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A Newfound Home  
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A Newfound Home  

Ten years after Queen Sugar brought him to New Orleans, Kofi Siriboe reflects on his love for the city and offers a peek at his new creative haven for local artists
By: Brande Victorian | Photography By: Corey Anthony

If you had 24 hours to explore New ­Orleans with Kofi Siriboe, here’s where he’d take you. “I would start Uptown, take you to St. Charles, get some food at Lebanon’s Cafe—just because that’s out the way,” he says of the Middle Eastern restaurant. “Uptown, it’s Audubon Park, the oak trees, the moss. It’s just gorgeous.”

A Newfound Home  
Photography by Corey Anthony Styling by Jason Rembert On Kofi: Jacket : Louis Vuitton Shirt : Brunello Cucinelli Pant : Brunello Cucinelli Shoe : Gucci Bracelet : Tiffany & Co Rings : personal (uknown)

Next, you’d make your way down Magazine Street to peruse the vintage shops in the city’s commercial center, where storefronts match the creole cottage, shotgun and ­bungalow-style architecture of New Orleans houses. “Then we would have to stop at the Loews on Poydras, because that’s my old stomping ground,” says Siriboe of the hotel where he lived when he first came to the Crescent City from his native Los Angeles. New Orleans has been his “second home”  for a decade. He arrived in 2015 to shoot Queen Sugar, Ava DuVernay’s OWN drama—on which he starred for seven seasons as Ralph Angel, the baby of the rural Louisiana ­Bordelon family. From his very first day there, he’s been enamored with the city.

A Newfound Home  
Photography by Corey Anthony Styling by Jason Rembert On Kofi: Shirt : Todd Snyder Pant : Burberry Shoe : Carlos Santos Ring : Personal (uknown) Ring(pinky) : Pandora Bracelet : Tiffany & Co

The French Quarter is next on his list—but where to go afterward is a bit of a conundrum for Siriboe. “This is where I get stuck,” he admits, “because now it’s either hit that left on Esplanade, go down Treme and hit City Park, or go to TOLA.

“I would probably go down Treme,” he says after a moment of contemplation. “Chill, see all of that, then make our way back to Marigny, the Bywater area—and then we’re posted up at TOLA.”

A Newfound Home  
Photography by Corey Anthony Styling by Jason Rembert On Kofi: Jacket : Brunello Cucinelli Tie : H&M Shirt : Louis Vuitton Pant : Brunello Cucinelli Shoe : Carlos Santos

TOLA is an acronym for The Other LA, in reference to Louisiana—the first one being the California city where Siriboe, 31, grew up in the predominantly Black, upper-middle-class neighborhood of Ladera Heights. TOLA is an artist residency in the Marigny/Bywater area that Siriboe officially launched in February. It’s a space for artists across disciplines to work on their respective crafts. There’s even a recording studio to welcome musicians—a part of the property when the star purchased it.

“Even before the renovations, the whole place had this super open, artistic kind of communal vibe, and its location just adds to that,” he says of the home, which sits just a block from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. That aura is one he plans to maintain as TOLA welcomes residents. “The idea was to create the space as a canvas, with lots of white walls, and keep it really open,” he explains. “It’s still functional, but the goal was for it to be modular—in the sense that the house can take on whatever form is needed to support whoever’s there.”

Siriboe is currently exploring investment interest, to sustain TOLA’s growth and expand in the near future. Up to this point he has completely financed its operations with earnings from his acting work. He most recently appeared on the final season of Prime Video’s Harlem, written, created and produced by Tracy Oliver. She also cowrote the ESSENCE Festival–inspired box-office hit Girls Trip, in which Siriboe starred in 2017—another role set in the Big Easy. Black in Every Color, Art in Every Form, an event series Siriboe cocurated with gallerist Josiah David Jones, has helped spread the word about his residency space. And The Movement, an exhibition featuring more than 12 New Orleans artists, debuted at TOLA during Super Bowl weekend in NOLA; it was shown again at the end of February, at Los Angeles’s contemporary-art fair Frieze.

“Just people saying the word ‘TOLA’ —that’s been something in my heart for three, four years now,” Siriboe says. “So for it not to be just an idea, and not just an actual space, but for it to be utilized— people were in the house spilling wine on my staircase, knocking up my wall, but I was like, It’s being used, and with good intention. That has become the driving factor. I want to see people actually utilize the space and create in the space.”

Siriboe’s own multidisciplinary artistry fuels his passion for TOLA. Growing up, he played the violin and trumpet; and he began writing music at an early age. When he was a teenager, his interest in taking photos was awakened by smart phones and social media. “Photography is one of those expressions that I don’t even think of as a craft,” he confesses. “It’s more so just the way I see life.”

While he plans to display some of the images he has captured inside TOLA, the verdict is out on whether the public will ever get to hear the music he has written or see the feature screenplays he’s developing; his multifaceted interests constantly force him to choose where he’ll expend his energy next. “I do everything—that’s the problem,” he says emphatically.

A Newfound Home  
Photography by Corey Anthony Styling by Jason Rembert On Kofi: Jacket : Todd Snyder Shirt : Todd Snyder Pant : Burberry Shoe : Carlos Santos Ring : Personal (uknown) Ring(pinky) : Pandora Bracelet : Tiffany & Co

It’s doing everything, though, that bridged his connection to New Orleans. On one of his first nights out in the city, 10 years ago, he stumbled upon a pop-up listening series called Couches on ­Gravier Street, where musician Christian Scott was performing. “It was like walking into a gym and Kobe’s playing. You’re like, ‘This is what y’all do every day?’” he recalls. The short answer, as Siriboe now knows, is yes. “New Orleans is art,” he says. “That’s really 
their ­language. That’s how they communicate—most especially through music.”

The racial pride of the city has remained another draw for the actor with Ghanaian roots—who, surprisingly, hasn’t yet adopted a taste for the city’s creole and Cajun cuisine. Instead he calls out ­Bennachin, a restaurant with dishes inspired by Cameroon and Gambia, as one of his favorites. Still, he has a reverence for the way the cultural traditions of the city’s largest ethnic group are embraced parish-wide.

“Just being explicitly Black, coming from L.A.—I love L.A., but when you move around the city and you navigate it, it’s a White city,  and it’s an extremely contemporary city,” he says. “Coming to New Orleans, there was an instant recognition of the culture, the history, the landscape, the trees. There’s also a dark history. We worked on a plantation for seven, eight years, but even though there is that denseness, there’s also a lot of information there that I wasn’t getting in L.A. My spirit was drawn to that.”

The hope now is that fellow artists who feel that same pull to the bustling bayou will find a creative respite in TOLA—with the space eventually becoming a “shared archive,” as Siriboe puts it, of the many imaginative individuals who will walk through its doors. It’s also representative of his planting firm roots in the city, which he expects will only grow deeper with time.

“I know there are so many shades and colors of the South, but New Orleans is my type of South,” he says. “I spent my whole 20s in New Orleans. I had a lot of important things in my life happen from the lens of me being in New Orleans. 

“When I think of 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, one day having kids—New ­Orleans feels like something that will be important to my personal story,” he adds. “It’s somewhere that I always want to be able to come to, and just be.”

A Newfound Home  
Photography by Corey Anthony Styling by Jason Rembert On Kofi: Jacket : Gucci Shirt : Gucci Pant : Gucci Shoe : Gucci

CREDITS:
Photographed by Corey Anthony  
Styled by Jason Rembert  
Groomer: Corian Coston using Nars  
Barber: Wayne Jolla, Jr. using Vincent  
Tailor: Shirlee Idzakovich  
Photography Assistants: Noé Cugny, Jazzmine “Jazz” Franklin, & Ibby Ali  
Styling Assistants: Ean Rutledge & Blake Turner  
Production: The Morrison Group  
Production Assistants: Gabbie Barabino & Amari Stewart  
Special Thanks: The Barnett New Orleans – A JdV by Hyatt Property    
ESSENCE, VP, Content: @itsnandibby  
ESSENCE, Visual Director: @_mq______  
ESSENCE, Art Director: @so.lit 

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