WE ARE CONSTANTLY CHALLENGING THE COMMON TO BE GROUND.
WYNTON MARSALIS
ACCUMULATING LANDSCAPES OF RACE
This exhibit explores the accumulating landscapes of race in New Orleans, Louisiana. We start with the premise that racial capitalism, white supremacy and racism work and rework the landscape and that they are made, literally and symbolically, in and through the geography of the city and its development over time.
Through visual representation and materiality, each tapestry in the first part of this exhibition portrays a temporal variant of racial capitalism, putting it in conversation with the accumulations of racialized ground from the past. These tapestries follow the city’s history from a wetland and gathering place for Indigenous peoples to the arrival of ships bearing enslaved Africans; from the division and drainage of the land into cash crop plantations to build the city’s economy to celebrations of Emancipation; from the birth of Jazz in the Tremé to Jim Crow segregation, redlining and urban renewal; from Black place-making along Tremé’s North Claiborne Avenue and resistance through protest and mutual aid to Hurricane Betsy’s devastation of the Lower NinthWard and the construction of the I-10 expressway; from Hurricane Katrina’s displacement of native New Orleanians and dispossession of its Black residents to the continued iterative grounding of racial processes in the wake of Katrina.
SYNCOPATING INFRASTRUCTURES OF JOY
The second part of the exhibition explores the tactile, material confluences of joy, freedom making and vitality. Three main pieces form a spatial ground for coming together to celebrate resistance and the imaginary of hope. The ground riffs on New Orleans’s Congo Square, sacred ground in the Black community. The oaks and cypresses celebrate the landscape as a space which held Black and Native communities, much of which is now lost to development. Finally, the wall embodies water, which shapes the city’s past, present and future.
