Focus: Leah Chase by Aron Belka
This portrait of New Orleans’ chef and “Queen of Creole Cuisine,” Leah Chase, is appropriately larger than life as is Chase’s legacy as an advocate for both Creole cooking and African-American art. Her restaurant, Dooky Chase, became central to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, providing a safe place for meetings with leading figures of the movement including A.P. Tureaud, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Freedom Riders. Over the years, she fed scores of luminaries – such as Sarah Vaughn, Nat King Cole, James Baldwin, Ray Charles and two US Presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She would often say, “In my dining room, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken.” Read More about Focus: Leah Chase by Aron Belka