Artist Bruce M. Davenport Jr., born Bruce M. Washington, aka “Dapper Bruce,” lives and works in the back of a tidy shotgun house on a street a couple of blocks from the Mississippi River in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans.

 

Davenport, 42, grew up in the Lafitte housing development in the city’s 6th Ward, not far but a world away from the French Quarter. The Lafitte Projects “ain’t there no more,” to use a particularly New Orleanian turn of phrase, having been razed and turned into sterile tracts of mixed-income housing in the years after Hurricane Katrina. But the part of the Lower Ninth where he currently lives looks like it’s doing just fine.

 

The first thing you see when you come into Davenport’s living room are the two enormous aquarium tanks bubbling away practically in the middle of it. A big, sweet-looking turtle bobs contentedly in one of them. The next thing you notice is that whatever space in the room isn’t filled by the aquariums is crowded with memorabilia related to Davenport’s life and career as an artist. Stacks of magazines, newspapers, and drawings occupy whatever surfaces might have otherwise been used for seating, and a good part of the floor as well. Dozens of framed press clippings from magazines all over the world cover the walls, along with thank-you notes from principals and band directors for the drawings Davenport has donated to their schools. A giant framed poster of Biggie Smalls, propped up next to a bookcase arranged with Davenport’s high school football trophies, watches benignly over all. The effect is equal parts atelier, archive, and bachelor pad, and the clustered clutter of words, faces, and colors feels a little like being in one of Davenport’s drawings.

 

Davenport’s dense, intricate art—which these days depicts boxing matches and football games in addition to the local high school marching bands that first brought him prominence—has captured the attention of the international art market. In addition to exhibiting at three installments of Prospect, the Big Easy’s contemporary art triennial, the artist has shown in places as far-flung as Marfa Ballroom in Texas, Vacant Gallery in Tokyo, and John Hope Franklin Center Gallery at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. Since being picked up by New York City’s Louis B. James Gallery last year, Davenport and his work have been featured to great acclaim at the Outsider Art Fair (in Paris in October 2014 and New York in February 2015).

 

VJ: It was after Hurricane Katrina when your career really took off? BD: Yeah, but it took a while. After I went to college and then started working, I would deliver furniture to people’s houses and see art on their walls and I would tell them, “I can do better than that.” And they’d say, “Just take this tip and get on out of this house.” I thought, ‘Alright, I need to show these people something.’

 

So when I came back to New Orleans after the storm I sat down and started thinking about art again. I kept thinking about those people who put me out of their house when I told them their artwork wasn’t good. I kept thinking of that social worker who told me I should be an artist. I kept thinking of my grandparents and about the people who loved my art, and I thought, ‘I got to please them.’

 

Then, when guys from the art world seen it, it took off. By my third year [making art], I’m showing in New York. By my fourth year, I hooked up with [curator] Diego Cortez and we’re going to Tokyo and going to France and doing biennials. He had all these connections.

 

We did a show at Duke University, and I did an interview with this black history professor, and when we finished he just looked at me and said, “Man, you just hipped me to something new. I knew all about Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, and you can be the next one. Whatever you do, you need to inspire the next generation.” And then that stuck to me. BAM! I didn’t know I could inspire another generation, inspire people who didn’t have hope. And so the art got a little more intense, the work got a little bit better, and then the stuff on it, like the texts, started switching up.

 

VJ: Let’s talk about the text. What are all the phrases that keep appearing in different drawings? BD: The texts started with just my signature and where I came from. Then I put different things, like “R.I.P.” for my grandparents or maybe a family member, or a teacher who inspired me, or for bands for schools that were closed by Katrina. It’s a way to remember them. I’ll put their name on it and it’s like a shout-out to them.

 

And “I see you looking”—what happened is that maybe a lot of times I can’t go to Spain, or to Germany with the artwork, but the artwork is there—and I want people to be like, “OK, this artist is looking at me, because I’m looking at his art.” I put that on there so they’ll go looking for me too. And when they start looking for me, they start looking at everything, all the detail.

 

And then with “The game has changed”—it means that the artwork has changed. Everything about it changes—the size of the paper, even what I put on the back of the artwork. Different galleries change. Everything in life changes. So I put “The game has changed” on everything to express that. Next year, I’m going to start putting “The game is mine” on the artworks.

 

VJ: You talk a lot about art in terms of it being a game. BD: When I got into this art game, I wanted to shake it up. And BAM! When I shake it up, I can control it. It’s all mine.

 

My whole thing is about competing. Art is like a football game. The shows are like a football game. Getting a show in a museum is like the Super Bowl to me. When you get up on that wall, you gotta have people running up to that wall and you gotta put a smile on their faces. And at the end of the show, just like at the end of the game, people are going to be shaking your hand, saying, “Good job!” You want to walk through your neighborhood and you want people to be proud of you. They’re like, “Good game!” You want to be the baddest thing they’ve ever seen.

 

So that’s how I play it in the art game. They put me next to Picasso, I’m gonna kick his ass. They put me next to any artist, I’m gonna kick his ass too. If they put me in the folk art game, I want to dominate it. If they put me in the contemporary art game, I’m going to dominate that too. So it doesn’t matter to me where they put me.

 

VJ: Do you consider yourself a New Orleans artist? BD: I want to be a New Orleans artist who’s separated from all the bad things about New Orleans: the crime, the bad politicians, the evilness that’s going on. And I want my art to be separate from anything that makes people forget about education. People are all about the Saints being the “home team.” I say forget about the home team—it’s all about the home people you gotta cheer on. So I don’t care what you want to call my art. Call it “Bruce Art,” because no one does what I do.