Drawing from this history and his expertise as an antiquarian, Hopkins carefully researches the architecture, material culture, and daily life of Creole populations in Southern cities circa 1830.
Andrew LaMar Hopkins paints meticulous, lush, minute depictions of 19th-century interior scenes and architectural set pieces based on the histories of free Creole people in New Orleans, the city he has called home for over a decade. Growing up in Alabama, Hopkins was particularly fixated on the Southern Creole culture to which his family is linked and which the Civil War largely erased; Hopkins can trace his lineage to a major Creole family, descended from Nicolas Baudin, a Frenchman who received a Louisiana land grant in 1710. Drawing from this history and his expertise as an antiquarian, Hopkins carefully researches the architecture, material culture, and daily life of Creole populations in Southern cities circa 1830. The self-taught Hopkins' pictorial compositions visually recall the paintings of Clementine Hunter, Grandma Moses, and Horace Pippin. Rendering interiors and exteriors with exquisite detail and depicting both free Creoles of color and white Creoles, Hopkins deconstructs and reimagines an idealized antebellum history of Southern port cities—often injecting overtly homosocial scenarios or obvert references to queer culture that excavate the often repressed histories of LGBTQ people in the antebellum south. Likewise, these queer characters echo Hopkins'sown biography and his parallel practice as a drag queen: his alter ego, Désirée Joséphine Duplantier, is a retro grande dame from New Orleans.