Sites of Resistance

Please join us in celebrating Dr. King’s legacy by participating in Design as Protest. This workshop is part of the event series associated with our Fall exhibit, Sites of Resistance: An Exhibit Exploring Geographies + Histories of Social Change in New Orleans.

The design of our built environment is the lasting physical result of policies, procedures, and practice with roots in historic inequities. Given the permanence of our work, we must pay particular attention to these relationships and seek design justice whenever possible. The Design Justice Platform is a means to establish a set of ethical, socially and environmentally conscious guidelines for operating as designers of the built environment.

The Design As Protest workshop is a Design Justice gathering to bring a diverse community of creative and ethical actors both within and beyond the design field together in pursuit of design interventions with the explicit intention of addressing the systemic issues of injustice throughout the built environment. Housed under the National Organization of Minority Architects, Design as Protest has grown into a day of action program in 20+ cities across the country. During the workshop, groups collaborate to answer core questions at the intersection of social justice and design through sketches, models, diagrams, and writings. Teams refine the resulting renderings, imagery, and writing to be used both locally and nationally, drawing broad attention to the challenges we collectively face and the potential for just solutions.

Sites of Resistance works to reframe a dominant narrative that has obscured New Orleans’ historical role as a site of intense organizing, legal strategy, labor struggle, and civil rights activism. By elevating lineages and spaces of dissent and marginalized stories of inter-racial collaboration, as well as histories of direct conflict and challenge in contested spaces, we hope to reconnect our audience with the possibilities for making change that have been erased from our civic framework.

Curated by our Public Programs Manager, Sue Mobley, this exhibit and the associated event series are made possible through the generous support of the Surdna Foundation.