Rodrigue Gallery: The Unveiling

In 2009, George Rodrigue purchased a centuries-old four-story brick building on Royal Street in New Orleans and set out to transform its expansive ground-floor space into his ideal one-story gallery. Although Rodrigue had maintained a gallery presence on Royal Street since 1989, this building purchase marked the first time the artist would fully own his exhibition space. The new roughly 3,000-square-foot gallery was approximately three times larger than his previous location.

Rodrigue spent months meticulously remodeling the space to meet his exact specifications. When the gallery opened in 2010, he released the silkscreen print Rodrigue Gallery: The Unveiling to celebrate the realization of a career-long dream.

Rodrigue Gallery: The Unveiling takes the gallery space as its subject matter. The print features at its center a Blue Dog draped in a red cover-up. The partially covered Blue Dog is a visual motif Rodrigue used in earlier prints and paintings with titles such as Hiding From The Blues and My Security Blanket. In this context, viewers might imagine the cover-up in the process of being removed and the Blue Dog being unveiled in its grand new home.

Rodrigue included several real-life elements in this silkscreen print. The rug the Blue Dog stands on is a digitally modified depiction of an actual rug that adorned Rodrigue’s studio floor. To achieve a true likeness of the rug in the print, the artist photographed it and then adjusted the image on a computer until it fit harmoniously into this gallery scene.

Additionally, the print’s background includes depictions of two real paintings hanging on the gallery walls. The painting featuring the bust of the Blue Dog is from 2008 and titled Strong Family Tree, and the painting showing the full-body Blue Dog in a landscape setting is from 2009 and titled A Beautiful Place. Created just before and during the acquisition of the new gallery, these two works subtly foreshadow the dramatic scale evolution that would define the final chapter of Rodrigue’s career. With the significantly larger footprint and tall walls of his new flagship ground-floor gallery, Rodrigue was finally able to paint on a much larger scale than ever before. Many of his works from 2010 onward reached impressive dimensions—some stretching four by six feet or larger, and others up to nearly ten feet across—fully embracing the architectural possibilities the grand new space offered.

Ultimately, Rodrigue Gallery: The Unveiling is a reflective print. It acknowledges a specific moment in Rodrigue’s career but also speaks to the years of relentless hard work it took for the artist to accomplish a long-held goal. Originally released as a signed silkscreen edition and unavailable to the public for over a decade, Rodrigue Gallery: The Unveiling has now been estate-stamped to complete the unsigned portion of the edition, offering collectors a way to reconnect with this trajectory-altering moment in Rodrigue’s artistic legacy.