The Bayou Collection
Walter Anderson Museum of Art
Ocean Springs, Mississippi
George Rodrigue’s “Bayou Collection” opens August 10, 2026 at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Organized by the LSU Museum of Art, this traveling exhibition highlights forty paintings created by Rodrigue between 1981 and 1984. Rooted in surrealism, this astonishing body of work provides a window into Rodrigue’s extraordinary imagination and features many of his favorite subjects, including Jolie Blonde, Evangeline, Jean Lafitte, and the Petro Brothers, all reinvented by Rodrigue as protagonists within his painted ghost stories.
Most significant, Rodrigue’s “Bayou Collection” includes his first painting of the loup-garou, a Cajun myth known to Rodrigue since childhood. As he explained, unlike the word’s literal translation from French, the loup-garou myth, as told to Rodrigue by his mother, was not a werewolf or shape shifter, but rather a “crazy wolf” or “ghost dog” that lived in cemeteries and frightened bad children.
Just as he modeled his human subjects on family and friends, Rodrigue based the shape and perspective of his loup-garou on photographs he had taken years before of his beloved studio dog, Tiffany.
Although Rodrigue himself described the painting, called Watch Dog, as “unremarkable,” or no more outstanding than the rest, the art took on a life of its own. Watch Dog ultimately became Rodrigue’s most famous work, as the unmistakable spark of his Blue Dog Series.
Exhibition continues through January 9, 2027. For more information visit https://www.walterandersonmuseum.org/thebayoucollection
Press:
- WLOX
George Rodrigue ‘Bayou Collection’ opens at Walter Anderson Museum of Art
08/10/2026
By Hunter Ezelle