“Despite the debate in the museum world about the value of blockbuster exhibitions, … the show became a watershed in the cultural history of New Orleans, with people speaking of ‘before Tut’ and ‘after Tut.’” -Prescott N. Dunbar*

Last week, with the death of Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition, I toured Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial and thought about information. I researched the show beforehand on NOMA’s new and improved website, impressed with the museum’s education efforts, particularly in sharing the exhibition with Middle School children.

In my youth, the show was Treasures of Tutankhamun, and the research came not from websites and social media, but from small images and dense text in a fat set of alphabetized books lined up along the school library wall. There were no links, no games, and no videos. Outside of Encyclopedia Britannica, Tut existed only in Egypt until one magical year it visited six U.S. museums, including the New Orleans Museum of Art, its only southern stop. I sat last Monday on a bench in Hard Truths (reviewed here by D. Eric Bookhardt for Gambit) and googled 'Selket' on my iPhone, triggering a flashback:

At 4:00 a.m. on December 26th 1977, my mother, giddy, woke me.

“Hurry up, Wendy Anne. Wear your new coat. It’s cold.”

I was ten.

Along with my younger cousin Kelly, we left my uncle’s house at 484 Fairfield Drive in Gretna, Louisiana on a moonless, stormy night. We ate pop tarts in my mother’s canary yellow Oldsmobile as we drove across the Mississippi River and a then-single Greater New Orleans Bridge to a parking lot located somewhere in Mid-City. With hundreds of families we waited one hour in the dark for a bus that carried us past a Nile-blue painted Lelong Avenue and the New Orleans Museum of Art to a distant City Park path, where we joined thousands of people already in line.

• The New Orleans Museum of Art
• Looking at NOMA, a speck at the end of Lelong Avenue, during 'Treasures of Tutankhamun' 1977

In a family photograph from New Iberia, 1950, six-year old George Rodrigue stands dressed as a cowboy on Christmas morning, an only child surrounded by symbols of the time: a Radio Flyer red wagon; promotional Coca-Cola Santa Clauses (in multiples because his dad traded them on a brick-laying job); a dartboard featuring Little Black Sambo*, a reality of a bigotry so culturally ingrained that no one in young George’s world thought twice about it; and a photograph on the fireplace mantle of cousin Nootsie, a fighter pilot shot down during World War II.

• George Rodrigue, 1950, New Iberia, Louisiana

I see the fireplace bricks George’s father laid ever-so-straight with his bare hands, and I wonder at the Christmas ornaments, heirlooms of school projects, world travels, and craft fairs in my own childhood (still hanging on our tree today). And yet by the time George and I married in 1997, the Rodrigue family long ago wrote off their ornaments as junk, flickering only within George’s mother’s aging and Depression-influenced memory. I asked her, a woman who had not decorated a tree in forty-seven years:

Where do I find your ornaments?

“I threw those out years ago,” she explained, her mild dementia drifting in and out, “when I turned the attic into a studio for Baby George. Daddy installed a window unit, our first air conditioner, and I listened to that whirring machine all night while George painted.”

…at which point she twirled her hands in a disco move, the same gesture she made each time she talked about the floodwaters of 1927 rolling into New Iberia.

“The brave young men rode onto the beaches and into battle on Higgins Boats, built in New Orleans by Andrew Higgins, the man Eisenhower said, ‘won the war for us.'” —Stephen Ambrose

Yet these two American giants of World War II never met. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) eventually became President of the United States (1953-1961); however, it was a decade before, in his role as a 5-star general in the United States Army and finally Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, that solidified his status as a hero, leading the United States and its allies to victory in Europe during World War II.

Meanwhile, Andrew Higgins (1886-1952) lived and worked in New Orleans, where he built many types of boats and barges but, most famously, designed the Landing Craft Personnel, Large (LCPL), the boats that transported allied troops to the Normandy beaches on D-Day.

• The National World War II Museum, New Orleans
• 'Victory on Bayou St. John,' acrylic on canvas by George Rodrigue, 2009

When the National World War II Museum approached George Rodrigue in 2008 about a Blue Dog painting for their new wing, he winced.

“The Blue Dog,” he noted, “has no connection to World War II.”