As dandyism dominated the 2024 Met Gala and films like “Sinners” brought southern aesthetics to the big screen, visual artist Najee Dorsey found his decades of work suddenly in cultural conversation.
His latest exhibition, “From Beale Street to Bourbon Street,” which opened May 22 and runs through July 19 at Black Art In America in East Point, traces the layered visual storytelling of an artist whose work emerges from the cultural crossroads of the American South.
The show presents nearly two decades of Dorsey’s creative expression, spanning painting, mixed media, photomontage, digital collage, sculpture, and installation. Through these varied media, Dorsey creates what he calls “a textured narrative” where bluesmen and conjure women serve as guardians of memory.
“Stories untold are stories forgotten,” Dorsey said during a recent gallery walkthrough, referencing a central theme that runs throughout his work.
The exhibition opens with intimate interior scenes that replicate Southern Black households. Vintage radios, old irons, and family photographs, both collected vintage pieces and contemporary recreations, fill salon walls in the style of the artist’s childhood memories.
“This is almost like an altar,” Dorsey said of one installation. “It’s indicative of how our moms and aunties and grandmas would have a lot of this stuff on the countertops in their home.”
From these domestic spaces, visitors encounter “Time Traveler,” a mixed-media piece that traces the symbolic journey from Africa’s Kisii tribes to Southern cotton fields through found objects, including a cargo ship image and a license plate reading “Dixie.”
The exhibition’s centerpiece is a juke joint installation featuring sculptures and artwork from Dorsey’s “Blues People” series. The space pays homage to venues where communities would “lay our burdens to the side” and connect through music.
One highlight, “Liberty Legend,” responds to Columbus, Georgia’s history and the city’s Liberty District, where Black musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey, Nat King Cole, and Duke Ellington, once performed.
Dorsey, who grew up an hour from Memphis with paternal family roots in Louisiana and New Orleans, draws heavily from this dual heritage. The exhibition’s title reflects this geographic and cultural bridging between Beale Street’s blues tradition and Bourbon Street’s jazz legacy.
The crossroads motif appears throughout the show, most notably in pieces inspired by the Robert Johnson legend. Dorsey’s interpretation focuses on universal themes rather than specific historical figures.
“It’s the Everyman story,” he said. “How we all come to various crossroads in life and have to make decisions.”
This year marks the first time Dorsey created a female crossroads figure in “Fond Memories,” which tells the story of a woman connecting to family land while pursuing success.
While the subject matter predates current trends, Dorsey acknowledged the timeliness of the exhibit’s release, which coincided with the Met Gala’s 2025 “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” theme and the prominence of Black dandyism, as well as the release of Ryan Coogler’s hit film Sinners.
“It didn’t influence the work,” he said of recent cultural events. “It did influence the timing of doing the show. When I saw ‘Sinners,’ I was watching my work unfold on the big screen.”
The exhibition includes pieces dating back to 2013, with several works completed within the past two years. Dorsey’s technique often involves digital collage, combining multiple images to create single figures, as seen in his signature Robert Johnson interpretation that merges eight different photographs.
Throughout the gallery, vintage photographs line the walls. In works like “Women in the Interior” and “The Listening Room”, Dorsey blends historic and contemporary visuals to simulate tintype and daguerreotype styles.
“We’re all in some form of fashion extended family,” Dorsey said of his approach to combining personal and found imagery. “I’m drawn to vintage photographs of the past.”