Dapper Bruce Lafitte Draws Above Sea Level 

By Emily Alesandrini
September 12, 2025 

Dapper Bruce Lafitte, Look But Do Not Touch, 2017. Archival marker on paper. Museum purchase, Joel and John Weinstock Fund for Prints and Drawing, 2019.30. Image courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

I love a window seat on a flight home to New Orleans. With my nose pressed to the pane, the superdome bulges like a belly after too much King Cake or a button that if pressed with a gigantic finger might call out: that was easy! Even though so much in The Big Easy isn’t. As the plane touches down, my atmosphere shifts from above to below sea level. 

Historically, landscape views represented from above have served colonial purposes of mapping, control, and ownership. Scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff presents the concept of “white sight” as that which is inherently surveilling. Bound in plantation logics, this looking down ensures compliance and labor through the sight of the overseer, the foreman, or capitalist supervisor. The word “surveillance” itself comes from the French prefix sur, meaning from above, and veillance, deriving from the verb for observe or watch.

Dapper Bruce Lafitte, T.D.B.C. Presents Na-Na, 2025. Archival marker on paper. Courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

But something different is happening in the aerial landscapes of Dapper Bruce Lafitte, the native New Orleanian whose solo exhibition A Time Before Katrina is on view in the New Orleans Museum of Art’s Great Hall through September 21, 2025. The show’s title and timeline coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the hurricane, a disaster that sparked Lafitte’s first impulse to put pen to paper to document second-line parades, housing projects, and jazz funerals from before the storm. “The work is aerial. It’s color. It’s penmanship,” remarked Lafitte in a gallery talk on August 20. 

The work is indeed aerial, a birds-eye view of hundreds if not thousands of participants in collective action — flying kites, sitting on porches, mourning the dead, riding Mardi Gras floats, marching with brass instruments, going to church, visiting the zoo, confronting police, and eating crawfish. Almost everyone depicted seems to be in motion. Lafitte annotates his own drawings with scrawled notes honoring deceased artists and neighbors and calls for more arts writing in New Orleans. There are also Bible verses, shoutouts of gratitude, and snippets of handwriting perhaps only legible to the artist. The layered cacophony of color, text, and quilt-like patches of landscape defies easy reading. The work may even defy surveillance, reclaiming a directionality too long deployed by the overseer. This intervention feels particularly potent at the New Orleans Museum of Art, located in City Park, formerly the site of Allard Plantation.  

Installation view of Dapper Bruce Lafitte: A Time Before Katrina at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

During a studio visit this past April, Lafitte explained that when making a piece, he starts at the bottom of the page and works up. In this way, aeriality is also important in his process and not just the work’s imagery. At the top of many of his more recent works appears the text “I SEE YOU LOOKIN”, with a cheeky face and eyes in lookin’s o’s. Through the page, Lafitte stares back at any attempts of overseeing, but he also calls the viewer into the work with tender details and ever more vignettes of team sports, band practices, and krewes. The works are about collective participation, about memory and survival, and the “us” in who comes next.

Lafitte has advice for younger artists: “Go back to when you were a kid, drawing before dinner, asking for five more minutes.” And, “Talk about what’s going on around you, what’s happening in your city.” Rendering New Orleans landscapes, Lafitte extends their reach to other parts of the country via institutional and private collections. His work is in the Nasher Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, as well as the private collections of Bruno Mars, Michael B. Jordan, LeBron James, and Jay-Z. The artist hopes to work at ever larger scales and see his practice reach more international audiences. Crated and shipped for galleries abroad, the work will fly higher and travel further. “I wanna leave a mark on the wall,” he says. “The way Katrina did.”

Dapper Bruce Lafitte, I Don't Get Dropped, I Drop the Label, 1 Bad Artist (6th Series), 2011. Archival markers on handmade paper. Museum purchase, Carmen Donaldson Fund, 2011.76. Image courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art.