NEW ORLEANS, LA.- Now on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), Dapper Bruce Lafitte: A Time Before Katrina includes a selection of the artist’s works created over the past 20 years.

“This exhibition is a reminder of how vital the arts are in sustaining the culture and history of place,” said Susan M. Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA. “Dapper Bruce Lafitte’s works are important tributes to New Orleans’s past, present, and future.”

The large-scale drawings displayed in NOMA’s Great Hall present many of the city’s landmarks, including iconic high school marching bands, former public housing projects, and neighborhoods transformed from gentrification and development post–Hurricane Katrina. The exhibition includes works from NOMA’s permanent collection, newly-created work, and loans from private collections.

Created with fine-tip pens, markers, and handcrafted paper, Lafitte’s bold and graphic compositions match neatly geometrical city blocks and rows of musicians with handwritten commentary on the erasure and preservation of New Orleans’s unique cultural traditions.

“Lafitte’s works are both celebratory and mournful visual elegies of vibrant historically Black neighborhoods in New Orleans.” said Anne Collins Smith, Chief Curator at NOMA. “They are testaments to the importance of cultural resistance and continuity, pride, and legacy.”

Dapper Bruce Lafitte, who previously exhibited under the name Bruce Davenport, Jr., was born in New Orleans in 1972. Lafitte often includes observations on the changing topography of New Orleans and personal reflections on his experience growing up in the Lafitte Housing Projects in his compositions.

With the encouragement of his grandparents, he began to draw at the age of five to entertain himself and document the world around him. His works have been shown in the Prospect New Orleans triennial, the New Museum, New York; and the Louisiana State University Museum of Art and in solo presentations at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, Biloxi, Mississippi; Atlanta Contemporary; and galleries around the world. He now lives and works in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward.

Dapper Bruce Lafitte: A Time Before Katrina is on view at NOMA through September 21, 2025.