A Conversation with Katie Bowler Young, Author of Enrique Alférez, Sculptor

I met Katie Bowler Young at a workshop at the National Academy of Sciences. When she posed a question to one of the speakers, she mentioned that she wrote a biography. During a break, I asked her about this aspect of her life. (She was there in her professional capacity with RTI International.) I learned that she wrote a biography of Mexican sculptor Enrique Alférez, in addition to writing poetry and fiction.

After the meeting, we emailed back and forth a bit. As you’ll read below, she told me about Alférez’s life and art; her process to research, write, and select images for the book Enrique Alférez, Sculptor; and her tips about writing amidst holding down a full-time job and raising a family.

Q: For people like me unfamiliar with your subject, who was Enrique Alférez?

Enrique Alférez was a 20th-century Mexican sculptor who helped shape the visual landscape of New Orleans. He was born in Zacatecas in 1903. After service in the Mexican Revolution as a youth, he emigrated to El Paso; studied in Chicago, where he contributed to art deco architecture; and, in 1929, made his way to Louisiana.

For nearly 70 years, he lived and worked in New Orleans. His lasting imprint is seen among figurative sculptures, monuments, fountains, and architectural details from the Central Business District to the Lakefront Airport and beyond. He was drawn to the human figure, to the female figure in particular, and he worked across many mediums. He wanted to present human emotion in his sculpture.

By the time of his death in 1999, he had become the most celebrated sculptor in New Orleans. In my writing about him, I make connections between Alférez’s art and homeland, international outlook, and Indigenous Nahua heritage.

Woman in a Huipil (a huipil is a ceremonial tunic embedded in Indigeneous Mexican textile art). Photo CreDit: Donn Young.

Q: Where can you see his art in New Orleans today? Are residents aware of who he was and how widespread his work is throughout the city—and sometimes controversial?

La Soldadera, located in the Helis Foundation Enrique Alferez Sculpture Garden. Photo Credit: Donn Yong.

Q: Alférez gained agency as an artist early in his career in the city, most notably his contributions to City Park. The park underwent an expansion and revitalization in the 1930s under the WPA (the Works Progress Administration, renamed the Works Project Administration), and Alférez was hired as lead sculptor. His influence on the park is extensive: architectural detail on bridges, fountains, figurative sculpture. The park grounds include the New Orleans Museum of Art and the New Orleans Botanical Garden, which is home to the Helis Foundation Enrique Alférez Garden today, with an extensive collection of his figurative sculpture, several of which have been donated or loaned by community members. While the city widely celebrates his influence, he isn’t as well-known as he should be outside of New Orleans. 

How he was received varied across time and geography. His work was met with controversy on multiple occasions, including around the design of a bridge wing wall in City Park, on which he represented people who worked at the park. He included Black figures at a time when people of color were banned by White society from enjoying the park, a restriction that remained in effect until 1958. When he received blowback to including the figures, he insisted that he was representing those who indeed worked there, and who he worked alongside of. He rebelled against racist social constructs and created art that reflected the public more broadly. His making monuments to the people who built City Park was a radical act at the time.

Q: What drew you to write his biography?

A: When I was a student at the University of New Orleans in the mid-1990s, I was going through a very difficult time. Alférez’s Fountain of the Four Winds was close to campus, and I would go there in between classes for solitude. Even by then, the fountain was decaying. Little by little, though, I wondered how it had gotten there, and its story. I made note of the marker that said Enrique Alférez and returned to the university library to learn more about him. Over the following decades, I collected material – recordings of interviews, ephemera, news clippings – but didn’t set out to write his biography. My writing life took more shape over those years, too.

Fountains of the Four Winds was Katie’s entree into Alferez’s art and, eventually, his biography. Photo Credit: Donn Young.

I mentioned my material to an editor at the Historic New Orleans Collection, and she asked what I was doing with it. When I responded that I was collecting it, she said, “But you’re a writer!” This led to discussions with the Collection, and ultimately to a contract to write Alférez’s biography.

Q: Talking to his daughter Tlaloc in New Orleans and Mexico sounds amazing. When in your research journey did you meet her and how did it help you write about her father’s life?

I met Tlaloc Alférez after committing to write the biography. Because I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I initially reached out by phone and then sent her a letter by mail. The moment she invited me over the threshold of her home is one of the most remarkable moments in my life: I was immediately surrounded by more of Alférez’s figurative sculpture and drawings than I had ever seen at once.

 Tlaloc provided unrestricted access to the family papers and has shared countless hours talking about her father’s art—which was her family’s work. She arranged for my visit to their family home in Morelia. She has been instrumental in preserving her father’s work and in my ability to write this biography.

The Alferez home in Morelia, Mexico. Photo Credit: Donn Young

Q: Did you record the conversations? How was she involved in writing the text and/or selecting photographs?

I recorded many conversations with interview subjects, including Tlaloc and other contemporaries of Alférez. Tlaloc did not have an editorial role in my book—there was independence in writing and selecting images. One of the unexpected experiences I had when researching was sharing details of Tlaloc’s father’s life with her that she did not know.

Tlaloc Alferez (L) and Katie Bowler Young in conversation at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Photo Credit: Donn Young

Q: His wife Peggy was a force of nature, and died tragically because of nature, Hurricane Katrina. How did you come to realize her important role in Alferez’s legacy?

A: I was aware of Peggy’s influence before I met Tlaloc, because she had a key role in managing Alférez’s business and therefore appeared in interviews and other research materials. But when Tlaloc provided access to her family papers, I recognized Peggy’s awareness of the importance of preserving records. The family papers were primarily Peggy’s papers. I’m confident she knew they would be meaningful to researchers in the years to come. She saved everything: library cards, receipts for raw materials, guest books at exhibitions, correspondence, photographs. These papers need professional archiving today.

Peggy didn’t evacuate for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The night before the storm, she shuttled Alférez’s artwork away from windows and to higher ground, and by morning she had collapsed beside her bed. She never recovered, and I believe she died as she lived her life, protecting her husband’s legacy and art.

Q: About your process for researching—what was most surprising in your search? Any obstacles and how did you work around them?

A: There were so many types of surprises.

Factual surprises, such as finding documentation of Alférez’s birth year, contradicting many published accounts, and his immigration record, which contradicted his public accounts about his interest in becoming a naturalized citizen (he spoke of one attempt but there were several).

Personal surprises, such as the joy of connecting with Alférez’s contemporaries like Jack Davis. I had known of Jack as a journalist who interviewed Alférez, and I enjoyed meeting him and learning more about his enduring friendship with Alférez. The network of people I met, who gave generously of their time, was an essential part of the research. Frankly, it also made my life more interesting.

One of the other surprises was how I questioned the value of information: whether it should or needs to be revealed, why or why not, when if so, and so on. These questions are essential drivers of a biography and have shaped my writing in other genres too, including poetry and fiction.

Q: Related to the photographs in the book---a wonderful array of him and of his work. Was it always the plan to make this a larger sized book and include so many images? How did you and/or the publisher decide what to include?

A: As I researched, I identified specific images I wanted to use in the book, as well as bodies of images that I wanted to draw from. When we neared the design stage, I shared these images with the publisher and we began a process of determining permissions, quality of image available, and so on. Editor Dorothy Ball, designer Alison Cody, and I also had several discussions about principles of the book, which carried from the text through to the design. Alison researched and found some remarkable photos, and she was invaluable in coordinating permissions from archives, museums, and other organizations.

The Bather. Photo Credit: Donn Young.

Q: On your website you note that you set aside a weekday evening and weekend morning for non-professional writing. All of us who have “other” jobs try to figure out the best way to be creative and productive. How do you make that work?

A: The practice of my writing life has changed over the decades, but the discipline I developed when my daughters were toddlers has continued. At the time, I was working full-time, going to graduate school full-time, and juggling commitments to family. I designed a schedule that arranged my writing into the times of day that I have been most effective at these tasks; reading, for example, in the evenings, and writing early in the morning; using weekend mornings for writing and revising.

One of the newest patterns to emerge is that once a month I meet a writer friend in a coffee shop on a weekend morning and we dedicate a few hours to writing administration. We begin the conversation with our goal for the day – submissions, revisions, creating packets to draw from for submissions, file organization, and so on – and then work quietly and independently in a place that’s a center of activity in our community. We wrap up the morning describing our accomplishments to each other. In the weeks leading up to our work session, I start planning for the tasks I want to accomplish. Having that end-goal in mind applies to larger projects too and helps me stay focused on the milestones to get there.

Q: The inevitable question--What are you working on now?

A: I have three manuscripts in development: a poetry collection that’s nearing completion, focusing on the effects of incarceration on families; a collection of short stories set in a fictional town in southern Louisiana; and a novel. I don’t think I would have considered writing a novel if it hadn’t been for the experience of writing Alférez’s biography, when I needed to understand the many places and times in which he lived, over the course of nearly a century.

As the biography was going to press, I had a conversation with playwright and writer Kira Obolensky about the experience of containing so much time and place in one manuscript. She introduced me to Elinor Fuch’s essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” about world-building in theater, and this started driving my interest in containing a more complex set of storylines on a single stage, so to speak. My novel spreads across three generations in one family and four in another, as their lives intersect in brief but consequential ways over the course of seventy-five years. Writing the biography became a step in being able to imagine this much time and place in one story.

The Historic New Orleans Collection is a museum, research center, and publisher in the French Quarter that is open to the public. As one example of Alférez’s legacy in New Orleans, the Helis Foundation’s outdoor music series, held at the New Orleans Botanical Garden in City Park, is called “Evenings with Enrique.”

You can read more about Enrique Alférez, Sculptor and Katie Bowler Young’s poetry and other work on her website.