ARTIST IN RESIDENCE – Fall 2024
Pronouns: (he/him)
Photo by Ariel Wilson-Harris, Courtesy of the artist.
“The crux of my approach as a visual communicator was developed in print journalism, fact-driven, and the quest for truth remains paramount to all facets of my storytelling. However, art has allowed me the freedom to explore, examine, and recreate factual events or issues that are not permissible in the news. That strategy is best reflected in my constructed realities, where I examine social justice issues in the African-American community. They are a means for visual and psychological studies to examine racial disparities and the imbalance that pervades class, education, and neighborhoods.”
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 eight solo photography exhibitions.
His series, Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges, (2018 – present) has been featured in solo exhibitions at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and at the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana. Harris’s writing and/or photography on the series has been included in several publications, including Wildsam Field Guides: New Orleans: 2nd Edition, Stranger’s Guide and most notably for “A Shot Before Last Call: Capturing New Orleans’s Vanishing Black Bars” in The New York Times. He was one of 49 artists selected globally for Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home, a city-wide triennial in New Orleans, November 2 to February 2, 2025. He is set to debut work from the series that explores Black bars & lounges from a national and international perspective.
Harris has penned essays published in a number of books including Best Food Writing 2016, New Southern Photography: Images of the Twenty-First Century American South, and he was the photo essayist for the Prospect. 5 Catalogue, Yesterday we said tomorrow. He was selected as a 2018 Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and a 2020 Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residence, as well as being named one of 8 “Louisianians of the Year” for 2017 by Louisiana Life magazine and the 2022 Documentary Photographer of the Year by Louisiana Endowment of the Humanities.
Harris’s 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, in 2018. He was among 60 artists selected nationwide for State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and was in the 2021 Atlanta Biennale, Of Care and Destruction.
Most recently, Harris was the unit still photographer for Academy Award nominated Nickel Boys, a movie directed by RaMell Ross and based on the Colson Whitehead novel.
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, and is a member of the Antenna Gallery Collective.
Harris’s work can be found in these Permanent Collections:
New Orleans Museum of Art, The Wedge Collection (Toronto), Center of Photography at Woodstock (New York), the NOVO Foundation (New York), Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Shops at the CAC (Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans), The Do Good Fund, The Four Seasons Hotel New Orleans, and Crystal Bridges Museum of Art.
Find Kasimu on Instagram: @visionsandverbs
