Photo by Eddie Robinson
One of Corey Christy's public art projects in Biloxi.
Corey Christy is a Biloxi boy through and through, and even a decade spent in “the deep Midwest” couldn’t change that. “I didn’t realize how unique Biloxi was until I lived other places,” he said. As a Black man, Christy had always felt a sense of welcome in diverse Biloxi. When he left, he discovered it isn’t that way everywhere.
“I was basically ready to return the moment I left,” he said. “The Midwest was fine, and I met some wonderful people, but something was always missing. If you grew up on the water, it’s hard to be happy anywhere else.”
That draw toward home pulled even tighter as Christy watched his beloved Gulf Coast suffer Hurricane Katrina, and then soon after, the BP oil spill. “The things that make Biloxi special are still in place,” he observed. “The people are the same. And I saw it coming back better than it was before.”
Around this time, Christy was working as a promoter for art and music events in Evansville, Indiana, organizing art exhibits, advocating for public art installations, and bringing musical artists in to play around town.
“I don’t regret my time away,” Christy said. By the time he was finally ready to return to Biloxi in 2013, he’d learned a lot about fostering community through the arts. This experience quickly landed him a succession of jobs at cultural institutions like the Walter Anderson Museum of Art from 2013 to 2017, then the Maritime and Seafood Museum from 2017 to 2021, granting him plenty of opportunities to interact with the public and with local leaders.
Photo by Eddie Robinson.
Corey Christy, who has organized numerous public art projects in Biloxi.
It didn’t hurt that he was becoming a familiar face on the local music circuit as well. Shortly after returning home, Christy built up a ten-piece brass band called Black Water Brass. For years, they played gigs around the Southeast and still to this day perform with the Gulf Coast Carnival krewes—now under the name Gulf Coast Second Line. “We even march with the Jefferson City Buzzards in New Orleans on Fat Tuesday where we play for millions of people in one day,” he said. “That’s really something!”
Christy started to get more involved in a civic sense, becoming a board member at the non-profit Biloxi Main Street Association (for which he served as president in 2020 and 2021) as well as other city and coastal boards promoting local culture. In 2019, he launched the Biloxi Main Street Association’s Public Arts Project—seeing it as an opportunity not only to support local artists, but to revitalize Biloxi’s downtown.
Christy began building the Public Arts Project slowly, organizing art shows in abandoned downtown buildings. “Out of the six buildings where we held shows, five were soon under contract,” Christy said. “These old buildings have great bones and tons of character and our goal was to help people see that.”
“The idea behind the murals was to bring art to the people, to increase foot traffic downtown and benefit businesses, to celebrate Biloxi’s history, to offer work to local artists, and to brighten up what was a pretty abandoned-looking downtown.” —Corey Christy
To enhance the refreshed downtown’s aesthetic qualities, Christy next turned his sights on commissioning murals, inspired by those he’d seen on trips to Mexico. The night he first presented the idea to the Main Street board, citizens who’d never attended a meeting before turned up to show their support.
“I feel like people want to experience art, but not everyone is going to go to a museum or gallery,” he said. “The idea behind the murals was to bring art to the people, to increase foot traffic downtown and benefit businesses, to celebrate Biloxi’s history, to offer work to local artists, and to brighten up what was a pretty abandoned-looking downtown.”
The first artist he commissioned refused to take money for his work. “He finally consented to let me pay for the paint.” Christy did so out of his own pocket. Then, the second mural artist not only refused payment but made a donation toward the next mural. Since then, Christy has received mural funding from individual citizens, as well a handful of grants and donations from the Hard Rock Café, Harrison County Board of Supervisors, and others.
Today, the fruits of his efforts are thirty murals displayed on buildings along a one-mile stretch now called the Rue Magnolia Arts District. Some celebrate the culture of Biloxi by featuring shrimp boats and shrimpers, alligators, and magnolias; and others paying homage to local celebrities such as "The Hermit of Deer Island" and longtime downtown business owner Miss Inez. The impact is more than just aesthetic though; each of the buildings Christy has installed murals on has since been leased by a business.
Photo by Eddie Robinson.
One of the public murals in Biloxi
When I visited, I saw a family posing in front of a postcard-style “Greetings from Biloxi” mural on the corner of Howard Avenue and G.E. Ohr Street and two young women taking turns photographing each other in front of a Mardi Gras headdress mural on the back of the Coastal Mississippi Mardi Gras Museum facing Martin Luther King Boulevard. Christy showed me advertisements for downtown business which prominently feature the murals on their buildings.
With Christy’s help, Biloxi’s Rue Magnolia Arts District is now off and running. When we met, it was in one of the formerly boarded-up storefronts, now a funky coffee shop called The Greenhouse. Across the street, Christy pointed out a vacant lot. “There were two burned-out buildings on that lot that had been a neighborhood eyesore for years. We placed an interactive sculpture there which motivated the owner of the buildings to have them razed, and we began attracting hundreds of people to art nights on ‘The District Green’.” Now under new ownership, the property will soon be home to a mixed-use building for the spot with shops on the bottom and apartments on top, within sight of at least four of Christy’s murals in the now walkable, bikeable, revitalized downtown.
For his contributions to Biloxi, Christy’s city has thanked him with two Fire Soul awards, the Design Award, the Visionary Award, a Mississippi Main Street Trailblazer Award, a Governor’s Initiative for Volunteer Excellence, and Biloxi Volunteer of the Year for Arts and Culture. He’s still hard at work on his mural project, which he sheepishly admits he never wants to end, and continues to hold positions on the boards of Biloxi Main Street and Gallery 782. “I owe this to the city,” he said. “It’s the least I can do to give back and make others feel as welcome here as I always have.” And a couple of times a year, Biloxi residents and visitors can find Christy at Fly Llama Brewing doing what he loves most: playing funk music with his band, The Karate Kids.
