The nightclubs, bars and restaurants of Frenchmen Street, the usually buzzing entertainment strip, are forlorn these days. Their windows and doors are blindfolded with blank plywood panels during the coronavirus shutdown.

At least the panels used to be blank.

“Seeing everything boarded up was, like, weird,” said artist Josh Wingerter, who set out to bring a little life to what had become a stretch of ghost town.

Now, instead of unadorned wooden sheets, passersby will find Wingerter's graffiti-style portraits of Jimi Hendrix, Dr. John, Audrey Hepburn, Frida Kahlo, the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, the Hubig’s Pie man, Saints football star Cam Jordan and a dozen other instantly recognizable pop icons arrayed along the street.

He calls it “a drive-thru art gallery” tailor-made for the era of social distancing.

It follows that the most captivating of Wingerter's paintings have a playful coronavirus-era theme. In his portrait of Louis Armstrong, the legendary jazzman wears blue rubber gloves and has placed a face mask over the bell of his trumpet. Another painting portrays piano virtuoso James Booker wearing a T-shirt that warns us to keep separated by six feet.

On the boarded windows and doors nurses have become soaring superheroes, Andy Warhol’s famous grid of soup cans has become a grid of toilet paper rolls, the smiles of smiley faces are obscured by personal protective equipment and Mr. Rogers attempts to lend a sense of calm.

Wingerter, 34, said he doesn’t have “direct permission” from every Frenchmen Street business owner to paint on their properties. But “the owners I bumped into were cool about it,” he said.

The Café Negril Facebook page includes a photo of one of the paintings with the caption, "Thank you Josh Wingerter for adding some brightness to Frenchmen Street.”

Only one business owner he encountered asked him not to paint, he said. Anyway, he’s just painting the plywood, not the property, so he’s confident he’s not hurting anything. “Worst case, I’ll buy the plywood,” he said.

Wingerter certainly isn’t making a secret of his guerrilla painting project. On a sunny Monday afternoon, he and his five-person crew were an attraction on the otherwise quiet street. He said that as an artist, he feels like it’s his duty to “put something in the air that isn’t fear or negative.” The painting on Frenchmen Street was his “chance to do a good thing.”

Passersby seemed to agree.

“It’s really awesome,” said Heather Autin, as she walked by toting a bag of groceries. “It’s a breath of fresh air in all of this. It’s inspiring that people are still doing their craft.”

“I think it’s great,” said Brigette Bruno, who paused on her bicycle to look at the art. “I mean, when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.”

“One of my favorite things is all the commentary I get out here,” Wingerter said as he painted.

Wingerter grew up in Westwego and attended L.W. Higgins High School. He’s always had an aptitude for art, he said, but at UNO he studied business, which led to a nine-year career as a Home Depot manager. In his spare time, he made paintings using stencils and spray paint. Eventually, he said, his artworks began selling off the walls of coffee shops, from a booth at the Frenchmen Art Market and recently the prestigious Art Basel festival in Miami Beach. He works swiftly and confidently.

“I’ve done thousands of paintings,” he said.

As Wingerter stenciled the boarded entrance to a popular chicken restaurant, a New Orleans Police Departmnt patrol car stopped momentarily, then slowly rolled on. A gray-haired bicyclist offered to sell pot. And a passing panel truck driver cried out, “The coronavirus is a hoax!”

Nate Jones, who was photographing the painting project for Wingerter, said his 82-year-old grandfather in on a ventilator because of the virus.

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Wingerter knows his paintings may provoke mixed emotions in some onlookers, but his intentions are to be upbeat.

“The (plywood) panels are a defensive thing,” he said. “I’d like people to feel a sense of comfort; that they’re not just being pushed away. So maybe a walk home isn’t so confining.”

Wingerter said his “art campaign” is spreading. On Tuesday, he said, he planned to head to the French Quarter, where the owners of Royal Street art galleries have invited him to stencil their boarded-up windows.

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