"MIMI OF BATON ROUGE"

Opening its doors in 1949, the Lincoln Theater at Myrtle and Eddie Robinson Drive in Baton Rouge was one of just three major theaters the African American’s could attend. “For 75 cents”, Peggy Bates with the Louisiana Black History Hall of Fame told WAFB, the black-owned business provided “hope in a time where hope was hard to come by.” Closed in the mid-80s, the theater once again tried to make a go of it between 2000 and 2007. In 2014, in the midst of renewed efforts to rehabilitate the theater, Australian artist Rone made a stop in his U.S. roadtrip to paint this wall. Describing his work as the friction point between beauty and decay seems a particularly poignant description for this lovely portrait of Mimi, a girl then living just two doors away from the boarded up property. Sadly this wall has now been covered with metal siding, and the challenges facing this neighborhood continue.