New Orleans’ Kasimu Harris’ pictures lands in MoMA | Leisure/Life

In 2025, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired images for its everlasting assortment by New Orleans-based artist Kasimu Harris, the second carried institutional weight. Not as a result of Harris was an outlier, however as a result of his work displays a broader, overdue correction in how American pictures is seen and valued.

For a long time, pictures from the American South, particularly work rooted in Black communities, lived largely outdoors the partitions of main museums. 

Harris’ work has been featured in MoMA’s “New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging,” which runs by way of Jan. 17, 2026.

Journalism, Katrina and ethics

Harris was in graduate faculty learning writing and journalism on the University of Mississippi when Katrina hit his hometown in 2005. He labored on campus as a author on the Daily Mississippian.

A visit again house 45 days after Katrina, mixed with strain from an Ole Miss professor to return to campus with work in hand, launched his focus and finally his profession.

“Anything that would catch my eye while I was at home during the break, I would stop and photograph,” Harris mentioned.

Over time, he began paying nearer consideration to what was taking place in New Orleans, notably with Black bars and the gentrification taking place as town rebuilt itself. He determined he needed to speak to White bar house owners and Black bar house owners for his commencement mission, however not one of the White bar house owners agreed to take part.

“The way I saw it was I wanted to tell a fair and balanced story,” Harris mentioned.

With entry to White bars denied, he determined to focus solely on Black bars.

“It almost felt like I was an investigative journalist,” Harris mentioned. “I felt that it was a lot of parachute journalism that happened afterward. My longer-term project was a response to that — like, let’s do a deep dive in that. …If I’m doing something in journalism, it’s gonna be facts. But when I’m doing art, I can arrive at the truth in a number of ways.” 

Preserving what disappears

Harris is a photographic tradition bearer. His “Vanishing Black Bars and Lounges” pictures sequence is about greater than Black bars closing. It is about greater than New Orleans.

“Even when I started this project, even though New Orleans was the inspiration, I always saw it as something bigger,” Harris mentioned. “So the first place I got to do this work outside New Orleans was Pittsburgh.”

He continued photographing Black bars in Clarksdale, Mississippi, then Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and South Africa. One factor, he says, is definite.

“You can tell a Black bar from a White bar by what they drink,” he mentioned. 

He says he can acknowledge a Black bar just by the signage outdoors — and that there are different delicate and not-so-subtle cues. White bars typically don’t promote pints, a staple of older New Orleans Black bars, in line with Harris.

“The pints are for the set up. A setup is, you get your pint — you can share it, you can drink it and you get a bucket of ice and you get some chasing,” he mentioned.

His familiarity with New Orleans tradition provides him a shorthand of understanding that doesn’t at all times translate elsewhere. That familiarity did not ease his nerves in Detroit, although folks had instructed him it was loads like New Orleans.

He compares getting into unfamiliar Black bars in new cities to beginning faculty in January as a substitute of August — he has to stroll a fragile stability.

Deeper than it appears

Harris’ spouse, Ariel Wilson-Harris, sees the layered strategy her husband takes as central to the work’s energy.

“You wouldn’t necessarily think about all of this when you think about a bar,” she mentioned. “To just go so much further and deeper into the community and then it connecting on a global scale — I think that is why this work is so important, not only to the city of New Orleans, but to the African diaspora as a whole.”

Brian Piper says he first turned acquainted with Harris and his pictures in 2018 when the New Orleans Museum of Art confirmed a few of Harris’ work in an exhibition referred to as, “Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories.”

Piper is the Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints and Drawings on the New Orleans Museum of Art.

“One of the things that has always impressed me is how it (Harris’ photography) transcends what we might call traditional genres of photography,” Piper mentioned. “It blends documentary. It blends storytelling. It blends sort of a theatrical view of things.”

Piper says that Harris has advanced in as “a picture maker,” utilizing his eye for story and for narrative to get on the essence of a topic or place and distill it all the way down to a strong picture.

“He is very attuned to the importance of African-American culture and history here in New Orleans, as a son of the city, but also as someone who has looked at these things around the world, especially when it comes to Black social spaces,” Piper mentioned. “In his ‘Vanishing Black Bar’ series, he’s thinking about similarities, both in terms of the vibrancy of those spaces and in the threats to them from factors like gentrification.”

Michelle Schulte, chief curator of collections and exhibitions at LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, says that since 1998 there was extra emphasis on folks of various backgrounds telling their tales.

“But we’re still missing that view of people from African-American backgrounds,” Schulte mentioned. “For a museum like MoMA to recognize Kasimu and this photography from New Orleans — that’s a big deal. He’s real — a nationwide voice.”

Learning the system with out changing into it

Harris’ understanding of establishments has additionally been formed by service.

He has served on the board of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art for a number of years, an expertise he says taught him as a lot about how museums operate as about artwork itself.

“The art is paramount, but museums can’t operate without money,” Harris mentioned. “Being on the board, you start to see how things really work — capital campaigns, strategic planning, even basic things like what happens when the air conditioner goes out.”

He acknowledges the stress between the monetary realities of museums and the will to make them extra accessible and fewer intimidating.

That institutional fluency has helped him navigate his personal profession extra intentionally.

“When MoMA asked for a hold, I knew what that meant,” he said. “That’s an intent — a proposal. Like, ‘I want to marry you’ — an intent to buy. All those things have helped me navigate my artistic career more seamlessly.”

That consciousness has additionally sharpened his understanding of how intimidating museums can really feel to individuals who have no idea the principles or who’ve not often seen themselves mirrored on the partitions.

Roots and accountability

Harris’ mom, Eartha Harris, grew up uptown on Chestnut Street in New Orleans. She died in 2015, however her fascination with tradition continues to tell his creative follow.

“My mom was just a tenacious person,” he mentioned. “Like she got fired from a job on Friday and showed back up to the same job on Monday. They were like, ‘What are you doing?’ And she’s like, ‘I got kids.'”

She later owned Le Earth Flowers, a floral store that Harris says was well-known within the Black neighborhood.

Work earlier than recognition

Ben Hickey, now govt director of the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts in Buffalo New York, says Harris’ work displays advocacy and cultural consciousness.

Previously, Hickey was curator and interim director at The Hilliard Museum in Lafayette, the place he curated a solo exhibit for Harris referred to as “Vanishing Black Bars and Lounges” on the Hilliard Art Museum in 2022.

Hickey says Harris’ work comes from a spot of affection.

“It exudes it in every pixel, in every drop of ink in a print,” Hickey mentioned. “That inherent quality is what drew me to him.”

Whether working inside establishments or photographing areas removed from them, Harris approaches each with the identical concern: understanding the principles effectively sufficient to not mistake them for the purpose.

His images are formed much less by end result than by intention — by decisions made earlier than the shutter is ever launched.