Roy Ferdinand

1959-2004 · New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

With poster board and drugstore markers he documented Black New Orleans street by street for fifteen years, and they called him the Goya of the Ghetto.

The life

Roy Ferdinand Jr. was born in 1959 and grew up in New Orleans’ Gert Town, dropping out of Warren Easton High School and passing through a street gang and a stint as a mall security guard. In his mid-twenties, encouraged by dealer Andy Antippas, he turned from drawing fantasy figures to recording the world in front of him: the neighbourhoods, characters, funerals and sudden violence of the city’s poorest wards, where he lived most of his life at or below the poverty line. He died of cancer in 2004, aged 45, the year before Katrina drowned much of the world he had documented.

The work

More than two thousand works on poster board in markers, children’s watercolours and coloured pencils bought at the local K&B drugstore. Tilted buildings, multiple vanishing points and unflinching portraits combine documentary and myth in equal measure. His work is held by the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Crystal Bridges, the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the American Folk Art Museum.

Why we love them

He gave a whole city’s unphotographed life a permanent record, on the cheapest paper money could buy. That is what witnessing looks like.

Go deeper

• Roy Ferdinand at the Outsider Art Fair
• 64 Parishes
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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