Cultural

Ashé Cultural Arts Center

Ashé Cultural Arts Center, founded in Central City in 1998 by Carol Bebelle and Douglas Redd, anchors the cultural infrastructure of Black New Orleans by connecting the Mardi Gras Indian and second-line traditions to a broader framework of cultural sovereignty and economic justice. Ashé treats the continued practice of those traditions as a form of claim on public space and public resources in neighborhoods the I-10 Claiborne Expressway damaged.

Location
New Orleans, LA
Founded
1998
Website
https://www.ashecac.org

Ashé Cultural Arts Center opened in 1998 on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in New Orleans’s Central City neighborhood, a corridor the organization has helped to revitalize as a center of Black cultural and economic life. The Center was founded by Carol Bebelle and Douglas Redd with an explicit commitment to the cultural heritage of New Orleans’s African-American and Afro-Creole communities, particularly the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, the second-line parade culture, and the social aid and pleasure clubs whose institutions predate the I-10 construction and have outlasted it.

Ashé’s programming connects those traditions to present-day economic and political organizing. The Center frames the Mardi Gras Indians’ continued presence in the streets of Tremé and the Seventh Ward not as folkloristic survival but as an ongoing assertion of community sovereignty over public space, a sovereignty the Louisiana Department of Highways attempted to annul when it cut the live-oak canopy on North Claiborne in 1966.

After Hurricane Katrina, Ashé became one of the institutional anchors for the broader fight to recover Black New Orleans’s cultural infrastructure. The Center’s post-Katrina work connected the HOPE VI demolition fight over the Iberville and Big Four developments to the longer history of clearance in the same neighborhoods, insisting that genuine recovery required addressing displacement as a structural condition rather than a disaster consequence.

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