The Louis Armstrong House Museum promotes the cultural, historical, and humanitarian legacy of Louis Armstrong (b.1901, New Orleans; d.1971, Corona, New York) by preserving and interpreting the artist’s house and grounds, collecting and sharing archival materials, and developing public programs. With this project, Regina Bain aims to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of Louis Armstrong’s landmark, independently sponsored visit to Accra in 1956. At the crux of the American Civil Rights and Ghanaian independence movements, this visit was a turning point in Armstrong’s political consciousness. Just months later, he issued a rare public condemnation of segregation in response to the Little Rock Nine. In 1960, Armstrong embarked on a months-long tour of the African continent through the US State Department. In addition to a focus on Ghana, Bain’s research will engage with discourse around Armstrong’s impact in other African nations, including the Republic of the Congo, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
Louis Armstrong shows a trumpet to a classroom of young men in the documentary Satchmo the Great, 1957. Collection Louis Armstrong House Museum (LAHM). Courtesy LAHM
Organized in collaboration with Odile Tevie at the
Nubuke Foundation in Accra and co-hosted by the Africa Center in East Harlem, the exhibition component of the project engages contemporary artists to respond to Armstrong, whose global fame focused attention on pressing issues across the African diaspora. Ghanaian artists working with varied forms, from sculpture to performance, and whose work connects to the African diaspora writ large, have been invited to engage historians, musicians, and archival material to create new work that speaks to these intertwined legacies.
In fall 2026, the exhibition will open in New York at the Armstrong Center, a 14,000-sq.-ft. new construction across the street from the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, and at the Africa Center in Harlem. It will then travel to the Nubuke Foundation in Accra in spring 2027. Through this multi-sited collaboration, the project not only emphasizes Armstrong’s often-overlooked international impact, but moreover includes direct narratives from African artists and institutions.
Reel-to-reel tape recorded by Louis Armstrong. Collection Louis Armstrong House Museum (LAHM). Courtesy LAHM
Regina Bain is Executive Director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum (LAHM), where she stewards the preservation of Armstrong’s landmarked home and the largest archive of any single jazz musician. In 2023, under her leadership, LAHM opened the $26 million Armstrong Center, which houses a seventy-five-seat performance space and the sixty-thousand-piece archive of Louis and Lucille Armstrong. Bain is currently organizing a digital experience on jazz and hip-hop in Queens. Prior to LAHM, she served as Associate Vice President of the Posse Foundation, a national leadership and college access program. She is a co-facilitator of Culture @3, a community of cultural leaders in New York, and formerly served on the Yale University Alumni Board of Governors. Her writing is featured in the Handbook of Black Librarianship (Bloomsbury, third edition, 2024).