2023 Artists of Public Memory
After a statewide nomination process, three projects engaging the work of nine contemporary artists have been selected to be presented in New Orleans in 2023.
All three of these projects interrogate and reimagine collective memory and representation in a state with a history that is both complex and spellbinding, violent and revolutionary.With initial commission development support from Prospect.5 Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, these inaugural projects were selected based on the scale and scope of their work, subject matter, relationship to locality, and their creative approach to monumentality and public engagement. Each selected artist or collective will receive between $40,000 and $50,000 to produce their projects. Artists will work closely with Curatorial Advisors Shana M. griffin and Monique Verdin, as well as city agencies and community organizations, to develop and install these new works of art in prominent public greenspaces across New Orleans.
Image courtesy of Jeremy Tauriac
kai lumumba barrow
kai lumumba barrow (b. 1959, Chicago) is a self-taught artist and founder of Gallery of the Streets, a national network of artists, activists, and scholars who work at the nexus of art, political education, social change and community engagement.
As an artist, barrow is interested in the praxis of radical imagination. Experimenting with abolition as an artistic vernacular, her sprawling paintings, installations, and sculptures are formed in traditional and non-traditional environments to transgress biological, ideological, and carceral borders. barrow’s installations and ritualistic environments recall African diasporic cosmologies, incorporating reusable materials such as dirt, moss, rocks, machines, money, and bones as a visual and ethnographic language. These remnants construct the archives of a place; the afterlife of everyday mundanity. In this sense, barrow’s work is memoir – grounded in repair, renewal, and regeneration. It is a map of what once was, what currently is, and a nudge to what might be.
barrow has previously received artist residencies, fellowships, and awards from Project Row Houses; the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Joan Mitchell Center; A Studio in the Woods; the Weavers Project Fellowship; Alternate Roots; Antenna; and the Kindle Project. Learn more about barrow’s Artists of Public Memory commission here.
Image courtesy of Jeremy Tauriac
Chandra McCormick & Keith Calhoun
Chandra McCormick (b. 1957) and Keith Calhoun (b. 1955) are artists, and documentary photographers, living and working in New Orleans. McCormick and Calhoun use their cameras to provide visual testimony to the lived experiences of Black life in the U.S. South. Since the early 1980s, McCormick and Calhoun have engaged photography as a site of social activism—documenting, illuminating, and conveying the struggles and celebrations of the Black American experience. Together they have chronicled religious ceremonies, cultural traditions, and visual histories of the Lower 9th Ward. Their images bear witness to the social realities of Black life—historicizing and archiving the rich, unique traditions and deep-rooted attributes of Louisiana culture and the Black experience.
McCormick and Calhoun have received numerous awards for their photographic work, which has been widely cited and exhibited, including in “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” at MoMA PS1 (2020-2021), “We No Longer Consider Them Damaged” at the Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College (2020), “Labor Studies” at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2018), the 56th International Biennale Arte Exhibition, All the World Futures, “Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex,” Venice, Italy (2015), and Prospect 3: Notes for Now (2014-15).
McCormick and Calhoun’s work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, New York City; Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans; Harvard University Art Gallery Collection, Cambridge; the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Aperture Gallery, New York City; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans. Their work has also been featured in Aperture Magazine, National Geographic, Art in America, Smithsonian Magazine, Hyperallergic, Muse Magazine, Art Review, CBS Sunday Morning, and PBS Jim Lear NewsHour.
Left to right: Jenna Mae, Ida Aronson, Virginia Richard, Dr. Tammy Greer, Ozone 504, Monique Verdin. Image courtesy of Jeremy Tauriac
AN INTERTRIBAL COLLECTIVE
An Intertribal collective of artists, educators, researchers, gardeners, herbalists, water protectors, land defenders and culture keepers are collaborating as one of the artist teams participating in the Artists of Public Memory Commission. The collective and their networks have been working in collaboration with each other and their Indigenous communities to make visible the Intertribal histories and present realities across Louisiana and the Gulf South.
Ida Aronson is a citizen of the United Houma Nation (UHN), a member of the Houma Language Project and the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo network, and a founding member of the Bvlbancha Collective and Bvlbancha Public Access. Aronson is a multimedia artivist working across visual arts fields, lighting design and event production, and cultural crafts such as basket weaving.
Tammy Greer is a citizen of the United Houma Nation (UHN) and director of the Center for American Indian Research and Studies at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is a medicine wheel garden steward and a documentarian of Houma culture. Dr. Greer works with traditional plants used by Indigenous Peoples of the southeastern United States.
Jenna Mae is a mixed southeastern creature of Eastern Siouan, Mvskoke, and Cherokee descent. As a poet, parent, gardener, ethnographer, and community herbalist, Jenna Mae dreams in Ancestral futures with beloved community in Bvlbancha. (Okla Hina Ikhish Holo, Bvlbancha Collective, Bvlbancha Liberation Radio, Hachotakni Haco)
Ozone 504 is an East Tennessee Melungeon (Saponi, Monocan, and Lenni Lenape descent), who found himself magically transported to Bvlbancha through a trick of fate at the end of the 20th century. He resides in the 9th Ward. He is a social practice artist, producer/engineer of Bvlbancha Liberation Radio, and arts editor and design director of Bulbancha is Still a Place zine, among other liberatory plots.
Monique Verdin is a transdisciplinary artist and storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and is supporting the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail), a network of Indigenous gardeners, as the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network Gulf South food and medicine sovereignty program manager. Monique is co-producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love and her work has been included in a variety of environmentally inspired projects, including the multi-platform performance Cry You One, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and the collaborative book Return to Yakni Chitto: Houma Migrations.
Virginia Richard is a MOWA Chahta ohoyo (MOWA Choctaw woman), born and raised on the Atakapa-Ishak prairie, who has made a life for herself among friends and relatives of the larger Indigenous community of Bvlbancha. She is a member of Bvlbancha Collective, Okla Hina Ikhish Holo, Hachotakni Haco, and other local intertribal projects centered around Indigenous sovereignty, Land Back, and reconnecting with the sacredness of the created world, including ourselves. She is pumped and honored to be a descendant during the time the ancestors are rousing a Mississippian rebirth.