In 2010, a collapsing Creole cottage on Piety Street in the Bywater gave a group of artists an idea.
Rather than demolish it or restore it, what if they used the salvaged wood and raw materials to build something entirely new? Something that didn’t just house musicians, but was itself an instrument?
That question became Music Box Village, and fifteen years later, the answer is still unfolding in the most singular art space in New Orleans.
The project grew out ofNew Orleans Airlift, the nonprofit co-founded by Jay Pennington and Delaney Martin after Hurricane Katrina as a way to get local artists in front of audiences outside a city that had just lost most of its own.
Back home, Pennington, Martin, sound artist Taylor Lee Shepherd, and celebrated street artist Swoon gathered about 25 collaborators to transform that falling-down cottage into eight small musical structures. When the first concerts happened in 2011, they expected maybe a hundred people. Thousands showed up. The idea proved itself immediately.
What they built, and kept building, is a village of houses that are also instruments. Floorboards creak in tuned pitches. Ceiling fans spin to emit whistles and harmonic hums. Windows open and close synthesizers. Guitar strings run as stair railings.
A telephone booth throws a performer’s voice in rotating arcs across the yard. An enormous wind chime shed has each chime labeled by musical note.
Nothing here is passive.
You open a door and sound comes out. You tug a rope and something shifts in the air.
The whole village runs on the logic that architecture and music aren’t separate disciplines so much as two versions of the same impulse, an idea that fits New Orleans as naturally as anything ever has.
In 2016, the village found a permanent home in the former yard of a steel fabrication shop near the Industrial Canal, enclosed by a wall of salvaged sheet metal with 16-plus structures inside.
Since then, the concert program has brought in Wilco, Norah Jones, Solange Knowles, Thurston Moore, the Preservation Hall Brass Band, the Sun Ra Arkestra, and dozens more, all of them performing on and through the houses rather than simply in front of them.
Artist residencies run throughout the year, and recent artists-in-residence include Lonnie Holley, one of America’s most respected contemporary folk artists, who built a musical cage installation as an allegory about freedom.
Public hours run on weekends, with a cocktail bar on site and occasional pop-up performances.
Check musicboxvillage.com before you go for current hours and the concert schedule, as programming changes seasonally.
Music Box Village is operated by New Orleans Airlift, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, and admission runs on a suggested donation basis during public hours.
