What We Do

The New Orleans Master Crafts Guild seeks to revive the traditional building trades traditions of New Orleans and provide apprenticeship training for new generations of master craftsmen through the use of cooperative business practices.

The Guild pursues three primary strategies to realize this:

– Apprenticeships to train new generations of master craftsmen with the skills to earn sustainable wages;

– Capacity building for independent master craftsmen to grow their businesses through cooperative marketing, technical assistance, and employee training;

– Cultural engagement to promote the indispensability of New Orleans’ unique building arts traditions through demonstrations, cultural events and collaborations with high profile artists.

Apprentices receive high-level training in the architectural preservation trades from the region’s best master craftsmen. Two skill tracts are currently offered:

• Trowel Trades – ornamental and specialty plastering, masonry and tile setting and
• Ironwork – welding and blacksmithing.

Master Trainers

Jeffrey M. Poree, Sr, a fifth-generation plasterer and patriarch of the legendary Poree family of plasterers, is owner of Jeff Poree Plastering in New Orleans. The Poree family is legendary for their exceptional skills in ornamental exterior and interior plaster, artistic molds and specialty finishes, including old world Venetian and exotic finishes. Jeff Poree Plastering maintains a full time art department and can restore almost any mold by working from fragments, photographs or drawings. Mr. Poree is the plasterer of record for many of the region’s most important restorations of historic sites, including the historic New Orleans Collection Williams Research Center in the French Quarter and the Peristyle in City Park.

 Jeff Poree Plastering
4437 St. Louis Street, New Orleans
LA 70119

504-944-2855

jporeeplastering@yahoo.com

Instagram: poree_plastering

Darryl Reeves

Darryl Reeves, a third generation metal worker, is owner of Andrew’s Welding and Blacksmith Shop in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward. Regarded as a natural, Reeves is well known for his creative contemporary steel and brass staircase railings and furniture, and is revered for his historic restorations of antique iron work at historic sites. His public commissions include the restoration of the ornate fence at the Presbytery in Jackson Square in the French Quarter, fabrication of a new identical fence (using old techniques) for its sister building, “The Cabildo,” and the disassembly and reconstruction of the massive gate at the Chalmette National Cemetery which dates to 1872.

Andrews Welding and Blacksmith Shop
1873 Agriculture St.
New Orleans, LA 70119
504-944-5941

ablksmth@bellsouth.net

www.neworleansblacksmith.net

Apprenticeship Training

The New Orleans Master Crafts Guild is reviving centuries-old apprenticeship training in the building trades. We are training  new generations of highly-skilled master craftsmen who will be required to build and maintain the distinct architectural landscape of New Orleans.

Basic training is followed by apprenticeship placements with a skilled craftsmen based on demonstrated interest and skills. Each participant will work full-time as an apprentice to a local skilled craftsman for at least six months. Program participants who successfully complete the six-month apprenticeship program will have the opportunity to continue for another six months and advance into assistantship positions.

Master Craftsmen Business Development

The New Orleans Master Crafts Guild assists master craftsmen, who typically work as independent contractors to successfully navigate the administrative and structural challenges in the restoration and construction economy and grow their businesses. This is done through a suite of business development and marketing services for NOMCG members.

Cultural Engagement

The New Orleans Master Crafts Guild develops cultural engagement activities to raise the profile of its members, and to increase community understanding, appreciation and demand for their building arts skills and products.

Cultural engagement activities across the community include: exhibits, oral histories, demonstrations, workshops, tours, presentations and symposia.

Board of Directors

Jonn Ethan Hankins leads the daily implementation of the New Orleans Master Crafts Guild as its founding Director. He previously held the positions of Executive Director of the New Orleans African American Museum, Development Director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Foundation, and Principal Development Officer for Corporate and Community Affairs at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). At NOMA, he directed, “Raised to the Trade: Creole Building Arts of New Orleans,” an award winning exhibition and oral history research project that documented two centuries of families of master craftsmen who built and still maintain New Orleans’ unique architecture. Mr. Hankins has advocated for and lectured to apprentice trainees on the need to revive traditional building trade skills in a post-Katrina New Orleans beset by what has been described as “a lack of traditional building skills in the local population and a low quality of rebuilding that threatened New Orleans’ character” by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales Foundation for Building Community. Mr. Hankins, who holds a BA in Journalism/Advertising and a Masters of Business Administration, has served on the boards of related organizations, including the Louisiana Folklife Commission, the Louisiana Landmarks Society, and the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans.

Darryl Reeves, a graduate of Epiphany School and a third generation metal worker, is owner of Andrew’s Welding and Blacksmith Shop in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward. He is a board member of the New Orleans Master Crafts Guild and serves as a primary spokesperson, membership recruiter, apprenticeship host and trainer. Growing up in a family of metal workers, Reeves worked at his father’s awning company, but was first inspired to be a blacksmith by his maternal grandfather who worked on St. Emma Plantation near Donaldsonville, LA. Reeves apprenticed under noted master blacksmith and furrier William “Buddy” Leonard. Regarded as a natural, Reeves is well known for his creative contemporary steel and brass staircase railings and furniture, and is revered for his historic restorations of antique iron work at historic sites. His public commissions include the restoration of the ornate fence at the Presbytery in Jackson Square in the French Quarter, fabrication of a new identical fence (using old techniques) for its sister building, “The Cabildo,” and the disassembly and reconstruction of the massive gate at the Chalmette National Cemetery which dates to 1872. Mr. Reeves has trained apprentices for over two decades, including as a master instructor for the “Rebuilding Communities” Apprentice Programme, a collaboration of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wale’s Foundation for Building Community, the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, and Delgado Community College.

Jeffrey M. Poree, Sr, a graduate of Epiphany School and a fifth-generation plasterer and patriarch of the legendary Poree family of plasterers, is owner of Jeff Poree Plastering in New Orleans. He is a board member of the New Orleans Master Crafts Guild and will serve as a primary spokesperson, apprenticeship host and trainer. Poree grew up in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward during a time when it was the tradition to pass down centuries-old trade skills from one generation to the next. Poree learned from the best. His father supervised the plasterers in the construction of the Superdome, a testament to the respect for an artisan of color at that time. The Poree family is legendary for their exceptional skills in ornamental exterior and interior plaster, artistic molds and specialty finishes, including old world Venetian and exotic finishes. Jeff Poree Plastering maintains a full time art department and can restore almost any mold by working from fragments, photographs or drawings. Poree is the plasterer of record for many of the region’s most important restorations of historic sites, including the historic New Orleans Collection Williams Research Center in the French Quarter and the Peristyle in City Park. Jeff Poree is the standard bearer for maintaining venerable ornamental plastering traditions of New Orleans.

Teresa Parker Farris, PhD, is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University. Teresa Parker Farris works on race and representation in the U.S. South. Her Tulane dissertation focuses on antebellum silhouette portraiture, in particular depictions of African-American slaves. The former Deputy Director of Tulane’s Newcomb Art Museum, she holds an M.A. in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi and a B.A. in English Literature from Haverford College. Her writings have appeared in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana, and numerous museum exhibition catalogues. Teresa is a trained folklorist and, since 2010, has chaired the governor-appointed Louisiana Folklife Commission.