Dalt Wonk is a play on “Don’t Walk,” but Mr. Wonk (she calls him Wonkie) decided they needed stage names, and after a while the names stuck. When they were young theater students at Bard, Ms. ![]() Sacabo was born Mary Alice Martin in Laredo, Tex., and Mr. Roberts, a photographer, was named Louise. Ersy was christened Eugenie, after her mother, and her partner, Ms. Sacabo had just moved into a 170-year-old merchant’s house around the corner with her husband, Dalt Wonk.įor the record, no one in this article uses his or her given name. Schwartz is taciturn.) As it happened, Ms. Sacabo was assigned by a local magazine to take a photo of Ms. That was when she resumed a friendship begun decades earlier with Ms. “And I loved the house, so there was really no choice.” “I loved my mother,” she said, describing a fiery human-rights activist and preservationist who used to throw herself in front of the tour buses rattling the foundations of the houses in the French Quarter. She returned to this city, and this house, 12 years ago, when her mother was no longer able to live alone (Ms. Schwartz mourned the contents of her freezer here, when she lost a shark, part of a deer, some lovebirds, frogs, a snake and a lizard.) She cast them in bronze and tucked them into pieces like a cheese grater fitted out on the inside with spiky teeth and tufted red velvet - a luxurious, toothy coffin. Schwartz would harvest the mice that sanitation workers flushed out from under the statue of Peter Cooper. “If my work seems a little grim, it is,” she said.Īt Cooper Union, in Manhattan, where she taught for 20 years, Ms. In a city where you expect a gothic family history, Ms. Schwartz’s childhood was also marked by tragedies, including the early deaths of several family members. “It didn’t hurt,” she said unconvincingly. Indeed, her father, an avid hunter who ran a wholesale hardware company, liked to use his only daughter as target practice, shooting her with his BB gun as she ran back and forth on the front lawn. Schwartz, 60, whose family moved into the house when she was 10. Schwartz’s cast-bronze mice, in a horizontal arabesque pose, and a painted metal parakeet, a prop in a practical joke her father liked to play on her, which involved hiding her real parakeet and replacing it with this tinny simulacrum. Schwartz’s front parlor since 1925, when her grandmother bought the place, which was built in the mid-19th century as a billiard house, an extension to the gaming club next door. This reporter added it to a little pile of objects she had accumulated on the red velvet and rosewood sofa, part of a suite of furniture that in all likelihood had occupied the same spot in Ms. Schwartz was saying early last week, as she handed over a photograph of her grandmother decked out as Queen of Comus (that’s high up in the caste society of New Orleans, as it plays out in Mardi Gras krewes). ![]() Schwartz’s partner, said, it signifies a moment “when we can all exhale.” Schwartz, a shy, gruff woman who is clearly allergic to self-marketing, will find it satisfying to see four decades’ worth of her work in one place for the first time.) It is also an intermezzo in the drama of real life, which has dealt some blows to both women in the last decade, a period that has not been easy for anyone in this town.Īs Kyle Roberts, Ms. This is significant not just because it’s a celebration of two local heroes. The two artists are the subject of side-by-side retrospectives, “Ersy: Architect of Dreams” and “Óyeme con los Ojos (Hear Me With Your Eyes),” opening here Saturday at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. It’s a territory of fallen angels, omnivorous ancestors and all manner of fantastic creatures. ![]() Sacabo’s ghostly, smoky female figures, you can see the collision of magic realism, allegory and surrealism. Schwartz’s meticulous, mischievous pieces - which might be peopled with tiny winged figures that have bird skulls in place of heads or real mice cast in bronze - and in Ms. ![]() They are also fomenters of the sort of time-traveling artwork that comes with a distinctly New Orleans point of view. ERSY SCHWARTZ, a sculptor, and Josephine Sacabo, a photographer, are old friends, neighbors and artistic collaborators who live in the crumbling village known as the French Quarter, in houses that are exemplars of a certain local aesthetic composed of equal parts grandeur and mystery, funk and rot.
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