As if extracting a ten-by-ten-foot, 1,200-pound wall from a building wasn’t difficult enough, the biggest obstacle New Orleans real estate and hospitality developer Sean Cummings faced when trying to preserve said wall—which features a painting by elusive British street artist Banksy—was fire.
The Looters, one of the few remaining pieces Banksy produced during his blast through Crescent City in 2008, just three years after Hurricane Katrina, depicts a pair of soldiers taking electronics through a trompe l'oeil window. It appeared back in 2013, on the wall of a Marigny warehouse Cummings owns on Elysian Fields Avenue; he then brought it to the New Orleans Craft Guild and began a four-year passion project to remove nine layers of tags and graffiti defacing the artwork…