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Acadiana People: New book explores man behind Lafayette’s murals

Bill Decker
Louisiana

If you know Lafayette, you know the murals of Robert Dafford:

• “Ex-Garage,” on which vintage autos power their way up the side of Jefferson Towers, once a parking garage.

• “Till There’s Nothing Left but a Postcard,” across Garfield from Dwyer’s, in which birds and bugs tell a sad story about the state of the Atchafalaya Basin.

• “Expulsion of the Acadians” at Acadian Village, showing British soldiers rounding up and burning out Acadian settlers in Canada.

• “Three-D Prairie” at the Lafayette Children’s Museum. Viewed just so, the Louisiana landscape under moon and stars appears to pop out in three dimensions.

What Lafayette people may not know is that Dafford’s work is known far beyond Lafayette, along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in Mississippi, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and many points in between. As they did in Lafayette, Dafford’s murals have enlivened aging downtowns and restored the bond between cities and their histories.

“We were able to create attractions that had an emotional as well as a historical resonance,” Dafford said. “And also what their community looked like when there was a vibrant life in these downtowns. And they see that it can be like that again.”

Lafayette documentary photographer Philip Gould followed the trail north for more than a year and collected his own photos in a new book, “The Public Art of Robert Dafford.” It was published by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press and made its debut at a book-signing last week at Anne’s Table downtown.

“Overall, I was impressed with the historical murals,” Gould said. “It’s phenomenal how, when you see them up close, you can see not only the size and the grandeur, but the sense of place.”

Dafford said he started drawing at age 5 and got a good art education at Northside High, from which he graduated in 1969. He went to what was then USL with an engineering scholarship for a year before switching to art. Then Dafford was drafted.

He worked as an illustrator and draftsman aboard aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. The work was small-scale and confining, but Dafford was able to see some of Western culture’s most renowned museums, libraries and historical sites.

The experience focused Dafford’s vision for his own future: “I not only realized that I liked to paint bigger things, but that I needed to live a life of creative endeavor. I could never be a nine-to-fiver.”

He came home at age 26, hoping to work in a surrealist mode and explore spatial relationships. At that time, in the 1970s, as Gould notes in his book, a group of young men in Acadiana were leading a movement devoted to preserving and celebrating Acadian culture.

James Domengeaux had already founded CODOFIL on the political front. Now Zachary Richard and Michael Doucet explored and pushed the boundaries of the local music. Barry Ancelet helped turn the culture and folklore of Acadiana into an academic study. Carl Brasseaux would do the same for local history.

People including Phil Lank were trying to put life back into Lafayette’s downtown. But as the 1970s passed into the 1980s, Louisiana’s economy hit bottom, and Lafayette’s downtown became an emptier and drearier place.

“We believed we were going to save the town and revive the culture at the same time,” Dafford said.

The job of telling the Acadian and Creole story visually fell to Dafford, as much as to anyone. Commissioned to create a mural for Acadian Village based on the Acadian exile, he found little material on which he could base an accurate depiction.

“There was no visual record for clothing, utensils, weapons, nothing,” Dafford said. “So I did a little bit of sideways research for what people looked like in 1755.”

Brasseaux, now a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, helped Dafford fill in the historical blanks. Dafford was on a path he’d never intended to walk. He was an historical artist.

Even the downtown murals that aren’t explicitly about historical topics tug at cultural memories. The muscle cars in “Ex-Garage” have Cajun musicians reflected in their chrome. The “premier” portion of “Premier, Dernier et Toujours,” writes Gould, “shows French and English generals playing chess with colonists, ships, properties, priests, soldiers, etc.”

Dafford hopes his art may help Portsmouth, Ohio, embrace its history the way Acadiana has.

Portsmouth is a classic Rust Belt story. The Ohio River city has lost half its 1950 population of 40,000 people with the flight of steel mill and shoe factory jobs overseas. Portsmouth has Appalachian roots, too.

“City leaders, for 50 years, have been conscious of trying to change that image,” Dafford said. “They’re absolutely terrified of being called hillbillies. They haven’t found a way to embrace their Appalachian roots...

“Those questions are answered to some extent in my murals. They’re just ready now to do what the Acadian culture did in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s.”

Those murals were a 10-year project, launched in 1992, that turned into 60 individual works covering 2,200 of floodwall along the Ohio.

“I keep thinking,” Gould said, “that those floodwalls, necessary as they were, were like a Berlin Wall that keeps the people from their livelihood, the river.”

But in the murals, the river becomes a character in the city’s story. That story branches out from riverside city scenes and riverboats to local heroes including movie and TV cowboy Roy Rogers and baseball innovator Branch Rickey, the art deco bus station from the 1930s, workers in the factories and mills that abandoned Portsmouth, downtown scenes, and more.

“Almost every one has a connection with the people who live there,” Dafford said. “It’s not just a storybook image.”

More Dafford murals enliven cityscapes in Maysville and Covington, Kentucky; Port Gibson, Mississippi; Point Pleasant, West Virginia; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; and more. The topics include mound-building Indians and Shawnees in Ohio, civil rights heroes in Mississippi and the antebellum cotton culture of Vicksburg.

Closer to home, Dafford has immortalized Rayne’s status as the Frog Capital of the World and created giant musical instruments: a clarinet on a Holiday Inn’s wall in New Orleans and a harmonica on the Belle of Baton Rouge Casino and Hotel.

Now, Dafford said, he has plans to paint an accordion mural at Abbeville’s City Hall, some small murals in downtown Lafayette and a mural in Metairie showing a boy looking at his own possible future in a floating bubble.

Then it may be time to get back to what he wanted to do at the start of his career.

“I hope to return to the surrealist and illusionist imagery that I set out to paint 40 years ago,” Dafford said.

Reach Bill Decker at 337-289-6327, bdecker@theadvertiser.com or @BillDeckerTDA.