Gray Line New Orleans partners with local artist on slave history tour
30th October 2023 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
An internationally recognized local Black artist has teamed up with a popular New Orleans tour company to present a tour of haunted locales in the city highlighted by several spots with crucial connections to African-American history.
Artist Marcus Brown is contributing three displays on Gray Line News Orleans “Ghosts & Spirits Walking Tour,” which began in October in time for Halloween but will be offered for an extended time from here on out.
Brown created tour stops recognizing the Great Fires of 1788 and 1794; the legendary voodoo queen Marie Laveau; and the yellow fever epidemic of 1853, all of which touch on events that greatly impacted or involved New Orleans’ people of color in tragic, haunting or mysterious ways.
Brown’s installations are augmented reality (AR) displays designed to bring the tour-taker into the interactive experience of each historic event. The great fires stop on the route places viewers in a flashback of the terrible horror of the blazes, while the yellow fever display is dubbed “Zombie Origins” and imagines the terror of dying from the disease while stacked among other similarly afflicted dying souls.
Brown drew the attention of Gray Line because of a previous AR display he made in New York City titled “The Slave Market: Wall Street,” which was added to Brown’s country-wide “Slavery Trails” project, in which site-specific AR installations augmented by music and other immersive media were placed at historic locations present a decentralized tour experience across the nation.
“When we learned about Marcus’ most recent AR project on view in New York City, ‘The Slave Market: Wall Street,’ we immediately knew we wanted to bring his creative talents to our Ghosts & Spirits walking tour,” said Gray Line New Orleans Director of Marketing Deidra Edwards in a press release.“The addition of these three new experiences right at the start of spooky season makes this a must-see for locals and tourists in October.”
In addition, Brown had previously created three “Slavery Trails” installations in New Orleans to recognize tragic slavery stories locally. Included in the New Orleans slavery tour are interactive, AR installations for Solomon Northrup, who was sold into slavery in 1841 and became the subject of the Oscar-winning film “12 Years a Slave;” the location for local slave pens and auction sites at the intersection of Esplanade Avenue and Chartres Street; and one entitled “Passage,” in which sculptures and a slave ship highlight the horror of the Middle Passage, the term for the transatlantic slave trade.
Brown told The Louisiana Weekly that Gray Line assisted him with the “Passage” installation.
“Slavery Trails is a decentralized memorial to slavery in the United States,” he said. “Gray Line has helped me show one of these AR exhibits called ‘Passage in the French Quarter.’ ‘Passage,’ a ship of African captives, is an exhibit that takes the viewer through the slave decks of a slave ship. The goal with this piece is to show you how people were chained and cramped in a small space on a ship.”
That partnership makes Brown’s further collaboration for the “Ghosts and Spirits” tour a natural one, Brown said.
“[Gray Line was] interested in bringing people to my Augmented Reality exhibit on the corner of Chartres Street and Esplanade Avenue and creating possibly other exhibits for their tours,” he said. “I was not as surprised as I was curious about the company’s vision for a collaboration with me. I thought that tours could be a good way to expose the public to the history of slavery in New Orleans. Also, I asked myself, could I get groups of people who are not interested in talking about slavery interested?”
The Marie Laveau exhibit created for “Ghosts & Spirits” was Brown’s first project actually commissioned by Gray Line,” and Brown said the challenge of creating an AR display for someone from history for whom no pictures or reliable images exist proved especially difficult but fascinating.
Brown eventually developed the interactive, AR exhibit of one of local history’s most colorful figures by modeling it on traditional images of people with African, European and Indigenous ancestry.
“My intention with this piece was to make a believable likeness of Marie Laveau even if I don’t have any reference pictures,” he said. “The stories of Marie Laveau did influence the way that I portrayed her.”
For more information on the “Ghosts & Spirits” tour, go to www.graylineneworleans.com/all/tours/ghosts-and-spirits-tour. For more information on the “Slavery Trails” project, go to https://arslaverytrails.com.
This article originally published in the October 30, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
