The Artful World of Leah Chase

One of the Crescent City's best collections of Black art is inside Dooky Chase's restaurant

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“My mother, loved art. She loved beautiful things,” Stella Chase Reese, the daughter of the late Chef Leah Chase, told me on a recent Tuesday morning at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, eyes scanning her mother’s art collection sprawling across the yellow walls of the empty dining room. “And she loved to just behold these things.” 

The storied chef was first exposed to fine arts when she moved from Madisonville to New Orleans as a thirteen-year-old girl. Chase’s parents wanted her to receive a Catholic education, which wasn’t yet available to Black children on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain. They sent her to live with her aunt in the city and enrolled her at St. Mary’s Academy. On walks through the French Quarter, Chase was mesmerized by the grandeur of the restaurants and art galleries. 

[Read Lucie Monk Carter's interview with Chef Leah Chase in 2016, here.]

“She saw all of these things, and she just said, ‘this is the part of life that I've missed,’” Reese explained. From those formative moments, Chase knew she wanted art and artists to be part of her life. “She always wanted to actually have art, because she said, ‘It's not only beauty to the eyes, but it's also the story that it tells,’” Reese recalled her mother saying. “‘And each artist has a story to tell.’”

That profound sense of empathy, of seeing the humanity and story to be told in each and every person, guided much of Chase’s life. Within protestors, cops, presidents, and civil rights leaders (and even this author as a naive twenty-something journalist), Chase saw the real human value and potential in each and every person she encountered. It’s no surprise that she understood and appreciated artwork and artists on such a visceral level. Gesturing to the works on display at Dooky Chase, Reese said, “Most of these are just art[works] that spoke to her.”

At a time when platforms for displaying Black art were rare in the South, Chase decided the dining room at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant would become a gallery of her own curation. “And so her art collection began,” said Reese. 

Even when Chase could not afford to buy artworks outright, a trusting friendship-turned-layaway-plan with Stella Jones of the Stella Jones Art Gallery on St. Charles allowed Chase to pay for pieces a little at a time. Jones allowed Chase to display the works in the restaurant while completing the payments, and would help Chase choose works that spoke to her. “And then we had some artists who certainly were starving artists, and they asked [Chase], ‘Well, if I give you this art piece, can I eat in your dining room for about six months?’” Reese said. “And of course, that was always a ‘Yes.’” 

[Read this story about author Alexandra Kennon Shahin and her book, Classic Restaurants of New Orleans, which includes one of the last interviews Chef Leah Chase ever gave before her death in 2019.]

Other times, Chase would commission original works of art directly from the artists, funding them while they completed the projects. One of the most notable remains a focal point of the restaurant’s dining room today: a series of stained glass panels by Winston Falgout, depicting scenes from Chase’s life growing up in Madisonville as a little girl. The concept was inspired by the way Jacob Lawrence—one of the most impactful artists of her time, whose paintings are among Chase’s collection—depicted moments of African American life

“That was her opportunity to tell a little bit about her upbringing, about scenes in her life that meant a lot for her as a child,” Reese said. “She felt, to make it come to life, it would be there forever.” The colorful panels of glass depict kite flying, hopscotch, the neighborhood sno-ball stand—simple, nostalgic childhood pleasures that Chase made sure her children and grandchildren got to experience, too. 

“She would always tell us, ‘You have to be proud of who you are and proud of your culture. And when you’re proud of who you are, then you can accept other people and you can welcome them in, because you know who you are.’ And she was always well aware of who she was,” Reese said. “She never lost sight of that.”

Other artist friends of Chase’s whose work became fixtures of her collection were Ron Bechet, Willie Birch, John Scott, Clifton Webb, Bruce Brice, Elizabeth Catlett, Samella Lewis—and on goes the list. Chase had personal connections with each. Ron Bechet and Wilie Birch, according to Reese, would visit the restaurant at least once a month for lunch—but more than that, to sit with Chase in her kitchen for long stretches of time, talking and joking. 

“Of course, now the African American art is priceless. And I say, ‘thank God my mother started collecting it then, because we wouldn't be able to afford it now, nor would we have some of these artists that we're privileged to have, because a lot of them have passed,’” Reese said. “So, we are truly blessed to have her eye and her love for art.”

“‘Looking at a person is just like looking at art. When you look at them, at first you may not understand it all. . . you have to get to know them. And so when you speak to a person, you can always find something that you like in that person, and that makes you look at the person totally different.’” —a sentiment of Leah Chase, as recalled by her daughter Stella Chase Reese

Chase’s love of art and artists extended into her civic engagement activities, as well. In 1977, Chase joined the Board of Trustees for the New Orleans Museum of Art, becoming an Honorary Life Member. In 1995, she testified before Congress, advocating for increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). 

As a way of continuing Chase’s artful legacy while also paying homage to the civil rights history that played out in Dooky Chase’s second-floor dining room, Reese and the Chase family commissioned a mural by Ron Bechet and Ayo Scott (son of artist John Scott) with the help of Bechet’s Xavier University art students. Now, a stately mural of the late members of the Chase family—including Leah Chase herself—overlooks the space where leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, first African American Supreme Court Justice Revius O. Ortique Jr., New Orleans’ first Black mayor Dutch Morial, Freedom Riders O.C. Haley and A.L. Davis, and countless others dined and strategized in the 1950s and '60s.

Spanning the perpendicular wall is another mural depicting an imagined scene of all those civil rights leaders and more, frozen in time eating, laughing, and planning over good Creole food. Tucked in their midst is a small diamond-shaped mirror, reminding visitors today of their own place among history. 

Reese recalled that her mother would tell her and her siblings, “‘Art is different, and all art should be really appreciated, because it speaks to us in a different way. I might look at this art piece, and I'll see this in it, but someone might come along right after me, they may see something else—but the beauty is there.’” 

Reese spoke like this through much of our interview: recounting her mother’s philosophies from memory in a casually reverent way, making me wonder how many times she’d heard these sentiments from Chase herself, perhaps while looking up at the same works of art. She’s inherited her mom’s way of speaking, with a matter-of-fact wisdom and humbleness, coexisting with deep pride in her family’s legacy. She has her wide, gracious smile and sparkling eyes, too. Throughout the hour spent in the restaurant with her, I was struck by the feeling of Chase’s presence, certainly her memory, there palpably between us. 

Just as Chase appreciated the diversity of stories within art, connected by underlying beauty—so the same it was with people, according to Reese, echoing the sentiment that her mother had also shared with this author from her immortalized spot in the kitchen in August 2019, shortly before she passed away. “‘Looking at a person is just like looking at art. When you look at them, at first you may not understand it all. . . you have to get to know them. And so when you speak to a person, you can always find something that you like in that person, and that makes you look at the person totally different.’”  dookychaserestaurants.com.