Panelists: Imani Jacqueline Brown, Shana M. griffin, Renee Royale, Hannah Chalew

Tuesday, April 11

Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Room #603

7001 Freret Street

1:00PM-2:00PM

New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and TU Libraries invite you to Art and Insurgency: A Conversation with the Co-curators and Artists of Insurgent Ecologies.

Insurgent Ecologies: Resisting watersheds of conquest, enslavement, and extraction along the Mississippi River engages artwork, projects, and collaborative initiatives across the Mississippi watershed that disrupt systems of racial enslavement, coloniality, displacement, and industrial encroachment, which rupture space-time to form a “continuum of extractivism.” Together, we interrogate common assumptions and false solutions while imagining new ecologies that can repair the violence of the “plantationocene”.

Invited panelists are the two co-curators/participating artists, Shana M. griffin and Imani Jacqueline Brown. Two guest artists, Renee Royale and Hannah Chalew, will join the panel and discuss the upcoming exhibition, and share their work in the context of our changing Gulf South environment and the role of creativity to understand our new dynamic climate realities.

This event is free and open to the public. The event is hosted by New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and TU Libraries with support from Antenna Gallery, the Newcomb Art Department at University, PUNCTUATE, and 3OneOne6 St. Claude Gallery.

PARTICIPANTS

Shana M. griffin

Shana M. griffin is a feminist activist, researcher, sociologist, artist, abolitionist, and mother whose work engages history and memory as sites of resistance, rupture, and protest. Her practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, activist-centered, and decolonial—existing across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, digital humanities, and land-use planning and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. Shana's work engages decolonial practices that attend to the lived experiences of the Black Diaspora, centering the particular experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive legislation, economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and climate change.

For more information, https://www.shanamgriffin.com/.

Imani Jacqueline Brown

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, writer, and researcher from New Orleans, based between New Orleans and London. Her work investigates the “continuum of extractivism,” which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production and climate change. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that form the foundations of settler-colonial society, she opens space to imagine new paths to ecological reparations. Imani combines archival research, ecological philosophy, cultural and legal theory, people’s history, and counter-cartographic strategies to unravel the spatial logics that make geographies, unmake communities, and break Earth’s geology.

For more information, https://imanijacquelinebrown.net/.

Renee Royale

In reverence to and remembrance of my rootworking and field-laboring ancestors, I utilize nature and natural elements as my tools to make the intangible, tangible. I am most frequently drawn to water, which serves as both a conduit and catalyst for ritual and repetitive change. As necessary, I incorporate materials such as silk prints, found ephemera of respective environments, mantras, poems, etc., to add context and extension to the visual depictions of my discoveries. In the vein of Zora Neale Hurston and other purveyors of Black feminist thought, I am inspired to provide perspectives and explorations that center Blackness both on this side of the Atlantic and the larger Global South with an emphasis on an accurate representation of Black life both current and ancestral.

For more information, https://www.reneeroyale.com/.

Hannah Chalew

We are living in the age of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch marked by humans’ effect on our planet—in Louisiana, where the oil and gas industry is a major part of the state’s economy and culture despite our ever more vulnerable coastline. My artwork explores what it means to live in an era of global warming with an uncertain future, and specifically what that means in Southern Louisiana. I connect my message with my medium by divesting my work from fossil fuels through my transportation and material choices and the way I power my studio and artwork. Believing that art has the power to make people feel deeply and to question their perspectives, I use my artwork to reach and engage people on the issue of climate change in an increasingly oversaturated information age.

For more information, https://www.hannahchalew.com/.