HOME, New Orleans?
Performing the Neighborhoods, Rebuilding Community
Overview
HOME, New Orleans? is a deeply-rooted community/arts network involving local residents including artists and students of various artistic disciplines, several universities, and neighborhood and cultural institutions. Our focus is home in its many manifestations: individual dwellings, neighborhoods, and the city itself, all of which have been radically challenged post-Katrina. Our process emphasizes finding sustainable ways to contribute to ongoing neighborhood life.Goals
One goal of HOME, New Orleans? is to energize and/or memorialize several of the affected neighborhoods, using traditional NOLA practices such as street performance, music, and commemoration. The devastation and wounds from Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding go beyond physical consequences to include, emotional, psychological, and social ramifications. All of New Orleans was wounded. Art is uniquely situated, in partnerships with people in many disciplinary spheres, to respond to these different registers of human experience at once.
Equally important is establishing a role for art within a larger community organizing plan for rebuilding New Orleans with an awakened sense of social justice. Decisions will be made holistically in concert with the people who will be most affected by them, as the project unfolds organically. We recognize the tensions of race and class that plagued New Orleans, like the rest of the U.S., even before Katrina. We hope to explore art’s capacity to bring people together in recognition of both difference and commonality, to break down fear and humanize polarized issues. We are committed to reciprocity as a working principle, and intend to be mindful of what all constituents want from this project. In this potent laboratory of post-Katrina life, HOME, New Orleans? and its broadly-based network amassed in this shared recovery effort may serve as a model collaboration of concerned individuals and institutions who are committed to experiencing art’s potential to effect positive social change.
Phase #1
In Phase #1, January-April 2007, participants will develop art projects in four neighborhoods, each with university, artist, and neighborhood liaisons: Xavier visual artist and professor Ron Bechet with sculptor Rashida Ferdinand and the NENA Center in the 9th Ward; local visual artist Jan Gilbert of The VESTIGES Project and theatre artist Kathy Randels of ArtSpot Productions, whose partners include Rev. Dick Randels of Lakeview Baptist Church and high schools students, in Lakeview; Dillard visual artist and professor John Barnes with Ashe Cultural Center in Central City; and NYU theatre professor Jan Cohen-Cruz with The Porch in the 7th Ward. Tulane professor/scholar Amy Koritz and filmmaker Kevin McCaffrey will facilitate a team of students supporting the four projects via documentation, publicity, and fundraising.
The overall intention is to explore, identify, and enhance a role for the arts in the large project of rebuilding and healing New Orleans. Our goal is not only to create art on site but to create and expand relationships among diverse new Orleanians through sustainable partnerships among neighborhood cultural centers, artists, and arts students and faculty from Xavier, Dillard, Tulane, and NYU universities as well as NOCCA, the local high school arts conservatory and other city schools.
