness of a polluted world, the garden scene in Chlorophyll Pulse shows a perplexed woman contemplating the electronic gadgetry that appears alongside plants and flowers. A naked woman reacts violently to her horrific setting in Aperture. Crouched in a fetal position with her hands over her ears, she appears to have recoiled from the towers of industrial ruins in the distance that emit ominous smoke. In characteristic fashion, Bourgeois contrasts her terror with lyrical beauty, emblematized here by a pristine wreath of leaves that encircles the scene, mimicking the eye of a camera. In his 1992 painting Pop Singer, Bourgeois shows a fictional rocker, backed by a shy guitarist and a strangely attired girl group, performing for an indifferent audience. On a stage littered with symbols of excess and destruction, such as raw meat, a booze bottle, vials of cocaine, and loose change, is an Aladdin’s lamp—a reference to the potency of wishes and a cautionary reminder to be careful what we wish for. Unaffected by the squalor around him and posed like Samson between the chain-laced pillars on either side of him, the performer keeps on singing, confident of the power of his music. In many respects, Douglas Bourgeois is much like the rock star in this painting. Although he certainly realizes that no single artwork can demonstratively change the world, he sees his role as that of a mediator. Like the music that has motivated him for so long, his paintings and sculptures are conduits for a heightened appreciation of life.