L. Kasimu Harris: Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges
L. Kasimu Harris
L. Kasimu Harris is a New Orleans-based artist whose practice deposits a number of different strategic and conceptual devices in order to push narratives. He strives to tell stories of underrepresented communities in New Orleans and beyond. Harris has shown in numerous group exhibitions across the US and two international exhibitions and has had six solo photography exhibitions.
Last year, he was among 60 artists selected nationwide for State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and also had a solo exhibition, Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges: Photographs by L. Kasimu Harris at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. His writing and photographs were featured in ” A Shot Before Last Call: Capturing New Orleans’s Vanishing Black Bars” which was published in The New York Times.
In 2018, his War on the Benighted series was a part of Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories, a group exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
He has penned food columns for the Bitter Southerner. And his essay, The Dismantling of Southern Photography was recently published in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s catalog, “New Southern Photography.” Harris has images in several publications including Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, by Shantrelle P. Lewis by Aperture. Harris’s feature for Edible New Orleans was selected for the book Best Food Writing 2016.
Harris earned a BBA in Entrepreneurship from Middle Tennessee State University and an MA in Journalism from the University of Mississippi. He is on the Board of Trustees at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, as well as the Board of Directors of the New Orleans Photo Alliance, and is a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance and the Antenna Gallery Collective.
Harris was a 2018 Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and is a 2020 Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residence.
Harris was named one of 8 “Louisianians of the Year” for 2017 by Louisiana Life magazine.
Selected Clients
The New York Times, NPR, Vox, HuffPost, Gravy, ESPN’s The Undefeated, The Open Society Foundations
Permanent Collections
New Orleans Museum of Art, The Wedge Collection (Toronto), Center of Photography at Woodstock (New York), and the NOVO Foundation (New York), and the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Do Good Fund, and Crystal Bridges Museum of Art