The André Cailloux Center
for Performing Arts
and Cultural Justice

The former St. Rose de Lima Church on Bayou Road will once again serve as a site for performing arts in New Orleans. Spearheaded by three community members, Lauren E. Turner, Dr. David Robinson-Morris, and Dr. Robin G.Vander, the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice is being envisioned as a hub for performing arts and as a promoter of cultural justice for New Orleans-based organizations. 

Located on historic Bayou Road, the site of the former church was transformed into a theatre space in 2018, as a joint project of Alembic Community Development and Rose Community Development Corporation. With this new initiative, the Andre Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice will operate as a hub for performing arts, a meeting space for community-centered organizations, a venue for public programming and gathering, and limited special events rentals. Harkening back to the historical origins of the location, the Cailloux Center views this undertaking as an act of reclamation for both the historic Indigenous and Black presences along the Bayou Road corridor. Central to its mission is a commitment to promoting the power of the performing arts, addressing issues of cultural justice, modeling cooperative leadership, and empowering economic freedom for global majority-led organizations.

The site will serve as the home for local, predominantly Black-led performing arts organizations that have operated without having permanent access to performance spaces of their own. In creating the Cailloux Center, the co-founder's Turner, Robinson-Morris and Vander were cognizant of the economic impact Black performing arts and culture have had on both the local and regional economies while the artists and companies themselves have often struggled to financially sustain themselves and their work. By creating an organization that would provide space and infrastructure, the Cailloux Center is addressing this and other historic inequities within the performing arts community and the community at large. The strategy is to create a performing arts ecosystem housing seven organizations, each with its own respective performing arts season. Of the seven, three will be designated “Legacy residents,” organizations with lengthier histories of offering live performances that have contributed to African American culture in New Orleans. 

 
While in its initial stages, the Cailloux Center is already garnering support from local and national agencies who readily understand the purpose of such a project. The Greater New Orleans Foundation provided funding to facilitate strategic planning for the Center. Most recently, No Dream Deferred-NOLA under the direction of Turner was awarded a grant by the Mellon Foundation that will support both programming, capital improvements, and purchasing of equipment.