Making Mardi Gras
Learn how artists and everyday people create the “Greatest Free Show on Earth” every year.
520 Royal Street
Tricentennial Wing, 3rd Floor
You can feel it coming. A marching band cadence echoes from a mile away. Pounding drums and bright feathers flare from the Mardi Gras Indians just up the block. Months of painstaking glittering, marching, beadwork, and brushstrokes have led up to this moment, and you are ready to burst into the street. It’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
On January 6, 2022, the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Making Mardi Gras exhibition rambles its way into the museum's French Quarter galleries. This showstopping display invites visitors into the sprawling dens, late-night sewing sessions, and sweaty dance rehearsals where “The Greatest Free Show on Earth” is created and re-created each year among the city’s diverse communities. Explore the vibrant expression that only Carnival season can muster, as we meet up with 19th-century float artists, dawn-breaking skeleton gangs, and homebound house-float creators—stopping to admire costumes, royalty, and hand-painted coconuts.
This is the Mardi Gras that happens before we're watching, the Carnival that will wind through the city on Fat Tuesday, far from the intemperate Bourbon Street scene. Catch it before it passes.
Carnival Playlist
Skull and bone gang video series
Danny Barker describes New Orleans’s Black Masking Indians in this clip from the 1975–76 film The Mardi Gras Indians.
Support
This exhibition is generously sponsored by Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World and Kern Studios.
Related Exhibitions
Fit for a King: The Rex Archives at HNOC
Jewels, favors, doubloons, float designs, and more commemorate Rex’s 150th anniversary.
Related Stories
Preserving the Pretty
HNOC introduces a guide to preserving and displaying Black Masking Indian suits.
The Breadth of Carnival Artistry in Nine Photographs
Snapshots of Carnival through photographic history, from Mardi Gras Indian big chiefs to ‘Tit Rex
Looking at the Obscure—and Sometimes Disturbing—Lore from the “Golden Age of Carnival”
Exploring the traditions of the past often reveals the deeper values and influences of the society that created them.
Carnival Canceled? When the Good Times Didn’t Roll
As New Orleans braces for a vastly downsized Carnival because of the pandemic, HNOC looks back at 14 times the city canceled parades and balls—as well as the celebrations that went on despite the shutdown.
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
