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Born 1959, New Orleans, LA Died 2004, New Orleans, LA Roy Anthony Ferdinand, Jr. grew up in New Orleans’ Gert Town neighborhood and attended Warren Easton Senior High School, but dropped out before graduating, and lived most of his life at or below the poverty line. He began drawing as a boy, but it wasn’t until his mid-twenties after he’d spent a few years running with a local street gang and then working as a mall security guard, that Ferdinand decided to dedicate his life to art. Without any formal training and using poster board and inexpensive art supplies purchased at his local K&B drug store, he drew fantasy and sci-fi figures. But his conversations in the late 1980s with New Orleans dealer Andy Antippas, whose Barristers Gallery was showing the work of several Southern self-taught artists, inspired the young man to make pictures of the daily life that surrounded him, including the brutal flare-ups of violence that defined New Orleans’ poorest neighborhoods. As he later reflected in an interview, “I realized then that there were hundreds of subjects all around me, the ‘black experience’…basically, our world.” Before his death from cancer at forty-five, the world that Roy Ferdinand created through a body of more than two thousand works was made up of equal parts documentary and mythification, and earned him the nickname “Goya of the Ghetto.” Ferdinand’s work has been increasingly collected and exhibited around the U.S., most notably in the 2008 Prospect.I New Orleans Triennial, where a selection of his drawings was organized by New York dealer Martina Batan (1958-2021). Batan’s later involvement with Ferdinand’s art was the subject of the documentary Missing People (2015) by David Shapiro. Ferdinand’s work is in the permanent collections of, among others, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), the Speed Museum (Louisville, KY), the Pérez Art Museum (Miami) and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), which will present a survey exhibition of the artist’s work in 2023.
