“Dapper Bruce Lafitte’s exhibition The Bricks features 209 of the artist’s narrative marker drawings installed along two long walls, creating a hallway of histories. Lafitte is a self-taught artist known for detailed drawings of marching bands, second lines, Black Masking Indian gatherings, and scenes of racial injustice. Here, Lafitte locates his subjects geographically, historically, and emotionally by chronicling events in the New Orleans public housing developments, emphasizing Treme’s Lafitte Projects where he grew up, and for which he assumed his current surname. Treme was the city’s first center of brick production, relying on labor from enslaved people. Centuries later, “The Bricks” was also the nickname for the housing projects. Lafitte’s compositions reject three-point perspective, with “flattened” picture planes that resemble maps or quilts, graphically blocked together, making everything in the picture equally important and happening right now: folks gather around a DJ, police raid someone’s home, birthdays happen, drug deals are made in broad daylight. From afar, the jewel hues from his markers appear as luminous fields. Lafitte’s longer drawings read like historic scrolls of epic events, exemplified by his loving attention to rows of high schoolers marching to a silent soundtrack, elevating them to hero status. Part memoir and part history painting, Laffite’s work asks the viewer to consider relationships between past and present, juxtaposing events like the drafting of the U.S. Constitution with a 21st century narrative with a word bubble that reads, “The Saints won a Superbowl, the ghetto lost its home.” Though scheduled as a solo show, Lafitte invited artist Albert Francis to exhibit 12 of his matchstick sculptures of iconic New Orleans buildings. Positioned at the gallery’s center, four miniature unnamed project buildings lead a “procession” followed by St. Louis Cathedral, Commander’s Palace, and the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club (with figure cutouts). Two thousand bricks painted white, possibly riffing on the whitewashing of gentrification in the city, surround Francis’ exquisite miniatures like ramparts of tiny cities. Similar to Francis’ ramparts, Dapper Bruce Lafitte outlines his drawings in grids of bricks, drawing directly onto the walls. These demarcations also imbue the drawings with a “cellular” feel, like parts of an organic, living thing. Another long drawing of bricks offers an expansive list of those who have passed, citing the projects that the Housing Authority of New Orleans demolished after Katrina, including Lafitte. Many former residents still cherish individual bricks rescued from the demolition of their homes. (The Bricks is on view until September 30th.) —Veronica Cross”