Dapper Bruce Lafitte

Critical text

Dapper Bruce Lafitte (b. 1972, New Orleans) is a self-taught artist who began to draw and to show his works following the devastating hurricane Katrina, which flooded 80% of the city of New Orleans in 2005, causing over 1,800 deaths. Starting with this tragedy, Lafitte’s work concentrates on the political themes of his native city connected with racial discrimination against the African-American community to which he belongs. With indelible ink and in a consciously naïve style, Lafitte has narrated the politics of the Trump era and the birth of civil rights movements. In a new series of drawings, the artist describes the traditional festive culture of New Orleans connected with parades and Mardi Gras, without neglecting continuous references to key figures of Afro-American culture like the boxer Joe Louis, known as the Brown Bomber, or the injustices wreaked upon his community in the past and present, from the Ku Klux Klan at the time of his grandparents to the recent housing crises and the wave of police violence in America, not just in Louisiana but in the United States as a whole. With his very colourful and at times child-like drawings, Lafitte portrays the painful problematic issues of American democracy.

Text by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli