Studio BE

The story

Before Brandan 'BMike' Odums took over this 36,000-square-foot industrial warehouse on Royal Street, he was painting without permission inside abandoned housing projects. In 2013, his painted portraits of Black leaders inside the blighted Florida Avenue public housing complex (#ProjectBe) drew illegal crowds before city bulldozers tore the buildings down. He followed that with #ExhibitBE in 2014 at a derelict apartment complex in Algiers. Studio BE, opened in 2016, became his first legal, long-term sanctuary—a space big enough to host building-scale spray-paint portraits without the constant threat of a demolition crew.

Inside, scale is the entire medium. Odums doesn't frame canvases to hang on drywall; he turns bare brick and corrugated steel into towering portraits of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and everyday Black New Orleanians. Figures rise 30 feet to exposed roof rafters, layered alongside physical artifacts: stacks of vintage school desks, suspended footwear, old luggage, and basketball hoops draped in fabric. The layout forces you to keep changing your gaze, craning your neck up at monumental likenesses and then looking down at hand-scrawled text etched low near the concrete baseboards.

What makes Studio BE distinct isn't just its floor space; it's the experience of standing inside a physical archive of local memory, grief, and civil rights history that skips standard gallery conventions entirely. There are no slick white walls or brass stanchions keeping you back. You walk directly past echoing steel columns while ambient soundscapes play, moving through rooms where spray paint bleeds right off the walls and into three-dimensional installations.