Taking Flight

After Katrina, a New Orleans artist strives to connect art and the environment

By Elizabeth Dewberry, GARDEN & GUN

It’s raining in New Orleans, and just before I set foot in Jacqueline Bishop’s studio, I’m looking at my shoes. I’m wiping them on the doormat, mostly because I don’t want to track mud inside, but because I’m wearing new suede boots and I want to see if, crossing the puddle-filled courtyard between her Garden District house and her studio, I’ve ruined them. That’s what I”m thinking about when I step over the threshold– shoes.

I’ve traveled from Atlanta to New Orleans to meet this environmental artist and see her jewel-colored, seemingly Gauguin-inspired paintings of birds that migrate from North America to South America, stopping to rest on the barrier islands just south of New Orleans. I want to talk to her about her travels to Brazil, where she followed the birds to observe them in their native habitat and where she developed a long-term fascination with Chico Mendes, the Brazilian rubber tapper who was murdered in 1988 after campaigning to save the trees in the Amazonian rainforest. I’m looking forward to seeing her portraits of him and other work that the rainforest inspired.

I once lived in Louisiana and still think of New Orleans as home in some ways, so I know the city well enough to expect the unexpected, but the first thing I see when I walk into the studio baffles me anyway. It’s a curtain of baby shoes, hanging from the ceiling. Literally dozens of tiny vintage baby shoes float there, tied together with their own laces, each delicate shoe resting in a corner of the square created by the laces.

I like it, I think, but I don’t get it.

It’s an installation piece, she explains patiently, soberly, called Ancestral Ground, and when on exhibit, the shoes I hang in front of a group of drawings, collages, and oil paintings of birds, bugs, butterflies, and other natural phenomena. She hands me a photo.

Nearby hangs another curtain, a white silk scrim with black bird silhouettes that she hopes will remind the viewer of the way birds look in the late afternoon. “Because of the fading light, you can’t see their color, just their shape,” she says,” and you know your bird-watching for the day is over.”

All over the studio sit more baby shoes, some untouched, some painted with extinct or endangered species of birds and flowers.

“What’s your attraction to shoes?” I ask.

“Because that’s how we connect with the landscape. We walk on it.”

“Why baby shoes?”

“Because they represent a time in our lives when we’re not afraid of nature, we’re not harming it, we haven’t learned how to disconnect from it.” Then she quotes herself, word for word, from a statement I’ve read in her press kit:

“The landscape as we know it is disappearing, but we are not walking away from it, the landscape is walking away from us and from beneath our children’s feet because of the decisions adults have made about it.

“Why vintage baby shoes?” I ask.

“Because most of the people who wore these shoes are dead,” she says. “Just like the landscape, which is dying.”

I’m wondering if Jacqueline Bishop’s apparent morbidity was heightened during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Baroque music is spilling softly into the air. The studio, which she describes as organized chaos but which looks more like pure chaos to me, also holds the things I anticipated finding here: detailed, colorful oils on linen of sinewy banyan-like trees that seem to be part human, part animal, displayed in antique frames; a portrait of Chico Mendes with his thick mustache, wavy hair, and sad eyes, looking something like a Brazilian Gauguin; a collection of fifty or sixty tropical birds painted on small wooden blocks and trimmed with assorted Mardi Gras beads, broken glass, and mirror fragments. The birds work together as art installation piece, she explains. “Some the birds I painted early on have become extinct. And after Katrina, some of the others stopped coming to New Orleans.”

We move on to a case filled with what look to me like leg bones of small animals, tiny bird and lizard skulls, and snakeskins—mostly items she’s collected from the floors of the rainforest—then we pass a work in progress of a surreal jungle scene before we stop at a large framed sculpture made up of black nests, black toys, black birds, black baby shoes, on some of which are painted birds and flowers. “Stand back,” she says, “and look at just one color, then another and another. It will start to appear to float. I did that before Katrina, but it’s a Katrina painting, where all of New Orleans felt like it was floating. There were fish in the streets.”

Everybody in New Orleans has a Katrina story, one he or she feels deeply. I ask her about hers. During Katrina, she and her husband stayed in their living room. “I aged ten years in twelve hours,” she says. They had three weeks’ worth of food and water and were determined not to go, but when armed looters came into her neighborhood, they gave their food to children in the streets and left. She’s hesitant to say what she lost in the storm. “Everybody has a story of loss,” she says. Then she’s quiet.

After a moment, she continues, “My work is all about loss of innocence, loss of species, loss of the natural world.”

She pauses again before she says, “I lost my job.” She laughs. “Two years before, my students wrote papers about what would happen when New Orleans was hit by a major hurricane, predicting almost everything that occurred. Then Katrina came, and I lost my job. I just got it back this semester.”

After studying at the University of Kansas, she came to the University of New Orleans to study art and decided to make the city her home. She now teaches a course at Loyola called “Art and Environment,” and she invites me to sit in on one of her classes. She tells her students the job of an artist is to ask questions, but they must sort out the answers for themselves. She’s very politically minded, so I find it interesting that she doesn’t impose her point of view. And she doesn’t mention Chico Mendes, which is what I most want to hear about—her quest to visit the place where Chico Mendes”s feet walked the Brazilian rainforest.

After class, she tells me that when she found out about Mendes’s assassination, she was in shock. “It didn’t make sense, why they would kill him,” she says. “He was all about peace.”

To better understand what he fought for and why he died, she traveled to Brazil, where she met his widow and became emotionally involved in his community and his cause. She explains, “He was a rubber tapper who became a union leader, campaigning for the rights of rubber tappers, which were also the rights of the rainforest. The cattle ranchers were cheating them out of money and destroying the forest where they made their livings, and when he became too powerful, the ranchers had him killed. I saw that there was a job to be done, a legacy to preserve.”

Months later, when Bishop returned to Brazil for an exhibition of her work that included some paintings of Mendes, she spoke out in interviews about the importance of continuing Mendes’s work to keep the cattle ranchers from turning the rainforests into wastelands. “I was invited to the governor’s home,” she says, “brought there by armed guards, and I when we sat down for lunch, the governor hit the table with his fist and said, ”If you Americans want to save rainforests, give us more money.’ I realized I was in over my head. While I was with the governor, my hotel room was searched, and friends told me I should make sure no drugs had been stashed in my luggage because I had to leave for my own safety.”

Reluctantly, Bishop left Brazil—though she returned every year, at least once a year, for the next ten years and still goes as often as she can—but she took with her a new political awareness and a new passion for her painting. “The work I was doing for the rainforest was taking my art somewhere magical. I believe in Mendes’s philosophies, in the deep connections between humans and nonhumans, and my art started reflecting my new awareness of those connections. I started painting landscapes where trees and people and fish are all part of the same object, and the distinctions we tend to make between ourselves and the world disappear.”

She’d long been painting birds that live in the rainforest—that’s what originally brought her to Brazil—but that work took on a new sense of urgency as well. “I became more passionate about the politics behind it,” she explains. “These beautiful creatures are going to become extinct if we don’t preserve them, not just in art but in life.”

It’s dark now. Class is over, and she’s driving me to the French Quarter, where I’m staying with friends. “I went to his house,” she tells me, her eyes focused on the slippery road ahead of us, “and I saw his shoes on the shelf. That was so moving.”

I ask her if her interest in shoes started with the sight of Chico Mendes’s shoes. “No,” she says, “the first shoes I collected were my niece’s, from when she first started walking. They sat in my studio for years while I collected more. My son had a pair of little red shoes. I put them in a birdcage and they became sculpture.”

It’s clear that Jacqueline Bishop sees Mendes as an innocent. She’s given me a copy of a book she created about him, published on the tenth anniversary of his death and entitled Em Memória Chico Mendes. The text, which includes writings by Bishop and others, appears in English, Spanish, and Mendes’s mother tongue, Portuguese (the title is in Portuguese), and the book includes eight paintings of him by Bishop, created on the first eight anniversaries of his death.

“They’re little memorials to him. We have to keep his ideas alive.”