Organization
House of Dance & Feathers
Also known as: HODF
Backyard museum in the Lower Ninth Ward dedicated to the Mardi Gras Indian / Black Masking tradition, second-line social-aid-and-pleasure-club culture, and Skull and Bones gangs of New Orleans — founded by Big Chief Ronald W. Lewis (1951–2020), a lifelong Lower Ninth resident, longtime streetcar maintenance worker, and Big Chief of the Choctaw Hunters Mardi Gras Indian gang. Lewis built the museum in the small wooden shed behind his house on Tupelo Street; after Hurricane Katrina destroyed it in 2005, it was rebuilt with volunteer help in 2006 and operated until Lewis's death from COVID-19 in 2020. The museum continues under family stewardship as one of the principal continuing sites of Mardi Gras Indian and Black-Masking material-culture documentation in New Orleans.
What's happening now
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Practical
The museum is open by appointment. Address: 1317 Tupelo Street. Suggested donation; no one turned away. Visits are typically guided by family members or the volunteer staff Lewis trained.
The collection: hundreds of Mardi Gras Indian suit pieces (beaded patches, crowns, feathered headdresses) made and worn by Lewis and other Big Chiefs across decades; [[second-line|second-line parade]] memorabilia (sashes, fans, photographs); Skull and Bones gang costumes and masks; dance-video documentation; and the working tools of suit-making (beadwork frames, feather-cleaning equipment, fabric stash). Many of the pieces are signed and dated; visitors can see how a single Big Chief’s work evolved across 40 years of annual sewing.
The museum’s premise — Lewis articulated it many times — was that the Mardi Gras Indian tradition is a working, continuing culture, not folklore. The suits get sewn each year. The chants get sung. The chiefs meet on Mardi Gras Day and St. Joseph’s Night. The museum exists to show outsiders what is happening, but the practice itself is happening with or without the museum.
Lewis appeared in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke (2006), David Simon’s Treme (HBO, 2010–2013), and Dan Baum’s Nine Lives (2009). His memoir The House of Dance and Feathers: A Museum by Ronald W. Lewis (2009, with photographs by Aubrey Edwards) is the principal published primary source on the museum and Lewis’s life.
See also
Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.
- Shares approach with: [[lower-ninth-ward-living-museum]]
- Member of: [[organization]]
- Contained by: [[new-orleans]]
- Contains: [[mardi-gras-indians]]
What links here, and how
Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.
Cultural
shares approach with
- Backstreet Cultural Museum the two principal Mardi Gras Indian and Black-Masking culture museums in the city; Backstreet anchored in Tremé, HODF in the Lower Ninth
- Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum the two principal neighborhood-led culture-and-history museums in the Lower Ninth Ward; complementary lenses (historical archive vs. continuing Mardi Gras Indian craft tradition)
shares substrate with
- Congo Square the Mardi Gras Indian masking tradition is a direct descendant of the Congo Square drumming-and-dance gatherings; HODF documents the continuing tradition
- Second line second-line and Mardi Gras Indian masking are the two principal continuing African-American performance traditions of New Orleans; HODF documents the visual-material side
contained by
- Mardi Gras Indians the museum founded by Choctaw Hunters Big Chief Ronald W. Lewis is the principal continuing public documentation of the tradition
contains
- New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian and Black Masking culture museum in the Lower Ninth
parallels
- The hand as tool Big Chief Ronald W. Lewis spent decades sewing suits and teaching the work to younger gang members; the museum exists to make the practice visible, but the practice is in hands
7 inbound links · 3 outbound