Sonali Fernando is a first generation Sri Lankan American curator, producer, and restaurateur currently living in New Orleans, where she’s the Cultural Engineer for Ace Hotel. She speaks about New Orleans with an authority and gratitude that comes from having been there in times both good and challenging. Sonali was there to witness the devastation brought on by Katrina, has been traumatized by America's legacy of institutional racism, and has dealt with plenty of F&B industry sexism—right down to the NDA signing. After a neighbor was murdered she skipped town for a bit, but Sonali's an extremely positive and caring person who allowed herself to be drawn back by the city's unique energy. She’s been throwing parties, running restaurants, slinging drinks, and naming venues for the better part of the past twenty years, all in the name of community. She’s the mayor. Ben: My friend, how are you doing?
Sonali: I'm really great, actually. Because of this interview I’ve been in touch with different people from my history in New Orleans events and concurrent with that, I've been helping the Queer Family Fund out. It’s been odd to revisit my past so intensely, but in a good way.
Ben: Any major realizations or insights?
Sonali: In New Orleans, parties, live music, and public gatherings are part of the social fabric in a really cultural, ritualistic way. Those practices and rituals were simultaneously impacted by Katrina and social media. I remember Coco Robicheaux’s second line after Katrina, that was the first second line I'd gone to where people were recording on their phones. I’ve been reflecting on those shifts a lot lately.
Ben: You're a first generation American, right?
Sonali: Yes, I'm the first generation. My family's one of the first seven Sri Lankan families that first moved to Dallas. All the stereotypes we have about immigrant upbringings apply. My parents didn’t want me in school for anything other than law or STEM. The irony is my dad would host DJ parties. As a kid, he was poor but into music, so him and his brothers would build their own tube amps and stuff. When I was a kid my parents partied every fucking weekend. When I tell you they partied, I mean we would get the cops called on every other party. Dinner was planned for 6:00, which meant 8:00, which was really when people started drinking lots of scotch. Actual dinner came closer to 10:00, followed by insane amounts drinking and dancing. My dad was the tape deck DJ. Around 2:00am it was cake and coffee, then people sat around singing to old Sri Lankan songs and playing spoons. This went on for years.
“We’re diagramming the machine so we can understand how to take it apart.”
Ben: That must have heavily influenced your path later in life.
Sonali: It did. The first big concert I went to was with my dad, it was Creedence Clearwater Revival at one of those free open air concert places. I remember having to listen to them at home and was like, “Whatever,” but watching the effect on him and everyone else in a live setting, even though I wasn't the biggest fan of the music, I was like, “Oh, this is cool.”
Ben: What were you like as a teenager, aside from a CCR-hater?
Sonali: I was socially charismatic and I think I was good at a lot of things, but that meant I never mastered anything. I was at a Catholic high school where there were legacy students, people whose parents went to the high school and their family paid for the building of the football field or something. I didn't fit in the white people box. I remember borrowing a Sugarcubes album from the library and— I had no idea who Björk was —thinking, “How does she make her voice change so many times?” I would try to speak to other people about it, or later about Aphex Twin or Rage Against the Machine but people just didn’t get it. I never felt I fully fit in culturally. Like, with Rage the reason it mattered to me was that I’d been living with terrorism as an aspect of my life since I was born. Those words meant something different to me. I was negotiating what the state was and what power was from a young age. But on the other hand I was student body president. I kind of always rode this line, getting into all different kinds of circles but I wasn’t the center of any of them.
Ben: After high school, you went right to New Orleans?
Sonali: My first boyfriend, Geoff, told me about this new program at Loyola in New Orleans for music business. I visited and the smells of New Orleans really reminded me of Sri Lanka. I had this kind of psychic attachment to it. I thought if I had to major in something, it might as well be throwing parties. I wanted to take a gap year, but my parents would have disowned me.
Ben: What was the college experience like? I imagine a new program meant things were a bit looser?
Sonali: I was part of the inaugural four classes and it was a bit of a shit show, to be honest. The first director of the program, I'm not going to say his name; he was exceptionally unprofessional. He eventually got fired, I think for groping a student. My first two years I was out in the streets and meeting everybody. Then Loyola made a right turn, hired a lot of incredible industry veterans, and at that point became reputable in my opinion.
Ben: And you started organizing events in school?
Sonali: Yeah. After I moved to the city I joined a 15-piece funk band called Thumpasaurus. We were a party band, doing covers for fun and stuff, but we went hard. One of our first gigs was for Mardi Gras, which is actually where I met the owner of Cafe Brasil. He was just like, “You should throw your birthday party at the Cafe.” So I did. Just for fun and for love, and for the sake of doing something for the first time.
The scene at Cafe Brasil, including Sonali performing in some amazing shoes on the right there. Photos provided by Sonali Fernando.
Ben: You hold Cafe Brasil in high regard, what was it all about?
Sonali: This is before my time but it started out as a coffee shop only. Eventually they got alcohol in there and started booking events, but it happened organically. There wasn’t much on Frenchmen at that time except for Snug Harbor and a coffee shop, I think. Students used to play in the eight o'clock slot, Harry Connick Jr. and Brian Blade played. All of the New Orleans bands in that younger scene played. It was a community center with poetry, art shows, very old school multi-use vibes. Politicians would be there, musicians would be there, everybody was there. Eight-year olds and eighty-year olds.
Ben: For a bit you were with an organization called Crossroads Institute. Did that stem from the high school program, too?
Sonali: I came in as a theater company manager for Creative Forces, that was the name of the company itself. This was after school, after Katrina, I had graduated and was delivering pizzas. I think I was bartending too, and a friend of mine was the documentarian for the organization who knew I wanted to work with kids. He put my name in the hat and I got the gig to work with high school aged kids in the performing arts.
Ben: Does this time overlap with W.A.L.K.S and Gris Gris Strut?
Sonali: Oh my god. You did actually research me. How did you...nevermind. So my friend AsaleSol Young was brought in to work with the kids with me, and she lived in a house full of queer women of color. We were always talking about ways to work together more, to team up. That was W.A.L.K.S., just like a collective of similar creative people. Gris Gris Strut was a dance crew. We would dance in parades and were all from the rock and roll adjacent scene, punks, or my gutter-punk friends’ friends. That certainly wasn’t connected with Creative Forces. I hadn't thought about that for a while.
Ben: In this post-Katrina era, you also formed what I think was your first real party-planning venture, Ditto, Baby?
Installation view of Genevieve Gaignard's Grassroots, 2017, at Ace Hotel New Orleans. Courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles. Photo by Crista Rock
Sonali: After Katrina, whatever barriers existed between people temporarily came down because everybody had to drink and there weren't that many of us. Everyone with PTSD was at the bar together; everyone was going out. My friends Helen Hollyman, Ali Mills, and Michelle Lopez, we just all hung hard. One night Helen and I were at Saturn Bar with some friends and put a Beyonce song on the jukebox a bunch of times, we were the only people there. I just looked at everyone and said, “We should throw a party here.” That’s how Ditto, Baby started. We’d meet up and talk about how to promote because after the hurricane like, where are you going to hang up a poster? I think we used MySpace. Our DJs were Brice Nice and Joey Buttons and somehow, we put Jude Matthews’ face on the flyer, and everybody came out. Our first party and it was a hit. The owner loved us ‘cause he was making more money than he'd ever made at the bar. It lasted maybe a year, a year and a half. Then I took off.
Ben: Took off?
Sonali: It was tragic. I was living in the Bywater when Helen Hill, who lived down the block from me, was murdered. The week before she was murdered, someone tried to break into our house. My friend Garnette Cadogan was staying over and told me to call the police and then I heard my neighbor’s brother fire off rounds so I went outside and he said there were dudes under the house. I was like, “Fuck this shit.” I called a friend, Ricardo Merediz, from Loyola and said I had to get the fuck out of New Orleans. He was doing this mobile marketing gig, and that's what I ended up doing. I got on a Walgreen’s bus sponsored by The National Urban League that was like Road Rules, but no glamour. But I was with a bunch of hilarious people of color, and we were just on the road doing health screenings for the community for a while.
Ben: This is the first time I’ve heard you talk about a time you wanted out of the city. I’m thinking back to your college graduation; I read there was a rousing “rebuild” themed speech from James Carville that had an impact on you?
Sonali: It was a rousing speech, for sure. The audience was largely young people who went through this collective trauma, we were looking for something to rally around. It did give me the feeling that I wanted to stay and put in real work. But you know, some kids didn't come back to graduate. Some kids didn't try to finish. You want to hear something creepy? I didn't see children for a year. You don't think about how that shit fucks you up. So I did want to stay, but after my neighbor was murdered I realized how much fear I carried with me every time I left my house. There were all these male construction workers everywhere, I didn't feel physically safe. I didn't feel emotionally safe. I don't think James Carville knew what it was like to be a woman walking around in post-Katrina New Orleans, you know? But after the health screening work I came back. There's just no place like New Orleans. I had to go back.
Ben: How’d you get back into events? What was the sequence or who’d you link up with?
Sonali: Something that’s hard, but important to understand is what something like Katrina does to memory and timelines. I call it Katrina Brain, it’s all a blur. I think we were starting this project called House of Templum a year or two after I got back. I started working at Bar Tonique towards the end of working with House of Templum, too. I can tell you stories but the timelines might be kind of messed up.
Left: Poster for a Ditto, Baby. party. Right: Sonali’s 20th birthday at Cafe Brasil, a legendary NOLA venue and a point of entry into Sonali’s career in events. Images provided by Sonali Fernando.
Ben: The population dropped by over 50% right? I can imagine it was just really disorienting.
Sonali: Exactly. This kind of leads into intersectionality, there were definitely less black New Orleanians here, without a fucking doubt. Then you saw this massive transplant wave come in, a lot of people who are working in school and in film. This is around the preproduction of the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. You know, the second unit director was in my house and they raised the Aurochs there. They raised that pig [which is in the movie]in my house. Pauger House / House of the Rising Sun, as we called it, was wild. In the years I was there, which was around nine, I’d come home to Momma Tried Magazines’ naked photo shoot with my gay male friends and decaying fruit, or some dude in a mirrorball outfit shooting pickup shots for an Arcade Fire video or something. That was the vibe.
One night at a dive bar, The Saint, I heard someone deejaying and thought their selection was awesome. I ran inside and met the DJ, Whitney Thomas (Pr_ck). Later, talking with him and his DJ friend Johnny Sanders (Five), we talked about how shows were weird ‘cause it's a sea of white people and then there's...us. We just felt strange in those spaces. Johnny is a gay man, I'm a queer woman, Whitney is a straight black man, and we just wanted places for us to authentically be ourselves. Some other friends, Jose Guaderamma and Theo Eliezer got involved too and we started a monthly party as House of Templum, or just Templum. We ended up moving it to Saturn Bar, and kind of helped put that place on the map.
Ben: A minute ago you mentioned Bar Tonique, this is where you established yourself a bit more as a bartender right?
Sonali: The bartending days were special, I think I brought an entirely new clientele at that bar. I was probably one of four people of visible color working in classic cocktails and the only woman at that time. I was really strategic with the playlists, people loved it.
Ben: When you say only a few people of color were involved in the cocktail world— and keep in mind I’ve only been to NOLA once —I think of NOLA as a very black city, and one known for its bar scene. What’s the context; why so few people of color in cocktails?
Sonali: There is a hierarchy in food and beverage. When the resurgence of the classic cocktail became a thing, that specific environment was very white and male. When women came into it, they were also mostly white. The history of New Orleans and drinking in bars...white and black people don't typically drink in the same bars. This excludes music venues, by the way. Black bars, at that time, were either ultra fucking bougie with bottle service and all that, or they were the neighborhood spots. In some older bars, you could order a setup, a small bottle of liquor and a carafe or bottle of a mixer . In some bars, if you didn't finish it, you could put the liquor bottle in a paper bag and they'd write your name on it and keep it at the bar if you wanted.
Ben: The setup sounds amazing. Let me know when it stops being humid as shit down there and maybe I'll move.
Sonali: You know I have a guest room! But in short, it’s just the history of racism and class issues that kept that hierarchy in place. It’s why even in the mid to late 2000s, I was one of only a few women of color in that world.
Ben: How did you transition from working in other peoples’ bars to co-founding your own spot?
Sonali: That came out of bartending. My former business partner, we tended bar together and would have the best shifts ever. After, we’d clean, get drunk, and talk business for hours. One day he says, “I've found the chef. I got this place.” It was cool and I wanted to get involved, so I put in some money and sweat in return for equity. When I say sweat I mean I laid down all the subway tiles myself. But that venture, La Fin Du Monde, was short lived and that's all I can really say about it.
Then this place in Bywater from back in the day came up for rent, and my same partner asked if I wanted to put in more money. The numbers were good, and I knew the neighborhood really well. I knew I could get people down there. So Oxalis happened, and it was beautiful. It was fun, it was a hit. I’d parlayed all of my social equity into that space, and the community really came out and showed love. I didn't realize it at the time, but so many people came in specifically to support me as a woman of color who owned a restaurant. This is when I really knew I had community. It’s one thing to be doing events, it’s another to have support through the most difficult times. A restaurant is an event that just never stops.
Ben: What were the difficult times? How’d you overcome them?
Handbills for House of Templum’s “Bones” party from March 2011. Images provided by Sonali Fernando.
Sonali: Unfortunately, I was forced to sign a NDA, but I can say some of it was just normal difficulty. Partnership is hard and in a restaurant, if you don't have a healthy relationship at the top, it spills out quickly to every aspect of your life and your employees lives.
Ben: What’s a classic pairing from Oxalis? A drink and something off the menu.
Sonali: We were known for our burger. Our chef, Jonathan Lestingi, had trained under a lot of heavy hitters. I remember telling him, “I'm down for whatever you want to do, but you have to make the best burger in downtown.” He looked at me like I was the devil. I go, “I have seen what you eat when you’re wasted. Don't pretend you are above a burger!” So, he did it. It was a huge hit, it was the best. He used creme fraiche as a binding agent, and the brioche bun, in-bone marrow add on. I mean Ben...I used to squeeze the burger juice over the fries. We were known for our $5 Old Fashioned, with your choice of plastic cap whiskey.
Ben: Did you then have a gap year or did you transition right into Ace Hotel? I can’t remember when Ace started hiring for New Orleans exactly.
Sonali: Actually, I was interviewing with Ace for a while, while I was still negotiating to get bought out from Oxalis. It was probably not smart for me to take on opening a hotel after opening a restaurant but, that’s what I did.
Ben: But how’d you initially connect with Ace?
Sonali: One night at Oxalis Rusty Lazer, who's a DJ in town and in the bounce community, Rusty came in and stayed late. The kitchen was gone, the servers were ready to leave so I took over the table. He was dining with Ryan Bukstein from Ace and I don’t remember exactly how we traded info, we set up a time to talk. So days later I’m doing a run to the bank and the phone rings and I’m like “Oh shit, I have a meeting with that Ace guy.” I’d just forgotten.
Ben: As someone who has worked with you, it’s comforting to know you’ve been forgetting about meetings from even before you were officially hired [laughs].
Sonali: Okay. Shut up. So on the call, Ryan told me the backstory, about Alex [Calderwood] and then just started asking me about the history of gentrification in the city, and for examples of business practices that locals found ethical or unethical. They seemed like weird first questions, but I told him if you're coming in as an outsider, the most important thing is to put the most money possible into the hands of people who are from here. After that call, I looked Ace up and saw all of Stryker Matthews’ programming in London and was like, “What?!” He was working with artists I loved that seemed a world away. So there were more calls, more talks about gentrification, and I thought it was dope that a corporation really did care. It wasn’t just talk. All of us who were on the opening team had stars in our eyes.
“A restaurant is an event that just never stops.”
Ben: Can you give a couple of examples of the kinds of projects you were involved with at Ace? Maybe two personal favorites.
Sonali: Let me see. So first, Inside Voices was a series of panels on New Orleans or Louisiana-specific topics, with locals shepherding the conversations. The first one was Inside Voices: The Audacity of Twerk which featured black women discussing twerking’s roots in traditional African dances, what it meant socially in the early days of New Orleans bounce and hip hop, and how it’s tied across the world to different disciplines regarding the movement of the body. At the time, so many people were talking about twerking. Miley Cyrus was twerking. Suddenly, everyone was twerking. I wanted to hear from people who invented and own the word, kept the traditions alive. People like Cheeky Blakk, Ms. Tee and Aussetua AmorAmenkum...it was an amazing lineup.
Ben: How about a gallery show? You had some good ones. I remember that time we had both curated Maxine Walters’ collection of Jamaican dancehall signs but had no idea the other person was doing it [laughs].
Sonali: We are the same person! So, I don't come from a fine arts background, so working in that space has been really fun. Ace’s 2017 partnership with Prospect 4, part of the art triennial here, that one stood out. We worked with Genevieve Gaignard on her show GRASSROOTS. She is a white-presenting bi-racial artist whose father is from the city’s Seventh Ward. She took over the gallery space itself, and then this extension area by the coffee shop. She wallpapered and painted two different rooms so it was made to look like a church, and the other room was made to look like a living room or parlor. She nailed it. So many black New Orleanians came in and were like, “Oh my God, I've stepped into my grandmother's house.” On the walls were her photo series with herself paired with a gentleman named Sean, a visibly black man, dressed like they were in the fifties or the sixties as well as a triptych in the parlor of 3 lighter skinned black women (the artist, Terri Coleman and Allison Glenn) in headwraps, a reference to New Orleans’ Tignon Laws. It was incredible to see how people responded to the work. There was also a large image, the well known diagram of the inside of a slave ship lining the walls above the picture rails. That got us a negative review from a white woman who was offended, but I think she just didn’t understand it was an intentional artwork in a curated space. Hotels can be tricky to show work like that in. But I can't take credit for that at all. That was all Genevieve. My job in that situation was to fight for what she wanted.
Ben: What’s the future for Ace in NOLA, you think? Or at least, your future with Ace in NOLA?
Sonali: Until there's a vaccine, I don't know what the fuck is going to happen. We're the land of the festival. Gumbo Fest, a fried chicken fest, a seafood fest, Jazz Fest, Essence, you know what I mean? This is hard for New Orleans. I don't know what the hotel industry is going to be like, but I want to be booking those events and I want to be working with our partners. I miss working with our residents. I miss working on projects with people I have shared community with for years now. The future plan is to just go with the flow for as long as we have to go with the flow and to keep people safe.
A New Years Even party with the Fernandos. Sonali is in the forefront wearing a crown, her mom is in the gold dress. Photo provided by Sonali Fernando.
Ben: On the subject of people you work with...it seems “best of” lists on the NOLA music scene are male-centric. Fats Domino, Dr. John, Professor Longhair, Wayne, etc. Which women or non-binary artists do you feel should be getting a more recognition?
Sonali: It's hard to say, there were few women recognized or welcomed into jazz in the beginning. It also depends on if you mean passed, here now, native, or transplant. Many musicians come here to grow. So for people from here I'm a fan of two women drummers, Nikki Glaspie and Jaz Butler. As far as vocalists and musicians, Betty Shirley, Sierra Green, , Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph, Denisia, Sarah Quintana, Mykia Jovan, and Irma Thomas. My favorite singer in New Orleans is Jelly, cant lie. Love that timbre and expression. I have also never not cried when I've heard Sunni Patterson deliver spoken word. DJ Soul Sister and rapper and producer 3DNat’tee deserve a special shout out here. Artists who came here are Helen Gillet, Meschiya Lake, Layla McCalla, and Mother Tongue. Special shoutout to new transplant and DJ, Heavy Pleasure - I hope they stay here. And those passed, that I must give my flowers to, are Sweet Emma Barrett, Mahalia Jackson, and many more. The names I’m giving overlooks the indigenous people who were here first and were decimated and I acknowledge that.
Ben: I was reading your Got a Girl Crush interview and you spoke about Buddhism. Does that play a role in your curatorial work?
Sonali: It's important to demarcate that I’m not a Buddhist practitioner in the traditional sense, It's especially important for me to say that as a Sri Lankan American because Buddhists there are political and that’s not the space I practice in. The biggest part for me is really meditation; my overarching world view is that the only thing true and real is your breath. Observing sensations related to breath gives rise to emotion. At the center of my practice, compassion is the most important thing. Compassion is not the same as sympathy. Compassion is a desire to alleviate suffering when you can and bear witness when you cannot.
There are two things. First, I think the human race might be an intermediary species, and we may get real confirmation that time isn't [necessarily] linear; I don’t think it is. I'm not really sure what's happening, with us, with AI, you know? It’s...a lot. But second, and more immediately real, is that overarching white supremacy and suppression, and maybe willful ignorance, have created a situation where the joy people [of color] find in New Orleans comes largely from their extreme resistance to and resilience in spite of what’s basically a human-made health crisis fueled by racism. So I try to remain committed to the alleviation of suffering in that context. I see such great injustice against black bodies and indigenous bodies all the time, so I try to help preserve those narratives through my role as a gatekeeper and supporting intergenerational creation. It's about giving people the language and a rubric to understand each other's oppressions as well, so we can move forward collectively into...whatever we’re turning into.
Ben: We are going somewhere. I don’t know if it’s where, say, Ray Kurzweil thinks we’re going, but it’s important we get there safely.
Sonali: With the advent of the internet and similar networks, we have an opportunity now to really map out complex systems of oppressive power, to really see how it all works. We’re diagramming the machine so we can understand how to take it apart. It’s hard work and it requires that people who are oppressed be allowed to move through their pain, and for people who have traditionally been the oppressors to move through their guilt. Sometimes it feels this is where our cognitive ability ends. We've plateaued. But maybe we're not at the emotional plateau and that’s where art can help.