When I first purchased my house in Treme, there were still a few pieces of furniture left over from the last owner. It was for decades, a rooming house that housed many of New Orleans single male musicians, and was owned and operated by a woman known to the neighborhood as Mother Sister. After Katrina, one of the chairs she left behind was damaged along with the rest of the house, so I cut up the chair and put it in this piece. —Jean-Marcel St. Jacques Jean-Marcel

St. Jacques is a twelfth-generation Afro-Creole. He was raised in Richmond, California, a small city in the Bay area settled by many black families like his own who had fled Louisiana and Texas between the 1940s and 70s to escape racial oppression. He returned to Louisiana sixteen years ago, inspired to reconnect with the land of his ancestors. In the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, St. Jacques began to make art with wood salvaged from his damaged home in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, and also to "mask" as a medicine man in the Black Masking Indian tradition. Many of his pieces take the form of "wooden quilts," patchwork constructions of strips of wood reclaiming and transforming the stories of those lives touched by Katrina.

According to the artist:

My great-grandmother made patchwork quilts.

My great-grandfather was a hoodoo man who collected junk and re-sold it for a living.

As a visual artist, I work mainly with wood and junk.

As the great-grandson of hoodoos, I work folk magic.

These wooden quilts are my way of being with the spirits of my late great elders.

They are also my way of finding a higher purpose for the pile of debris hurricane Katrina left me with. [They] grew out of an impulse to find beauty in the ugliness of one of the worst human disasters this country has ever experienced, and, on a more practical note, to save and rehab my house for me and my family.

Stacy C. Hollander, "Mother Sister May Have Sat in That Chair When She Lived in This House Before Me, 2014" exhibition copy for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020.