Freedom Day: A Boundless Love
2018
New Orleans, Louisiana
L. Kasimu Harris is a New Orleans-based artist. His in-progress series Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges 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 photography were featured in “A Shot Before Last Call: Capturing New Orleans’s Vanishing Black Bars” in The New York Times. His work has been published in a number of books, including Best Food Writing 2016, and he was the photo essayist for the Prospect. 5 catalogue, Yesterday we said tomorrow. 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. 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 was a 2018 Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock.
Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2022
My artistic practice is rooted in Truth, By Any Means Necessary, a visual beacon light that deploys several approaches to arrive at verities. It is a constant striving to amplify fundamental inequities and injustices of Black people, as well as illuminating the Black pool of genius from the same disenfranchised community.”