Big Chief Demond Melancon in the 2019 documentary All on a Mardi Gras Day.
In His Mardi Gras Suits and Beadwork Paintings, Demond Melancon Creates Compelling Tensions between Representation and Opacity
Emily Alesandrini’s ARTnews feature examines how Demond Melancon negotiates representation and opacity through the painstaking materiality of beadwork. Once a laborer in New Orleans, Melancon now beads full-time, reflecting, “I can’t live without my beads. I can’t wait to get up in the morning to do this work.” As Big Chief of the Young Seminole Hunters, he constructs suits that can weigh over 100 pounds and require thousands of hours to complete, summoning ancestral presence through what he describes as a-koo-chi-mali.
Alesandrini situates his practice between performance, painting, and sculpture, noting how Melancon considers himself in dialogue with artists like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Kerry James Marshall. His beaded portraits—depicting figures such as Tina Turner and Harriet Tubman—“wow” viewers with their virtuosity, yet parts of his Mardi Gras suits remain intentionally concealed until revealed in the street. “Who are the Indians? We walk on water and can’t get wet,” Melancon says, underscoring the layered meanings embedded in a practice that moves between land and sea, body and gallery, spectacle and sacred knowledge.
