Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories

Across a series of seven projects by Katrina Andry, Willie Birch, Lesley Dill, Skylar Fein, L. Kasimu Harris, The Everyday Projects, and The Propeller Group, Changing Course explored how defining moments from New Orleans’ past continue to shape art and life in the city today. The exhibition framed the act of commemoration as a form of forward thinking: a rejoinder to the present that might also change the course of things to come.

Skylar Fein’s installation Remember the UpStairs Lounge commemorates the 1973 arson at the UpStairs Lounge, a popular gay bar in the French Quarter, offering a haunting memorial to the fire and those impacted by the tragedy.

Fein mines the history of the UpStairs Lounge—the site of one of the deadliest fires in New Orleans’s history— to reflect on the complex and contradictory meanings of the event, which was the largest massacre of gay men in the United States prior to the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Fein’s installation examines notions of history, memory, truth and the slippages between them by including both real and fictional memorabilia of the era alongside crime scene photos and charred objects.

The last two galleries of Fein's installation pay homage to LGBTQIA culture by recreating the posters and memorabilia at the bar...

...alongside replicas of New Orleans street signs that reference other places of gathering and refuge for the LGBTQIA community.

Lesley Dill’s installation Heaven Heaven Heaven Hell Hell Hell explores the life and work of visionary New Orleans artist, preacher and musician Sister Getrude Morgan.

The project sheds light on Morgan’s little-known artistic legacy, and demonstrates her shared connections with a long lineage of female writers like Emily Dickinson and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Dill’s work often mines the mystical writing of women artists to create immersive installations that speak to the power of the female voice.

Sister Gertrude Morgan shared her visions with the New Orleans community in the form of music, painting, and sermons inspired by divine revelations she believed she received directly God.

Katrina Andry’s installation Diverge Divest Deny (repeat) exposes the real human toll that hides behind the romantic vision of New Orleans as a tropical paradise, exposing the systematic erasure and disenfranchisement of Black communities throughout the city's history.

Andry combines hand-carved woodblock prints of verdant foliage with crumpled flower-like forms imprinted with archival imagery taken from recent urban redevelopment projects that disproportionately impacted communities of color.

She focuses on the expansion of the Interstate 10 freeway through North Claiborne Avenue in the 1960s, which leveled the lively neutral ground of the predominantly Black neighborhood of Treme and destroyed hundreds of homes, businesses, and a thriving cultural district.

Andry's installation demonstrates the devastating impact of New Orleans's divestment in many of its most historic and culturally significant neighborhoods...

...and shows us the stakes surrounding urban planning, gentrification and historical preservation in New Orleans today.

Willie Birch's installation Fabric, Root, and Bone tells both symbolic and literal stories, connecting past and present across the same region. In drawings, tapestries, and sculptural works made of root, bones, and grass, Birch references both nineteenth-century efforts by enslaved people to resist their bondage and his own twenty-first century efforts to create an art-centered community in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward.

This drawing shows two rocking chairs, one white, one black, sitting vacant on a neighborhood porch, referencing America's empty promises to address its racial divisions, and inviting us to sit down and start the conversation.

Many elements of the installation came from a row of houses and lots at the intersection of Old Prieur and O’Reilly Streets that Birch has been remaking into a gathering space for the neighborhood with outdoor artworks and a shared garden.

Birch produced his fabric and woven pieces with materials pulled from these lots in Old Prieur, and creates physical manifestations of the place in his drawings, exposing the city’s scarred past and showing his ongoing efforts to build human connections on the same landscape.

A collection of drawings document and represent the Old Prieur community, and evince the truly collaborative nature of the project.

Participants learned how to create their own visual narratives through photography. This photograph is by Martika, a participant in the workshop at Warren Easten High School.

The art created during these workshops was printed and put on display at the museum, in addition to being shared online through the hashtag #EverydayNewOrleans.

This provided a platform for NOMA's audiences to consider how the museum can best reflect and engage diverse communities across the city. Here, Justin from Rebuild Center discusses his work at the Changing Course opening.