Questions W/ kai lumumba barrow
A glimpse into the world and work of artists, collaborators, and friends of Prospect New Orleans through unfiltered and contemplative conversations.
kai lumumba barrow installing Abolition Playground. Photographed by jazz franklin.
kai lumumba barrow is a New Orleans based artist and one of the artists selected for the Artists of Public Memory Commission. Her work Abolition Playground is currently on view at Norman C. Francis Parkway situated between Bienville and Canal.
We had the opportunity to ask kai a few of our core questions related to our sixth triennial, Artists of Public Memory Commission, and talk a bit about her creative process and connection to New Orleans.
Prospect New Orleans: What is your relationship to New Orleans?
kai lumumba barrow: New Orleans has always held a certain romance, mystery and mythology for me. By reputation, New Orleans was a place of bohemians and artists, queers and itinerants, shutters and secrets. It was the big city my Louisiana-born grandmother escaped to for weekend fun and the first place that I hugged a tree, walked with an ancestor, and went to a drive-thru bar—not necessarily in that order. I first moved to New Orleans in 2006, in the aftermath of Katrina. A national organizer, I was invited by local organizers to help with the recovery and rebuilding effort. At a time when the city was reinventing itself, we worked to prevent the privatization of public schools, housing, and healthcare; battle environmental racism and gender discrimination; and develop local, national and international human rights campaigns that demanded environmental protections, the “right to return,” the abolition of the prison industrial complex and expungement for “Prisoners of Katrina.”
I returned to New Orleans in 2010 with paint brushes and canvas, eager to embrace the artist’s life. I have since focused largely on community-building with local artists and arts organizations and am currently a member of the Antenna Collective, a past recipient of local fellowships and residencies, such as A Studio in the Woods, Amistad-Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, and the Joan Mitchell Center. I have also had the good fortune to work with numerous BIPOC, abolitionist, feminist, post-capitalist, queer, and trans artists, thinkers, and activists who have had an abundant influence on my artistic and intellectual growth.
P: Which artists and/or thinkers have influenced your creative practice?
KLB: Over the past several years, I have been exploring what Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods named “Black geographies.” I am specifically interested in the cultural practices of diverse and shifting Black communities. The economic downturn that ushered in the 21st century: including an expanded carceral society, mass displacement, and the privatization of public spaces, programs, and services, severely impacts Black cultural spaces, particularly public spaces—which have become unsafe or inaccessible. The ideas that influence my creative practice have been sparked and shaped by too many people to list here. A quick roll call of the thinkers whose theories on abolition and carceral landscapes, counterpublics, hauntology, radical imagination, and speculative history ground Playground includes works by: Gina Dent, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Colin Ward, the Black Public Sphere Collective, Nancy Fraser, Avery F. Gordon, Toni Morrison, Robin D.G. Kelley, Herbert Marcuse, Franklin Rosemont, and Saidiya Hartman.
I am also inspired by contemporary artists who experiment with Black spatial geographies in ways that complicate form, function and abstraction. I’m thinking here about people such as El Anatsui, Chakaia Booker, Houston Conwill, Abigail De Ville, Torkwase Dyson, Sam Gilliam, John Scott and Noah Purifoy, whose Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum is the primary inspiration for the design and materials used in Playground.
Installation view of Noah Purifoy’s Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum.
P: In your own words, what is a monument and to whom or what is it in service?
KLB: Simply put, I think that “The Monument” is essentially an ideological tool of the ruling elite. Historically, the ability to dedicate, commission, and site a monument belongs to those who have the power to amplify (and materialize) their values, history, goals, and priorities. The names of streets, parks, and buildings; the images on coins, walls, and plinths, and the meaning assigned to these symbols can either reinforce or disrupt ideological power.
kai lumumba barrow installing Abolition Playground. Photographed by jazz franklin.
P: Which Louisiana stories, movements, groups, and individuals do you believe should be honored in public space and which are you honoring in Abolition Playground?
KLB: New Orleans holds the dubious honor as the largest slave market in the nation, (where, according to historian Walter Johnson, over 100,000 people were packaged, priced and sold). A citywide enterprise unconfined and sprawling, people were sold in public parks, private hotels and residences, decks of ships along the Mississippi, high-walled slave pens, and commercial complexes and arcades.
As a memory work, I aim to recall real and speculative “fugitive” spaces. Considering the ways in which Black public space has always been surveilled, occupied, and contained (thinking here about the plantation landscape), Black fugitive space is also public space, a counterpublics where maroons, runaways, refugees, misfits, rebels, and itinerants gather to exchange information, strategies, ideas and resources. The narratives of those who move within these counterpublics are often invisibilized, deprioritized, criminalized or unknown.
kai lumumba barrow installing Abolition Playground. Photographed by jazz franklin.
Sited on Norman C. Francis Parkway, between Bienville and Canal, the Mid-City neighborhood that houses Playground, is also where the Orleans Parish Prison, a behemoth complex of jails on the far end of the Parkway reminds us that Black people, who on average, make up about 89 percent of the jail population, are still being held in high-walled pens.
Abolition Playground interrupts the normalcy of the carceral landscape and its confederate ghosts. In a city that was designated as a punishment for those who were considered ungovernable, the work asks, “how do we confront the hauntology of a place, especially as that space continues to harm us through its values, symbols, systems and structures? In her book, Ghostly Matters, Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon describes three characteristic features of haunting: 1) an unsettling of propriety and borderlines in activity and knowledge; 2) a representation of what is missing, thus drawing attention to loss, and 3) a future possibility—a hope.
P: Within Abolition Playground, what conversations are you influenced by in the local and national conversation around how monuments and symbols appear in our civic landscape?
KLB: I want to think about the civic landscape as a fugitive space, a temporary, adaptable, migratory, and vulnerable space, especially for people who are in a contentious relationship with state power. I think of this fugitive space also as a place where the community commemorates itself—where we leave our own trails, signals, and markers—as offerings to future generations in the abstract; the space between legibility and opacity. I am interested in exploring the ways in which a community creates its own memories within the imposed symbols that occupy public space. In this vein, I’m imagining an abolitionist art framework that would support an almost “anti-monument” movement—a recognition of the ways that a community chooses, creates, uses, maintains, and invests in its own commemorative spaces. Dr. Wille Wright discusses this practice in his paper, "Right Beyond the Site: Otabenga Jones and the Social Practice of Belonging." Street altars, shoes strung over high wires, tags and billboard “redecorations” often convey far more information to and among a community, than the symbols erected by governmental authorities and economic actors.
Installation view of Abolition Playground. Photographed by jazz franklin.
P: How does this installation fit into your practice as a multi-disciplinary artist? Has this work evolved from previous works or do you see it as a stand-alone piece?
KLB: My work experiments with abolition as an artistic vernacular within and among Black geographies. Since I am based where the work is sited, I have the opportunity to observe Playground over time and in conversation with its community. So far I have noticed windblown, and sometimes intentional, trash, graffiti, and wheatpasting. The work is vulnerable to the elements, creatures, and characters that engage it. A monument that is reclaimed by the community who engages it, seems to me a statement of collective ownership. I am curious as to how the project’s installations and sculptures invite people to actively engage the work; how they evoke radical imagination and critical dialogue.
Over the past decade I have been exploring these ideas in my individual studio practice and through collaborations with an informal network of artists, activists, fabricators, media-makers, scholars and community organizations called “Gallery of the Streets.” This formation allows me to work at a larger scale, especially for public and performative works, and helps me to build/strengthen relationships with people who share similar visions, interests, and goals. Using a socially-engaged practice, we work with our communities to identify, engage, and share “everyday” rituals and gestures that transform public spaces into temporary imagination zones—harm free sites of resistance, mutual aid, critical discourse, beauty, and discovery.
P: How are you exploring and redefining monuments, collective memories, or memorials? What other artists/organizations both locally and beyond do you see doing similar work?
KLB: Abolition Playground is envisioned as a kind of fugitive space where the remnants of a community–its treasures and trash–are transformed into monuments of mundanity; again, a kind of “anti-monument.” This fugitive space neither exalts any individual nor does it commemorate singular events, actions or ideas. The fugitive space asks us to consider how we honor and recall each other as everyday historic actors. What markings, patterns, and codes help us see and remember our communities’ contributions for current and future generations? To me, this question is particularly relevant in a city that is regularly at-risk for short-term evacuation and long-term displacement.
Installation view of Abolition Playground. Photographed by jazz franklin.
I think the artists and curators from the inaugural Artists of Public Memory Commission bring new insights to the afterlife of place: Shana griffin and her “Displaced” and “Soil” projects; Monique Verdin’s transdisciplinary storytelling; and photographers Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun and An Intertribal Collective, are all thinking critically about collective memory. Additionally, artists such as Brandan “BMike'' Odums, Jessica Strahan, and Journey Allen, leave their mark on neighborhood walls throughout the city—visibilizing everyday occupants who make up the rhythm and action of the community and complicate its narrative.
I think conversations about the present and future of public symbols and public space should continue to drive the initiatives, coalition-building and experimentation that is currently happening at the intersections of arts and social change. (I’m thinking here about the Monuments to Movements initiatives, the Monument Lab and Readying the Museum coalitions, and the artist and social change community collaborations led by the Surdna Foundation, Alternate Roots and the Southern Performance Network, among others.) I appreciate the ways these institutions are addressing the shifting terrain of public space and the emphasis they are placing on expanding the voices of artists who are under-represented or completely excluded from the art market.
P: How can we collectively situate projects and support artists so that they are better positioned/empowered to renegotiate actual political and ecological geographies in the city?
KLB: While the recent Monuments Movement expands the dialogue to include an interrogation of art and public space, I think the way that arts communities and our allies respond to the challenges of ongoing critical activism will determine our ability to produce material impacts on political and ecological geographies. In a city where cultural capital, exemplified by the entertainment, hospitality and tourism industries, produces cyclical patterns of exploitation and survival, there is still much to be explored in developing collaborative work that can shift policy, economic development, and community revitalization. With the approaching 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (symbolizing an important marker in the collective memory), I am interested in dialogues that examine the role of art and artists in a shifting geographic, environmental, social, political, and economic landscape. What are the impacts of carcerality, climate crises, displacement, disaster capitalism, failing infrastructure, and racial and gender violence on the arts and culture sector? Do we have a collective response to the current health, well-being and future sustainability of the arts, artists and cultural workers across the city, state, and region? And, what can a post-capitalist framework bring to fundamental questions of cultural production, community design and public space? Returning to Gordon, “Haunting recognition lets us know what has happened or is happening.” What we choose to do from this vantage point is up to us.
Installation view of Abolition Playground. Photographed by jazz franklin.
Questions W/ provides glimpse into the world and work of artists, collaborators, and friends of Prospect New Orleans through unfiltered and contemplative conversations. To read more conversations visits our News sections.
ABOUT 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.
Artists of Public Memory is funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project with additional major funding from the Ford Foundation; the Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation; the Wagner Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Arts.
