style tribes

Inside the Queer, Diverse New Orleans Art Scene

Photo: Aubrey Edwards

Flat-screens will be tuned to New Orleans this weekend as the colorful frontier town hosts Super Bowl XLVII. But beyond the Superdome, French Quarter, and beaucoup plastic beads, the city’s Marigny-Bywater neighborhood celebrates style that ESPN is unlikely to chronicle. Think plastic spiders, earrings made of pit bull bones, and enough leather to make Alex Wang blush, all worn by members of the House of Templum — an electronica-listening, queer-leaning, racially diverse art collective that congregates at house parties and creates new work in ragtag neighborhood studios.

The Cut sent reporter Katie Van Syckle and photographer Aubrey Edwards, a member of the scene herself, to catch up with the Templum crew partying upstairs at John Paul’s Bar on Elysian Fields. With Carnival season in full swing, the divas were rocking DIY Halston frocks, Kelly Rowland–inspired drag, and in some cases, what they’d been wearing for the past three days. In the post-Katrina revival of N’awlins, anything goes.