Unlike the Lenin exhibit, artists for this show were given free rein to use any medium or dimension for their creations. Ferdinand, associated with Barrister's Gallery for more than 15 years, had planned to participate. Cremated after his death, Ferdinand's sister Faye Powell entrusted Antippas with his ashes. "I couldn't think of any place that would be better," says Powell. "Roy's art was his life, and Barrister's was like his second family. The gallery is where he belongs."

Antippas has commissioned two artists who were friends of Ferdinand -- Jeffrey Cook of New Orleans and Renee Stout of Washington, D.C. -- to create an urn that will be accompanied by a display of Ferdinand's artwork, photographs and personal effects. "Voodoo was one of the themes for Roy's art, and he was a practitioner of Santeria," says Antippas. "Anyone who knew him will instantly recognize his personality in these belongings, which in this context could perhaps be called artifacts of the spirit, evoking Roy in the way that the sacred objects of a voodoo altar invoke the deities."

Along with his artist's box and portfolio, black cowboy hat and spurs, Star Trek novels, action figures and videotapes of horror movies will be a sampling of the medical bills that totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time of his death. Ferdinand, who lost his job a year ago, had no health insurance. While he died virtually broke at age 45, his work is part of the permanent collection at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Louisiana State Museum and House of Blues and was featured in the New Orleans Museum of Art's Triennial exhibition in 2001.

"I've been around long enough to know what's good and what's not good, and I instantly knew that Roy was good," says Willie Birch, a nationally prominent African-American artist who nominated Ferdinand for inclusion in the 2001 Triennial. "To me, he was fearless, and that was his strength. Roy will go down as one of the more significant artists to come out of New Orleans. His work is set in a timeframe and will grow in strength as the years go by."

Exploring what he called "the black urban warrior myth," Ferdinand was a self-taught artist with few parallels. Drawn on matte and poster board, his best works offer compositionally sophisticated, realist portraits of life in New Orleans' impoverished black neighborhoods. His images are by turns sweet, sardonic, tragic, bizarre and horrific.

Graffiti is a recurrent motif, with walls and fences covered in the signs and symbols of a violent underworld. "A name crossed out with an ÔX' shows someone killed by a rival gang, a name inside a tombstone is a tribute to a gang member or a friend," he once explained to an interviewer. "A lot of times I use people I've known who've died on the street." His self-portraits showed him as, conversely, a Western gunslinger in a New Orleans ghetto and an artist-revolutionary critiquing the street culture around him. An obsessive fan of horror films, Ferdinand's more imaginative pieces blur the boundaries between truth and fiction while often seeming to glorify the same outlaw mentality and violence he examined almost journalistically elsewhere.

"Death was a continuing fascination for Roy and a major theme in his art," says Antippas. "Much of his work has a gothic sensibility and this may have become more prevalent after his first brush with cancer."

Ferdinand had undergone emergency surgery for an ulcer in 1998 and doctors discovered stomach cancer, which had claimed his mother two years earlier. He recovered quickly, but his personal problems extended beyond his health. He had been homeless for nearly six months in 2000 before he enrolled himself into Responsibility House, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program on the West Bank. After eight months in residence, he checked himself out and began working fulltime for a local hotel company while producing some of his best art. In 2002, he was part of an exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore titled High on Life: Transcending Addiction.

Yet he continued to struggle to make ends meet. For the past two years he had lived alone in an apartment in Metairie, his bid to escape the culture of violence and drugs that he depicted brilliantly in his art and that often surrounded him in the neighborhoods where he had lived.

"Roy could have been book smart if he wanted but chose not to -- he was street smart instead," says his sister, Powell. "When he dropped out of high school and took the GED to join the Army, Roy scored so high they thought he cheated and retested him twice. Roy was a genius. Since he's died we've found out so much about him that we didn't know. It seems like the people who loved him the most were the people who didn't have to, who knew him because of his art."

An often-contradictory personality who could be by turns wildly funny, disarmingly charming, irrationally demanding of family and friends, and tragically self-destructive, Ferdinand left an indelible impression on those who knew him. "He was someone I wanted to hang out with, a very intelligent guy who seemed he could talk about almost anything, very philosophical about things and very approachable," says Cook. "He went places in the 'hood that I would have liked to have gone but didn't, and they accepted him there for what he did. People would say ÔFerdinand, he's the guy who does ghetto art,' but I knew there was always a lot more going on in his drawings and that he was an important artist.

"There was no shame in his game and he told it like it was. Roy was a friend and a person of substance, and it was very important for me to do his urn."

Ferdinand's circle extended beyond New Orleans. Bob Roth, president of the Chicago Reader, knew Ferdinand personally and came to New Orleans in December to attend his memorial service. "I like his work immensely but can't precisely tell you why, just that the first time I saw it, I took one look and said, ÔThis is New Orleans,'" explains Roth, who owns one of the largest private collections of self-taught art in the United States -- including more than a hundred drawings by Ferdinand. "His subject matter is morally askew, and what often makes his style so powerful is that it's also off-kilter, a look that makes it seem weirder, perhaps morally off, which was what his art was about. Roy was something of a legend in his own mind and created this outlaw image for himself -- proud to be a scoundrel -- which of course has a long tradition in New Orleans."