"A Bayou State of Mind"
LSU Musuem of Art
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Sept. 11, 2025
In Louisiana, George Rodrigue’s iconic blue dog is an easter egg that only crops up more when you’re actually paying attention. You’ll find him in the living room of a friend’s home or hanging in the office you work in or on a postcard/sticker you pass on the street. As a transplant who moved here in adulthood, I’ve never really understood it. It’s part of the cultural tradition that I’m aware of and even participate in, even though I don’t fully feel part of it.
“A Bayou State of Mind,” an exhibit at the Louisiana State University Musuem of Art, is meant to reflect this culture through a “tapestry” of different experiences. The exhibit features 120 objects from different artists including photography, painting, sculpture and more. In its program language and layout of the gallery, the LSU MOA tries to forefront the work of Black artists in this exhibit, but despite these attempts, in the actual gallery space, the focus falls on the “Bayou Collection” by George Rodrigue (1944-2013) and its particular portrayal of the state and the now iconic dog painting that changed his life’s work.
The Bayou Collection is a series of 40 paintings originally created to accompany ghost stories by author Chris Segura. In the LSU MOA exhibit, the paintings are situated in the back rooms, so people have to walk through other work in the exhibit to see it. Only one of the paintings contains the iconic blue dog that Rodrigue has become known for. The oil on canvas paintings are darker, in a united color palette of muted blues and greens, and feature figures who look somewhere between person and ghost.
According to museum plaques and a documentary trailer playing in the background, Rodrigue always said that he painted not what Louisiana looks like but “what Louisiana feels like,” and this selection of Rodrigue’s work reveals a Louisiana haunted by history and tradition.
Rodrigue’s iconic dog has been called his “Campbell’s soup can,” and this collection features the first blue dog he ever painted. The dog, I’m surprised to find, is a ghost too. He was modeled after photos of a beloved studio dog, Tiffany, who had passed by an artist who was capturing the Cajun culture he felt was disappearing. The blue in “The Watchdog” (1981-1984) is more muted than in subsequent iterations. It’s based on a loup-garou, the Cajun werewolf he was warned about as a child. “The Watchdog,” despite its inspiration, looks more scared than intimidating.
But seeing the dog in its original context changed my perspective on its subsequent iterations. In a 2013 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, which plays in part at the exhibit, Rodrigue talks about the dog as “a vehicle to comment on life today.” The dog, he said, is bewildered to be looking at us, sitting in the same position with the same expression even as the background around him changes.
As a resident of Louisiana, I identify with the dog, bewildered but still here. Rodrigue passed away in 2013, so he couldn’t have anticipated the state of our country in 2025. But all these years later, the blue dog is still staring out with eyes wide open.
