10-Year Anniversary Poster Series
As part of an ongoing collaboration with Nine Times Social & Pleasure Club, the Neighborhood Story Project created a series of posters to celebrate the clubs’ ten-year anniversary parade. The posters included text and images from their book, Coming Out the Door for the Ninth Ward, to highlight the history of the Desire, the founding of the club in 1998, and the commemoration of the 2008 parade. Starting with five members, the men’s division has grown to include 21 members.
Over 600 copies of the posters were put up along the second line route for parade-goers to admire and take with them as momentos. The next day, all the posters were gone.
Click on the images below to view each poster:
It was a city within a city.
That's where our smoke is coming from
Bringing it back
The colors for the parade (and the posters) were chosen to honor George Washington Carver Senior High—the Ninth Ward public school just down the block from the Desire Public Housing Development where the majority of club members attended high school. As Raphael Anthony Peter Parker writes in Coming Out the Door, “Carver brought together forever friendships, some new families, and a great big community.” This community was out in force for the 2008 parade. The Neighborhood Story Project hosted a stop on the route at Tanya Solomon’s house on St. Claude, which was featured in the NSP book Between Piety and Desire, by Arlet and Sam Wylie. For more information, see our slide show of the parade, which traces many of the connections between the Desire, Carver, the making of Coming Out the Door, and the Neighborhood Story Project. This project was supported by Transforma Projects/National Performance Network thanks to generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts.