Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges: An Interview With L. Kasimu Harris

David Schalliol: As we discussed, I’m especially interested in your work “Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges,” where you express the promise and precariousness of these places of Blackness in a gentrifying and demographically changing city. I wonder if, by way of introduction, you could talk a little bit about your relationship with the city of New Orleans.

L. Kasimu Harris: I was born and raised in New Orleans, and I always had the good fortune of parents who believed in exposure. I traveled outside of New Orleans while living here until I started college. College was in Tennessee, Middle Tennessee State University, and I had the scenic route of college, from 1998 to 2004.

I moved back to New Orleans for the summer in May 2005. After a year-long stint as an assistant store manager at Walgreens I spent the summer traveling to Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C. I started graduate school at the University of Mississippi in August, days before Hurricane Katrina.

This project and a lot of my work in graduate school was essentially a constant reconciliation of the New Orleans that I remember, the New Orleans that is, and the New Orleans that it’s becoming. Most times, they didn’t reconcile. It’s an internal struggle, did you make this memory up? Did this memory really happen? And it’s more traumatic when, a lot of times, you don’t even have the physical space to refer to.

And that relates to the Black Bar project. Sometimes the physical space of a bar could remain, but there were no vestiges of history. A restaurant that would have closed would have a record: if it was reviewed, if they had a cookbook… The restaurant lives on in more than just memory. But for one reason or another, no one ever took the time to write about these bars and document them in a deliberate way and over an extended period. When I started doing my research, I realized that the bars only had a record if the bar owner died—an obituary—or if a crime happened—a news report. They just vanished; no fanfare when they close, no substantial documentation of its existence.

But I jumped a little bit here. I would say that one of my greatest strengths as a storyteller relates to being from New Orleans, moving away, and then Hurricane Katrina happening. But even before all of that, I just always had this fascination with this city, a reconciliation of memory, and reconciliation with fascination. Then, Hurricane Katrina—those traumatic events—are driving me to constantly document and preserve the city.

DS: I want to talk about documentation in a little bit, but before then, I’d like to discuss one of the subjects that came up in your conversation with Dawoud Bey. You described one of your first experiences with Black bars in New Orleans as connected to both music and family. And combining the power of sound and kin in one place seems like a powerful way to be introduced to something. Could you share one of those experiences? Because it seems like a really important part of the way that you’re connecting with that kind of memory, presence, and future all at once.

LKH: The first time I went into a Black bar was with my mother and my sister—my late mother, Eartha Harris, and my sister, Rahsaana Ison. Rahsaana, we have different fathers. Her dad was Richwell Ison, a cool dude, a military officer, a lawyer, and he was in both the Air Force and the Army. He was also a jazz trumpeter.

I grew up in a musical family. On the weekends, he is playing with his band, Richwell Ison and Kirk Ford Experience. One evening, they played at this bar called the Winnah’s Circle. For years, I thought it was “Winner,” as commonly spelled. It’s, “Winnah’s.” The Winnah’s Circle is still there, but the name has changed. Now it’s named Seal’s Class Act bar near St. Bernard Avenue and Galvez Street in New Orleans. It is still a Black bar.

Winnah’s Circle is important because my sister and I shared a free enterprise teacher, Sylvia Crier, who is still alive. My sister graduated high school in 1989. We’re talking about when we were in a bar in the ’80s. Sylvia owned the bar then, while still a schoolteacher. I graduated high school in 1997. Rahsaana would go to sit in with her dad’s band. I have a dad who’s also a musician, so I don’t know why they just didn’t leave me at home with him. We were in Winnah’s Circle, and that’s the first couple times I went to a Black bar.

Fast forward to 1995, I think I’m 17 years old, and now I’m playing trumpet as well. It’s the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (Jazz Fest) in New Orleans, and we go to this bar called Little People’s Place. Jazz Fest is on the last weekend of April and the first weekend of May in New Orleans, and some of the most iconic musicians will be here in the city. One thing about real musicians, whether it’s Stevie Wonder, Prince, Wynton Marsalis, or Roy Hargrove, a lot of times, these virtuosos want to play more after they perform. Wynton and a lot of people from his band, and people from the Charles Mingus Band and Kermit Ruffins, who had the gig at Little People’s Place in Tremé—which is still there—met up there for a jam session. Little People’s Place is small. It’s the size of a quaint living room. I’m in there, I play my trumpet. Wynton played these Monette trumpets that are really, really heavy. After a while, he asked to play my horn, a Bach Stradivarius, much, much lighter. And I said, “Yeah,” and then after a song or two, this guy pulled me to the side and said, “Hey, I bet you ain’t never heard your own sound like that, did you?” I was like, “No sir, I have not.”

Those things just stuck with me; it was banking information before I even knew I needed it.

DS: Oh, amazing! And, so, when you return to New Orleans and start to imagine this project, how do vanishing Black bars and lounges emerge from that relationship?

LKH: Great question. In graduate school, I came across Birney Imes’s work, his iconic series Juke Joints, and I just loved it. That, coupled with Roy DeCarava, was important. Sometime after graduate school, I bought one of DeCarava’s books, The Sound I Saw, and experienced his relentless documentation of Harlem. You have this white guy documenting Mississippi and a Black guy documenting Blackness in Harlem. It just made me think back to my childhood memories. I’m like, “Damn, I could do this.” I grew up in Black bars; it’s pretty natural.

But it was a project I wrote in my notebook and thought that I had forever to do it, because Black bars were so ubiquitous here. Soon I realized that would be very, very wrong.

DS: This takes us back to your reference to the importance of documentation. The idea for Black Bars and Lounges, then, is motivated by that desire to document combined with your family and musical history, that latent memory of the experience of the Black bar. Is that the thing that initiates the project for you?

LKH: I would say so. Adding to that, you still have to think about Hurricane Katrina, where you have just this city drastically changed in several days, and then the rebuilding process that looked very different. You had the then-mayor C. Ray Nagin, saying New Orleans was going to be a “Chocolate City” again. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. New Orleans may have had Black neighborhoods, but how much Black ownership did you have in the neighborhoods? You had systematic things in place with the Road Home program, and the way money was distributed to people trying to rebuild their homes was very inequitable, along racial lines. You have the swaths of land where Black people once resided, laid barren.

You have that, and I did my thesis project all on New Orleans culture. It took me three years to graduate from graduate school. I set out a semester after Katrina and then went back; all my research was on New Orleans and culture. And when I would return to New Orleans, to these second lines that I’ve been going back to as a child; I just remember that it was so different. It was less dancing, and far more gawking.

I always say New Orleans has this interesting relationship with its own culture, where it promotes it and benefits off of it, but it doesn’t invest in it. You had people in the New Orleans Police Department that had a contentious relationship with the culture, Black Masking Indians, and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, each throwing a second line for a total of thirty-five to fifty Sundays during the second line season, from late August through mid-June. New Orleans was very spontaneous, particularly in Tremé, when it was majority Black. Tremé is one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in America. It still exists, and it’s right next to the French Quarter. If a musician died, you already have a neighborhood full of musicians, so it was nothing to just come out and start to celebrate. The police department started to really cut back on those cultural traditions. Some of those events got physical, and obviously, police will win, because they have the authority to arrest. So much so that the Southern Poverty Law Center got involved, and I remember some of the early second lines where they had lawyers that had neon hats and vests on to signify that “if you need help, I’m here to help.”

I remember the moment where it hit me, years later. I was hanging at a friend’s house, this had to be 2017, and I heard a brass band on a Saturday. Again, in New Orleans culture, the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs parade on Sundays. Every Social Aid and Pleasure Club has its own day: one day a year. And then, if they do have a second line on a Saturday, it’s probably a funeral, or a wedding, or a birthday party, so I’m like, “What is going on?” I walk down the street and go into this Black bar I had never been into before. It was called Next Stop, I believe. I took a 15-second video. Then, maybe a year later, I go back, and now that Black bar is painted black or cobalt gray, and it was completely devoid of Blackness. It was called The Goat. Instead of selling beers that Black people typically drink, like Michelob and Bud Ice—all made by white people, but I guess people's palates are different—now they’re selling PBR and IPAs. I don't drink PBR, but I love an IPA… So, anyway, I just realized how drastically, how quickly it changed.

Going back to my earlier point, I couldn’t find any reference of the previous bar, other than that it was permanently shuttered. It was then that I looked around in this street, on St. Bernard Avenue, where they had a multitude of Black bars, like seven or eight. Only one remained. All those Black bars had turned white. It was a lot of build-up, but that was the thing that got me upset and made me want to go back to some of my childhood memories and start to figure out how many Black bars are left.

DS: The image of Tremé and trying to return New Orleans to the “Chocolate City” is related to something I wanted to talk about: the way that Blackness is commodified in the popular image of New Orleans. You see it in the touristic elements of Mardi Gras or how the neighborhood of Hollygrove gets linked to and sold via Lil Wayne. I wonder, how do you see Black bars in relationship to that public image of race in the city?

LKH: I don’t think you do. A few years ago, I wrote an essay for some magazine, maybe Wildsam, about a staycation at the Roosevelt Hotel, with my wife, Ariel Wilson Harris. Being from New Orleans, you like to see how New Orleans represents itself, and we saw that the concierges perpetuate overlooking Black New Orleans businesses and recommending bad restaurants. I’m not saying it’s their directive, but it’s through the concierge where you are welcomed into New Orleans. You come from the airport, or you drive in from the road, that’s the first stationary voice you see.

They give lists that are just devoid of anything Black, even the iconic restaurants like Dooky Chase, where presidents have actually eaten; Martin Luther King Jr. ate there, and James Baldwin, and Ray Charles, among so many other luminaries. You have Compère Lapin by Nina Compton downtown, and there’s also Willie Mae’s Scotch House; both are James Beard Award-winning restaurants in “tourist safe zones.” Even these restaurants that are revered within the culinary industry are not recommended.

In these so called “safe zones” is where government officials and the tourism leaders want the visitors to typically remain. These Black bars that are not in safe zones don’t even stand a chance of being marketed to tourists. But the Black Masking Indian Culture, the Black Hand in a Pot, happy Black people, all of those things are being sold. And it’s going to be some of the things that are advertised to entice you to New Orleans. But once you get here, that’s not what they’re going to sell you.

These places were typically neighborhood bars. As the demographics of the neighborhoods have changed, you don’t have that same customer base anymore, as well as changing wants and needs. Some younger Black people want other things. I even went through this, where after a while, I wanted more than just a highball, more than just a Jack and Coke. I wanted a well-balanced cocktail; that’s usually not the program of most Black bars. I’m not saying that they can’t do that. There’s a newer generation of Black bartenders who are being properly trained and going through programs like Turning Tables and could make any kind of drink. How that leads back to the topic of tourism is if you have a shrinking neighborhood, you need to get business from elsewhere, but it’s never been promoted.

DS: Relative to that—and I know you’re not thinking about your work as selling Black bars in this kind of way—but how do you see your documentation fitting into that public narrative, and the community experience of the Black bar and lounge?

LKH: Initially, when the project was published in The New York Times in 2020 and started getting acquired by museums, I thought it would just save the bars, and it would just create this awakening. That didn’t happen. It didn’t, at least not to the extent I imagined. I know this project has raised awareness. But Black bars are still closing.

Where I see myself now is multifaceted, an entry point to someone who may not have known these places existed. Maybe you see it in the Museum of Modern Art, and now, when you come to New Orleans or you go to Chicago or Pittsburgh or Los Angeles, these places that have Black bars, you would perhaps feel more comfortable.

Even for me, unless you’re just a certain type of person—some people are just adventurers, a lot of people are not—my point is, I’m Black and I could go into a Black bar, and I have a little anxiety. Actually, I don’t even have to assign it to race. I could go into any new bar, or any new place… A lot of people have issues going into museums because it can be intimidating. They don’t want to feel uneducated, or vulnerable with something they may not understand at the moment. Perhaps, after seeing the Black bar in various contexts you are more apt to experience it.

And then the other part, the third part, is advocacy: looking at Black bars in different ways, and ways to sustain and thrive. Situating them as a place that is more than drinks by talking about the need for that third space. Because those places are going away too. You still have barbershops, but Black churches are shrinking. Black people’s places to gather are dwindling.

I look at it that way, and I also try to encourage the bar owners to think about the way forward, for succession plans or being intentional on who they sell to, because the windfall of money could be good to them, but it’s probably not as much as you think. If you sell your building for $700,000, after taxes, what do you get? How many children did you have? But what’s the cost to the culture?

DS: Thinking about that culture and the way that you’re sharing a viewpoint of it, I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about the way that you photograph. One of the things that’s clear to me is that you’re intentionally striking this balance between portraits of the inhabitants of these bars along with wider images of the bars themselves. How do you choose the way that you want to represent these bars and lounges photographically?

LKH: One is always in the best light, just first and foremost. That’s the through line. I’ve never seen anyone inebriated in a Black bar, but if someone was in there, I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in a messy bathroom. I’m not interested in anything like that. I’m interested in telling a full story of the place. You know, the place is also a character. The people are a character—and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. They have a narrative that I want to share. And some of it is just thinking about visual rhythm, visual variety.

One of the first things you learn in photography is wide, medium, and tight—tight being details. I typically start off wide, just warming myself up into the room, and then I go in tight, and then I pull back for some medium shots. Then it’s a cycle. The closer I get, the more comfortable I am with someone and the more comfortable they are with me, so when you see close shots, you know that I’ve established a rapport with someone. In a technical way, that’s how I look at it, but it’s also a feeling. You’re not going to be tight on somebody where there’s not that connection or respect for space. They have the invitation, the “Okay.” You know, not like, “Get the hell away from me.”

That’s how I look at it. It’s very technical and very, very emotional, too.

DS: For sure. Earlier you referenced this idea that you have a little anxiety about walking into a bar you’re not familiar with. How has your relationship with Black bars changed through working on the project? That could be about a specific bar, but could it also just be about Black bars and lounges in general.

LKH: I like how different they are and how similar they are. In Pittsburgh, a lot of the Black bars in the Hill District have islands for the bar. The bar is in the middle. Black Beauty on Center Ave, which is about fifty years old, was recently renovated, and their bar is not an island anymore; it’s up against the wall. In New Orleans, just about every single bar is up against a wall. I was in the Living Room Lounge in Los Angeles, and it looked like a Black bar in New Orleans to me. It just looked the same; the vibe was the same, and throughout the African Diaspora, in these Black watering holes, the thread of Blackness is very interconnected. That has just increased my love for Black bars.

Looking at all these places and going to all these different bars has also helped me see some things that bars could do to try to increase their clientele. As of late, here in New Orleans, most Black bars have at least one night where it will be very populated. Then, most of the other nights, it might just be people trickling in, but it might be a steak night, it might be a two-for-one drinks night. Those nights are crucial to their success.

But the biggest takeaway is that they all work in silos. Black owners are not talking to each other; they’re not sharing information; they’re not doing anything together. One of the things that I’ve been iterating in my head is to try to bring people together. I was a school teacher after graduate school, and I would come home complaining to my dad. I’m like, “Man, you know, I don’t feel like I’m reaching these kids.” He would say, “Man, success for you might be if you reach two or three people, if you really help change their life.” And I’m thinking, like, “Damn, it’s thirty kids in the class!” Success for me is not having every Black bar in this co-op, but we get two, we get three, then success will build slowly from that.

DS: I love the idea of having that social mission with that additional advocacy element. I see how that could emerge from your work.

Before we talk about something a little bit different, your references to Pittsburgh and Los Angeles point towards something I wanted to ask. Last year, you were invited to make work about Black bars in Detroit. Since your personal history is such an important part of your work in New Orleans, can you share more about your relationship with Detroit before working there? In one of your statements about that project, you reference how Detroit was “mythical” in your mind. I wonder how having more of a relationship with the mythos of Detroit than its day-to-day life affected the work.

LKH: Well, anytime you work outside your city, it’s going to be different. I’ve heard Ryan Coogler, the director of Black Panther and Fruitville Station, talk about this. He said when he directed Fruitville Station, he had a shorthand for the city because he’s from Oakland. You just understand the city. You know it. You don’t have to do as much research. He said when he went to direct, I think it was Creed with Michael B. Jordan in Philadelphia, he had to do so much research, because he just didn’t know the city. He wanted to get it right. That’s how I felt about Detroit; I have these mythical ideas of what Detroit was, but I knew that Detroiters are very particular. They’re not trying to be everybody else—those shirts that came out, “Detroit vs. Everybody.” It was intimidating in a sense to try to really learn the city. My connection to Detroit is from a curator, Allison Glenn, who grew up in Detroit and went to Wayne State. Because of the timeline for the project, to be honest with you, I got there, and I didn’t even get a chance to do a site visit. I just got there and had to start making work. From my journalism background, it’s not hard at all, but there’s this thing called “parachute journalism” that I never liked. It’s like, how to not be that. You got these deadlines you have to hit. I missed three flights that day, I’ll tell you that, and I was in the airport for two of them. I’m not someone who suffers from anxiety. But I got there. One of the things I do, I just put this interesting thing on myself. For every bar I shot, I photographed, I’ve done it the first time going. I do enjoy having to build a quick rapport with someone—either the bar owner, a bartender, a strong patron, or a regular—and I was able to do that in Detroit.

The first place I went to was Jolly Old Timers. It looks like a house, an old Greek Revival house with beautiful columns in the front and just a little neon sign. It was a members-only club. You can’t just go there; you still have to know a member. The second place I went to is Cutter’s Bar & Grill in Eastern Market. It’s a Black bar, but because of where it is, not in a Black neighborhood but an area with other bars and shops, it’s just like any bar. They serve burgers; they have an extensive bar menu; and was newly renovated. In the Eastern Market, on some Saturdays they have plant day. It’s just a lot of people there in the area.

The last bar I went to was Zell’s Corner. We were driving after dinner and the opening of The Sea and the Sky, and You and I, a group exhibition curated by Allison Glenn at The Shepherd and presented by Library Street Collective. I spotted it from the car and immediately said, “Stop. Stop the car.” I had my camera with me, so we went in. At first, I thought, “I don’t think I’ll make work here.” I’d already had a couple of cocktails and felt content. I wasn’t quite feeling the vibe, and I didn’t necessarily want to shift into work mode. Then, someone tapped me on the shoulder: “Hey, someone wants to talk to you.” I went over to the DJ booth. The guy I met said, “Oh, so you’re the picture man—the cameraman?” “Yeah,” I replied, “but not like you think.”“What you mean?” he asked, slightly offended. I pulled out my phone and showed him my work. His whole demeanor changed. “I’m the owner of this place, man—and I love what you’re doing. Feel free to take anything.” That was my entry into the space. From that moment on, everything shifted.

DS: I wonder: You mentioned the physical differences between bars in Pittsburgh and bars in New Orleans. Did you notice any social or cultural differences in the bars in Detroit?

LKH: They could still smoke in Detroit. At least in Zell’s Corner, they were still smoking. I remember in Pittsburgh in 2020, they were still smoking. That’s a game changer. I smoke cigars, but cigarette smoke is nothing like it—it’s terrible. That was different. But all the bars in Detroit had a different feel from each other—those three bars were all unique. The one in Eastern Market was very bright and newly renovated. Even though the whole staff was Black, it wasn’t just outwardly Black. They didn’t have Black liquor ads on the wall, no photos of regulars; it just looked like a sports bar. Jolly Old Timers was really old and still had that living room feel, and Zell’s Corner was more like a bar-lounge club. That was interesting too.

DS: Thinking about that, I have a couple of questions informed by those experiences. The first is reflecting on the installation you had at the Hilliard Art Museum. There, your images were in dialogue with an imagined Black bar, with tables and a bar present in the museum, where attendees were invited to read about the work of Black artists who influenced your photography. It made me think about Theaster Gates’s 2019 “Assembly Hall” installation at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, where he intertwined archives from the Johnson Publishing Company with a reading space to encounter their publications and artwork by other Black artists. To you, what is the potential of the museum space? What are you hoping people will get out of that environment?

LKH: A call to action. It’s a call to action in a way that’s comfortable for the viewer, whether that’s supporting art, a cause that’s near and dear, maybe something you haven’t thought about, something you might have just taken for granted. Maybe it’s supporting a music program in your community. And most importantly, go visit a Black bar.

Particularly for anyone in New Orleans—and I’m not talking about Black or white, because where you grew up could dictate your exposure to bars in New Orleans—look on WWOZ’s cultural calendar. They list all the stops on the second line. The second line usually has about four or five stops and lasts about four hours. They’re dancing through the streets, so they need to stop, take a break, have a drink, grab a bite to eat. That could be your entry point into the culture.

After embarking on this project, someone came up to me—her words—and she was talking about a “dyke bar.” I had heard of gay bars, but I’d never heard of a dyke bar. She said they’ve been eliminated. They don’t really exist anymore. So maybe you see this and think, “Oh man, there’s a struggling dyke bar in my city.” Revitalize a dyke bar.

Maybe there’s a last steel mill bar in Pittsburgh. I want the art to do something to the viewer.

The curator Kilolo Luckett at ALMA | LEWIS connected me to Pittsburgh. It was the first city where I worked in Black bars outside New Orleans, and she has continued to support my work. As an artist, particularly with some of the projects I work on, the return on investment could be so far down the road, you still have to make the work because things are ever-changing, and you have to be faithful to make the work. Financial support is vital to artists and creatives, particularly those without strings or influencing the work or requiring artists to donate work after the residency.

I’ve never personally met Theaster, but I’m a huge fan of everything he’s done—his vision and his ability to execute and garner support around initiatives like these. I’m in Kappa Alpha Psi, a fraternity that boasts the famed artists Aaron Douglas, Sam Gilliam, and Al Loving among many other achievers from every field of human endeavor. I have a fraternity brother in Chicago, Darius Broadwater. He knows Theaster—they own property in the same area— and when I’m riding through the city with Darius, he’s always telling me things like, “Oh, Theaster owns this. Theaster did that. Theaster had a DJ booth on the Chicago transit line.” He said, when you talk to Theaster, the way his mind works is just amazing. For Theaster to have that level of talent in art, in the production of art, and in the financing of art is pretty unmatched.

DS: That leads to my last question. One of the throughlines in this conversation is art as a focal point combined with a desire to do something more—whether through making more work, supporting Black bars, providing opportunities for people to access spaces they’re unfamiliar with—as a way to support Black bars, lounges, and other wavering third places. Since you’re looking to do that in the future, how do you think about all those things coming together?

LKH: Worldbuilding. It’s worldbuilding. I read in Aaron Douglas’s book that—in no particular order—you could access his work at a museum or gallery; if you couldn’t, you could buy a Crisis magazine with his cover; if you didn’t have 25 cents, perhaps you could go to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, or other places and see a mural, though Fisk wasn’t public; or you could go to a YMCA in New York and access his public artwork. He was giving various entry points to the art.

I want this project to be ongoing—something I do until I just can’t take photos anymore. I want it to be a way to mark time, but for it to exist in other ways. Maybe someone encounters it through a coffee table book, maybe through a podcast, maybe on TV or a docuseries—and hopefully that curiosity leads them to do something.

I’m interested in various entry points to this singular subject matter. Beyond just the bars, the whole series is about a trilogy of gentrification. I did it out of order—it was supposed to be churches, neighborhoods, and then bars, because all those things are under attack from drastic changes and cultural loss. I’ve started those projects already and I am just looking at those three pursuits through one lens and in several ways.

“Champers: 3 Beautiful Experiences” encompasses a transition in my artistic practice where I am coalescing factual images where everything is undisturbed—not posed—with constructed realities. It is an approach where things are staged, but steeped in truth. I screen printed the text directly onto the photograph. The copy in these ads are foreboding messages about gentrification from past generations, speaking to the present and future.

DS: Thank you.