When artist Douglas Redd and writer/producer Carol Bebelle opened the doors of the Ashè Cultural Arts Center on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in December 1998, the goal was to create a cultural center for the community that would last longer than they did.
“We resisted being called an art center because art derives from culture. The foundation for the human experience is culture,” Bebelle said during the center’s 25th anniversary rooftop gala in October.
Since opening, Ashè has been an outlet for the New Orleans artistic community, culture bearers as well as organizations that need space to put on programs. There have been art exhibits, theater productions and programming focused on health disparities, criminal justice, environmental justice and economic development.
“We were open to possibility,” Bebelle said. “Ashè’s name actually means ‘the ability to make things happen.’ And so we were open to the possibility that there were great things there. And the journey that we did for the first 21 years taught us that. Faith and grace were the things that kept us going.”
Nyree Ramsey, executive director of the Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation, said Ashè was one of her first stops when she moved to New Orleans in 1995. The cultural center has “done an amazing job of preserving culture, cultivating culture, recognizing the importance of culture and really putting it on the map in terms of the importance of New Orleans culture throughout the world,” Ramsey said.
The cultural center received a proclamation from the city in October in honor of its 25th anniversary.
Verite News sat down with Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, chief equity officer at Ashè, to discuss its impact in the city and the future of the organization.
Verite: Ashè had a big celebration this fall honoring the organization’s 25 years in the city. What is the community celebrating?
Ecclesiastes: This is a celebration of the institutional fortitude of Ashè Cultural Arts Center and our rooting in the people, places and philosophies of the African diaspora in making those things central, not just for us, but central in the fight for and a discussion of equity globally.
Verite: What has Ashè meant to the Black community in New Orleans?
Ecclessiates: We center Blackness in all things because what we know is when we center Blackness, everybody else gets taken care of. There’s not a lot of Black safe spaces and definitely even fewer Black, brave spaces — places where we can go to feel not just physically safe but safe with our ideas and our dreams and our plans. It’s a place where it’s okay to be all of who we are in all of our fullness, in all the ways that we are, and to be supported to innovate and do bigger and better.
Verite: What’s next for Ashè?
Ecclesiastes: We are launching a community investment fund called the Getcha Some Fund. We are going to invest in real estate and artwork together with our community. We bought the land across the street. It’s going to be a community-owned, Black-owned hotel. We built out the first floor of the building so people can see the dream and the vision.
Verite: Is there an estimation of when the hotel is expected to open?
Ecclesiastes: I’m gunning for two and a half years at the most. This building (the Ashè Cultural Arts Center) is being renovated over the next year with the great help of Sen. (Royce) Duplessis and our previous Sen. (Karen) Carter Peterson and previous Sen. Diana Bajoie, who all have kept Ashè alive in the capital outlay process at the state. It’s finally coming through and we’re going to be able to renovate our apartments and get a new roof. We’re going to go solar and do all the sustainable things. And then on Freret Street, the house that our co-founder Papa Doug lived in before he passed away, we are renovating as an artist residency space. We are also working on an equity policy for Carnival. In 2025, we’re going to bring practitioners from seven different Carnival producing nations to New Orleans, to Orleans and Claiborne (Avenues), to have a diaspora Carnival celebration. Black and Latino travelers from all over the globe will come to this carnival and make it rain on our local carnival.
Verite: Anything you would like to add? What do you want people to know about Ashè and the work you do?
Ecclesiastes: Ashè is a global organization. We do work throughout the African diaspora. We partner with Black people all over the world to help figure out some really big existential issues that we face as Black people — issues around climate catastrophe, economic injustice. While I know people know us as a Central City organization, they know us as a New Orleans organization and they know what we do and who we do it for here. I also want them to know that the legacy of New Orleans and the legacy of our cultural community is also being shared throughout the world through the work Ashè does and that we have a lot of good will in the world. People know who we are. People care about who we are.