Insurgent Ecologies

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 Friday-Sunday from 12PM-5PM

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 project is also part of the The Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange (2022-2024); 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. They are the following: 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).