In a world dominated by millennial gray, flat-screen TVs, and fleeting trends, Andrew LaMar Hopkins, an artist and antiquarian, is a defiant exception. His rooms, like his renowned paintings, don’t whisper; they serenade. Rich, detailed, and immersive, his interiors feel as though they’ve slipped from a more grand and beautiful time.
Step inside one of Hopkins’s spaces—whether it be his 1830s Royal Street apartment, his Savannah pied-à-terre, or even a borrowed Airbnb in the Marais in Paris—and you’re transported not just to another era, but to a wholly different way of seeing. In Hopkins’s world, every object holds lineage, every brushstroke carries archival weight, and beauty is inseparable from history. It’s a continuous thread, stitched by a master conjurer: part historian, part designer, part visionary Creole storyteller.
Born in Mobile, Alabama, Hopkins grew up in a 1970s ranch-style house where modern furniture coexisted with nineteenth century heirlooms inherited from women in his family who had served wealthy white households. “There was always something old with a story,” he recalls. “That mix of modern and antique made me who I am.”
Before most kids mastered riding a bike, Hopkins was frequenting Mobile’s antique shops, charming dealers into teaching him about Empire and Federal styles and investing his allowance in battered porcelain and frames. “I’ve always wanted to live surrounded by the past,” he said.
That early passion for history led Hopkins to his first career as an antique dealer. In his early twenties, he co-founded a store on Magazine Street in New Orleans called Antiquités Les Olivier, eponymous of a storied Creole family whose portraits he adored and visited at the Historic New Orleans Collection. His hand-painted rendering of the Olivier sisters even served as the shop sign. He says the store represented “all I ever wanted; a beautiful home filled with the things I love.”
When the antiques market saw a drop, Hopkins, a self-taught artist since childhood, began painting more, visualizing stories he couldn’t find in textbooks, stories of the Louisiana Creole people—free, often wealthy people of color in the nineteenth century who frequently owned real estate and lived in and around New Orleans.
Painting primarily in acrylic on canvas, often in miniature, Hopkins brings to life this rich, multiracial, multilingual culture. His work masterfully captures and reimagines Creole life, presenting it through bold colors and obsessive detail that blends architectural and historical precision with his own personal identity. His outsider folk art style nods to Clementine Hunter and Horace Pippin, but his work is uniquely his own. It’s cultural reclamation, revealing the elegance, complexity, and diversity of the Creole narrative with a contemporary twist—unapologetically lush and whimsical, yet historically anchored.
It wasn’t long before collectors started noticing. Eventually, the shop gave way to the road, Hopkins pursuing art fairs and antique shows alike, while nurturing an emerging painting practice that ultimately catapulted him from the Tremé to the front page of The New York Times in 2020. That same year, the National Gallery in Washington D. C. acquired his self-portrait as “Désirée Joséphine Duplantier”—an alter ego he adopts in both his paintings and his life, blurring the lines between performance, identity, and history. In the summer of 2022, Hopkins earned further acclaim when a prestigious show at Stanford White’s Isaac Bell House in Newport, Rhode Island, featured “Creole Brother and Sister,” a portrait of children painted into a background of luxurious wallpaper holding a book, indicating their wealth, education, and social status.
Hopkins acts as a reanimator of cultural memory. His paintings of praline vendors, calas sellers, and artists outside St. Louis Cathedral capture a moment in time in the history of Black Louisiana. It’s a story that has largely gone untold, until now. This work has secured him prominent national and international gallery representation in Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, New York, and New Orleans (including at Orleans Gallery, which—full disclosure—this author owns).
Hopkins draws on his background as an antiquarian and self-taught historian. His paintings are filled with period interiors, rendered with radiant precision, whether it be the inlay of a cypress armoire, the bricks on a historic building, or the clothing of a Creole free woman of color. Inspiration for his artworks draws heavily on death inventories, family archives, and the collective spirit of the Gulf Coast. “When people died in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Louisiana, they left incredibly detailed inventories,” Hopkins explains, “down to the twelve pairs of socks in the upper drawer of a worn cypress armoire.”
From these records, Hopkins reconstructs entire worlds, both on canvas and inside his homes—his art practice and his interior design sensibility inseparable. Among his collection are antique faience apothecary jars and French confit pots—vessels not only displayed in his home but also immortalized in his paintings. And like his paintings, his interiors bristle with giltwood frames, silk upholstery, cypress and mahogany furniture, and Old Paris porcelain. “I don’t just make up rooms,” he says. “I recreate what was.”
But Hopkins doesn’t just display his antiques, he lives with them. If you’re lucky enough to attend one of his famed soirées or Holy Thursday gatherings, you’d get a peek into his world: gumbo Z’herbes warmed on the stove, served in the same porcelain that graces his canvases and always a marvelous dessert with "real French champagne."
As such, Hopkins’s homes function as living tableaux—repositories of Creole material culture and expressions of his aesthetic worldview. “I don’t do comfortable,” he laughs. “I do beautiful.” Friends know better than to question the dainty, period-upholstered furniture or the impractically petite Louisiana beds.
“People sat on this furniture for 200 years,” he says. “If it was good enough for aristocrats, kings, and queens, it’s good enough for you.”
Hopkins’s encyclopedic knowledge of antique forms is matched by his ability to breathe life into them. “A great house evolves,” he says. “You move in with a few things from the 1820s, add treasures from the 1850s, and one day realize—this is how people lived. Not a Pinterest board, but layered, personal, lived-in.”
Standouts from his collection include tortoiseshell boulle cabinets, Louisiana cypress armoires, Parisian Empire clocks, 1830s pianofortes, and hundreds of pieces of Old Paris porcelain, sourced from estate sales in the Garden District of New Orleans, brocantes (or flea markets) in France, and auctions worldwide.
But amidst his maximalist interiors, the crown jewels of Hopkins’s spaces remain his paintings, which are masterclasses in visual storytelling. He and his artwork are not concerned with trends or conventions: he resurrects history, reclaims beauty, and invites the world to join him. In each piece, Hopkins illuminates histories of Creoles, free people of color, and LGBTQ+ life in the antebellum South. He renders this life in exquisite, historic detail and thus reclaims the past, daring the rest of us to catch up.
When asked, “What’s next?”, Hopkins responds: “I see high-end scarves, luxury bags, my paintings on silk and leather walking down Madison Avenue. I want a Creole artist in Bergdorf’s.”
In an era obsessed with speed and novelty, Hopkins offers something singular in life and art: a world where time slows, rooms sing, and beauty is always on display.