Insurgent Ecologies :: Group Show

Photo documentation by Jose Cotto.

New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University and Antenna with collaborating partners launches Insurgent Ecologies, an exhibition project featuring artwork by forty-five artists, collaborative projects, and initiatives across the Mississippi watershed.  

Insurgent Ecologies is curated by Imani Jacqueline Brown & Shana M. griffin and organized by Antenna and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, with collaborating partners. The exhibit spans two venues, Antenna Gallery and 3OneOne6 Gallery, and opens this Saturday, April 8 through Sunday, May 28, 2023.

New Orleans (April 3, 2023) New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University (NOCGS) and Antenna, in collaboration with the Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange, PUNCTUATE,  Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University, and the Gulf South Open School  are excited to announce the opening of Insurgent Ecologies: Resisting Watersheds of Conquest, Enslavement, and Extraction Along the Mississippi River. 

Insurgent Ecologies is curated by Imani Jacqueline Brown & Shana M. griffin and organized by Antenna and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University (“NOCGS”), with support from the Gulf South Open School, PUNCTUATE, & Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Department. This exhibition, public programing, and print project features 45 artists and initiatives and stems from transdisciplinary collaborations nested within the Mississippi Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange and the international Anthropocene Commons project. The exhibit spans two venues,  Antenna Gallery and 3OneOne6, and opens on Saturday, April 8, from 6 – 9 pm. 

The exhibition 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.” Insurgent Ecologies  interrogate common assumptions and false solutions while imagining new ecologies that can repair the violence of the “plantationocene”.

This exhibition, public programming, and print project reflects on-going collaborations between activists, scientists, visual, sound, and interdisciplinary artists, and scholars to understand the intersections of climate change, colonialism, and extraction up and down the Mississippi River. Insurgent Ecologies is the latest iterative project inspired by the Anthropocene River Campus, the upriver Overflow exhibition, the Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange, and international Anthropocene Commons. 

The Anthropocene Commons grew out of the 10-year Anthropocene Curriculum initiative, which since 2013 has reflected on the ways communities around the world understand and respond to the human impact on earth. The Anthropocene Curriculum project was organized by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in partnership with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. In 2017, HKW instigated Mississippi. An Anthropocene River (2017-2019) and seeded 5 field stations along the river. NOCGS was invited to co-organize and host the culmination of this two-year experiment, Anthropocene River Campus (2019). 

Featured artists, collaborative projects, and initiatives include:

Ana Hernandez

Andrea Carlson

AnnieLaurie Erickson

Beatte Geissler, Mat Rappaport, and Oliver Sann

Brandon Ballengée

Brian Holmes and Jeremy Bolen

CFreedom

Civic Studio and Water Leaders Institute

Geography of Robots

Hannah Chalew

Imani Jacqueline Brown

jackie sumell

Jennifer Colten

Jessi Parfait and Christopher O’Loughlin

John Kim

Juan Carlos Quintana

kai lumumba barrow

Kayla Anderson, Sara Black, Amber Ginsburg, Sarah Lewison, and Claire Pentecost

Kira Akerman

Les Cenelles (Denise Frazier, Peter J. Bowling,  Joseph Darensbourg, and Demi Ward)

localStyle (Marlene Novak and Jay Alan Yim) in collaboration with Mak Hepler-Gonzalez

Matthew Rosenbeck

Michael Ifeoma Esealuka  

Monica Moses Haller

Monique Verdin

Nic[o] Brierre Aziz

Rebecca Snedeker

Renee Royale

Ron Bechet

Sarah Kanouse, Ryan Griffis, Corinne Teed, Heather Parrish, and Jon Lund

Shana M. griffin

Steve Rowell

Tia-Simone Gardner

Insurgent Ecologies will be accompanied by an opening reception on Saturday, April 8,  6 – 10 pm, and will be on view at Antenna, located at 3718 St. Claude Ave, and 3OneOne6, located at 3116 St. Claude Ave., until  Sunday, May 28, 2023. Public programming will include panel discussions, workshops, and more.

For more information, contact New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University at gulfsouth@tulane.edu and 504-314-2854.

ORGANIZERS

About New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University:

The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University (NOCGS): is an interdisciplinary, place-based institute that promotes the understanding of New Orleans and the Gulf South region. We support research, teaching, and community engagement that relate the local to the global and planetary. All of our programming is based on the belief that the more we understand where we are, the more fully we can engage in our democracy and collective destiny.

About Antenna:

Antenna is a 501(c)(3) non-profit multidisciplinary cultural institution presenting exhibitions, public programs, publishing, and regranting located in New Orleans. We provide financial, curatorial, professional, residential support for BIPOC, LGBTQ-GNC+, women, immigrant, and other abled cultural contributors and cultural bearers who produce visual and performance art; digitally printed book arts; participatory and socially engaged projects in public space at the intersection of Gender and Identity, the Environment, Equity, Renewable Resources, Abolition, Restorative Justice, and the histories of the Gulf South. 

About PUNCTUATE:

PUNCTUATE is a feminist initiative foregrounding the embodied aesthetics and practices of Black feminist thought. Integrating critical research methods with activism and socially engaged multimedia projects, PUNCTUATE works to address the intersecting forms of everyday violence and subjectivity Black women, our families, and communities experience in the context of housing access and land-use planning, climate impacts, reproductive control, surveillance, carcerality, and gender violence. PUNCTUATE aims to engage in public programming highlighting Black feminist spatial imaginaries and disrupt ideological policies and practices of control, punishment, and disposability.

About Gulf South Open School:

The Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange (2022-2024) is an expansive educational and research collaboration through the formation of five river hubs spanning the river’s headwaters to the Gulf. The Open School engages pressing issues at the intersections of race, environment, and extraction through education, cultural exchange, and action. The Gulf South Open School (GSOS) comprises six organization-based projects in this region, including Civic Studio (Katie Fronek and Aron Chang), PUNCTUATE (Shana M. griffin), New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (Rebecca Snedeker and Denise Frazier), Dillard University (Amy Lesen), Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange (Monique Verdin), and Antenna (Monica Mejia Restrepo). 

_____________________________________________________________________________________