Could artist Jamar Pierre’s Tchoupitoulas Street mural become the longest painting anywhere?

Jamar Pierre says it’s one of the city’s great paradoxes. The Mississippi River is New Orleans’ reason for being. Yet most of the time you can’t lay eyes on it, because the view is blocked. That’s especially true on Tchoupitoulas Street, the Uptown thoroughfare that hugs the river’s edge. All you see on the riverside of Tchoupitoulas Street is a long concrete levee wall.

For the past seven years, Pierre has made that endless gray wall his canvas . With the permission of the Flood Protection Authority and other agencies, he’s been painting a colorful mural on a mile-and-a-half stretch of the flood protection barrier. Currently segments of the painting are scattered from the Walmart to Ninth Street.

Pierre believes it will be the longest mural in New Orleans. It may be a contender for th