2024 Spring Exhibition Opens March 14!

“DON’T STAND ALONE”: Black Labor Organizing in New Orleans
MARCH 14, 5pm-9pm (Thursday)
Small Center for Collaborative Design
1725 Baronne Street (Central City)
Free Entrance – RSVP
Light Refreshments Provided

This mobile exhibit centers on 12 panels that showcase the wide range of labor organizing in New Orleans — from musicians and domestic workers to longshoreman and hospitality — as well as important campaigns and moments of greater solidarity as seen in the 1892 General Strike or the Campaign for a Living Wage.

The exhibit will run from March 14 through May 10 at the Small Center.

The New Orleans Black Worker Organizing History Project began in 2014 with the aim to raise up the long history of Black-led labor organizing here and publish an online timeline to educate ourselves and our community. The project developed from a collaboration between lead organizers of Stand with Dignity — Alfred Marshall, Colette Tippy and Toya-Ex Lewis — an organized group of Black workers within the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice and Tulane University students of Sarah Fouts, now a Professor at University of Maryland-Baltimore County. From archival research done both by students and Stand members, the timeline launched on Juneteenth 2016. Before the pandemic disruption, leaders of the project started plans for a public exhibition highlighting particular events. We are ecstatic to bring this vision to a reality in 2024 and beyond.

Thank you to members of our Community Advisory Committee this past year and to community partners who we’ve worked with across the years. Special thanks go to university collaborators Prof. Jana Lipman and Jose Cotto at Tulane University, and Prof. Molly Mitchell and Prof. Max Krochmal at UNO. And finally to our hometown artist bringing this history to life, Langston Allston.

Where will you be able to see it once the run at the Small Center is over, you ask? While the exhibit team has leads for follow up locations in 2024, they are collecting suggestions for community spaces that would be excited to host the exhibit! If you have any leads, please reach out to Matt Olson at molson@nowcrj.org with a location and contact information.

DEPART-MENT Spring 23 Opening Reception

Attention Small Center friends, supporters, and collaborators! Mark your calendars to join us February 9th, from 6-9pm, for the opening reception of our Spring 2023 exhibit “EXTRACTIVSM” curated by artist/filmmaker Jazmin Miller and artist/writer Anya Groner.⁠
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For the past two years Miller and Groner have been documenting the history of Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans which contains over 150 petrochemical plants and refineries.⁠
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Miller’s forthcoming documentary film, Jonesland, tells the story of her family’s history in this region — from chattel slavery, to land ownership, to the current onslaught of petrochemical refining and manufacturing. Scenes from the film and artifacts from the family bring viewers onto the land where, for more than a century, the Jones family has raised generations of children — finding joy and spirituality even as their very existence is regularly threatened. ⁠
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Groner is a reporter-producer for Monument Lab’s forthcoming podcast Plot of Land and a freelance writer for The Atlantic. Her journalism documents the consequences of centuries of extraction along the Mississippi River — click here to read one of her pieces. Throughout the exhibit, visitors will be able to listen to segments from the forthcoming podcast, which chronicles Miller’s journey as she uncovers her family’s history and reconsiders their future.⁠
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Thanks to our friends at Trapolin-Peer Architects for supporting DEPART-MENT, our public programs and exhibition work.

DEPART-MENT Fall 22 Kickoff Reception

“While colonization and slavery were also driven by capitalist rationales, these processes were above all based on a colonial worldview that invented a hierarchy between races and different lands of the globe.

In the colonial era, the lands of the Americas were subordinated to the lands of Europe. They were seen as a means of keeping shareholders happy, and this legitimized any practice. Even measures to protect the fertility of the land were ultimately aimed at maintaining its exploitation. These lands were thought of as different from those of France. It was a violent and misogynistic process, an awful way to inhabit the earth promoted by the colonizer for whom other human beings were dehumanized and for whom colonised lands and the non-humans that inhabited them mattered less than his desires. This is what I call ‘colonial habitation’. Colonial habitation is a violent way of inhabiting the earth, subjugating lands, humans, and non-humans to the desires of the colonizer.”
 — Malcolm Ferdinand

Built on the Small Center ethos that all of us should have the power to shape the places, we live, work and play, DEPART-MENT brings together creative doers and dedicated scholars to encourage us to zoom in and out of our environments, to contextualize our histories and realities, and to make space for new visions of our futures to emerge. 

INHABITATION, our fall 22 exhibit, brings to center the impact fossil fuels — and the means through which we have sourced and processed them — have had on our ecosystems and our bodies. Through thoughtful engagement with material byproducts of extraction — such as archival film, chemical pigments, plastics, and expanded polystyrene foam — DEPART-MENT residents Kira Akerman and Flora Cabili (alongside other collaborators) attempt to move away from the concept of “colonial habitation” that theorist Malcolm Ferdinand writes about, wherein land and people are seen as disposable resources. Through interactive installations, hands-on workshops, and community conversations, INHABITATION invites us to relate and reimagine our relationships to the built environment and one another — while challenging us to reflect on our responsibilities to the lands we inhabit.

Kira Akerman is an educator and documentary filmmaker, and her forthcoming film, Hollow Tree, is about three young women coming of age in the climate crisis. Her installation derives from the film and alludes to 18th and 19th century colonial projects that resulted in manipulation of Louisiana’s landscape. Throughout the course of her residency at the Small Center, other participants featured in Hollow Tree will contribute to the exhibition and workshops. Dr. Robin McDowell is a featured expert in the film and will exhibit her mixed media artworks that envision Black history as a chemical and geological churning. It is a resistant reading of the reports and travelogs of white scientists and a subversion of historically rooted horrors of numeracy. Using soil, clay, silt, rock salt, and carbon byproducts from sites in south Louisiana, these artworks reclaim stories trapped within extracted minerals themselves. Annabelle Pavy, one of the protagonists in the film, will exhibit woodcuts of an extracted cypress tree.

Flora Cabili is an educator and interdisciplinary artist who explores storytelling through themes of origin, assembly, and dislocation. In DEPARTURE, Flora’s solo show last April, she showcased work with found materials. Notably, found styrofoam, or more accurately, Extracted Polystyrene foam. Her work to understand these materials and how to shape them in order to reconsider their nature, is Flora’s entry point in conceptualizing the impact of oil extraction in Louisiana. This immersive installation will showcase recycled materials and mixed media works that allow us to examine the materiality of our relationship with petroleum byproducts. By adapting, and manipulating these materials without transforming them how can we reconsider their nature and the manipulation of nature? During the course of the DEPART-MENT Fall residency, she along with fellow community members will hold workshops to engage folks across generations in collective learning and artmaking.