This Saturday, August 8th, art galleries up and down Royal Street will open their doors for Dirty Linen Night, the French Quarter’s biggest summer celebrations of the visual arts.

The evening began over a decade back as a spoof on the CAC’s White Linen Night (which takes place every year exactly a week prior) but it’s since evolved to become a large-scale cultural phenomenon of its own. It’s always a great time to find that perfect new piece for your place, and what’s more, the musical performances, tasty food samples, and featured alcohol specials offered at tons of the galleries create an extra-festive atmosphere.

Hordes of art voyeurs will be out and about in their best soiled linen, as tradition dictates that participants wear the same whites (unwashed) that they sported the week before.

“It’s really kind of a celebration of what Royal Street can be at its best,” said Taylor Lyon, owner of Graphite Galleries (926 Royal). “Everyone puts on a brand new show, kicks open the doors, and there’ll be thousands of people walking around. It’s one of my favorite nights of the year on Royal Street… So many of us are doing are own thing, it’s hard to get a ‘gallery night’ together. This is the one night where we can all work in unison.”

Graphite Galleries will bring in over 30 new pieces for the event, creating a kind of “best of” of their most regular artists.

“I don’t do a lot of one-man shows here. For me, the whole tenet of what Graphite Galleries is about is showing how you can put together a lot of very disparate work and make it all tell a story,” Lyon said.

The artists he’ll showcase this weekend include Joshua Chambers, whose narrative pieces incorporate “misremembered quotations” and address how we place ourselves as characters within the timelines of our own memories, and Moneybags Wellington, who uses iconic cartoons superimposed over images of money to subtly question the way society commodifies culture.

In addition, he’ll display Michael Hance’s new “White Series” of multimedia face/eye paintings (“The way he blends them together and makes them work so coherently, you aren’t feeling like you’re looking at four different mediums”) and the unique paintings of Lidia Altagracia. One of Altagracia’s works, “Pepe de Un Jeme,” features a pint-sized, spaghetti-western style hooligan brandishing a pistol while riding a rodent.

“She does these strange, whimsical characters, and I think, for me, the reason I’m attracted to her work is that you’re seeing… the artist out of time,” Lyon said. “There’s very little reference point to what she’s doing.”

This is only a sampling of what will be available at Graphite, and there are countless other venues in the area that will be teeming with stunning works. Off the top of his head, Lyon recommends Orange, Nadine Blake, Red Truck, Antieau, Tresor, and Harouni as other galleries to scope out.

“Every time a new gallery opens up, I want to do a happy dance.” he said. “I think it’s amazing to have a street like this, and I don’t think there’s much like this in the world.”

“I think what I also like about [Dirty Linen] is that this is a very ‘locals’ event,” he continued. “And the locals don’t get down to the Quarter very often. There’s a million reasons why we all stay in our own neighborhoods, but here they get to see what we are and what we’re about… I think the culture of the Quarter continues to change and evolve. Years ago, there was not that much new, cutting edge, contemporary art down here… I’ve been in this space for six years, watching it really start to happen. And now it’s here. It’s no longer a thing that’s beginning to happen. It’s happening.”

In addition to the artwork, Graphite will offer complimentary local craft beers made especially for the event by Scott Wood of Courtyard Brewery (1020 Erato Street), a new hot-spot for micro-brews.

So, put on your finest dirty whites, brave the heat, and come down to Royal Street to see everything the galleries have to offer (air conditioning, for one…).

The event officially runs from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., but, as Lyon said, “I’ll be here til at least midnight… it’s a great night to meet and greet, and to get excited about art again!”

“I think New Orleans remembers to celebrate its culture,” he summer up, “but there’s always another chance to do it again!”