April 20, 2019
The New Museum is pleased to announce IdeasCity New Orleans, taking place April 15 to 20, 2019, in the neighborhood of Tremé at the Bell Artspace Campus and on the grounds of the New Orleans African American Museum. A five-day residency program for emerging practitioners working at the intersections of urbanism, art, design, community activism, and technology will culminate with a festival that is open to the public and themed around the concept of the “Everyday Festival” on Saturday, April 20.
The free public festival will feature conversations, artist talks, prototypes, and demos by an array of acclaimed local and international cultural agents whose work engages the forces that define our cities. Highlights of the festival on April 20 include a keynote address by Black Thought in dialogue with Imani Perry, along with talks by dream hampton, Franklin Leonard, Gia Hamilton, Stephanie McKee, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Austin Allen, Anne Rolfes, Sue Mobley, Bryan C. Lee, Beth Coleman, Marshall Brown, Katey Red, and LOT-EK, among others. Performances by local musicians and artists will occur throughout the day, curated by Junebug Productions’ Homecoming Project, a community-based storytelling performance series that maintains the relationship between culture and social change in New Orleans.
Prior to the Festival, IdeasCity Rockefeller Fellows will work in collaboration with local partners Bell Artspace, New Orleans African American Museum, and the Propeller Incubator to explore the possibility of the festival as a creative platform to address environmental justice and the cultural and ecological questions at play in urban space. Considering the outsized role New Orleans has played in the global perception of festivals, IdeasCity Fellows will focus on four areas of inquiry pertaining to the theme of the “Everyday Festival”:
Storytelling and Entrepreneurship: looking to the circulation of stories as an alternative to the economy of resource extraction
Culture and Landscape: exploring the potentially contested preservation and future of waterfronts, open space, industrial landscapes, and social histories
Data as Ecology: addressing questions of public urban data
Art Everyday: foregrounding aspects of advocacy, civic purpose, and social life in art-making and curating at museums and beyond
The projects developed by the Fellows over the course of the residency will occupy the Bell Artspace campus and the grounds of the New Orleans African American Museum in Tremé.
The IdeasCity New Orleans Fellows include: Marlo Barrera, Nic Brierre Aziz, Crystal Z Campbell, Hannah Chalew, Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri, Atianna Cordova, Joseph Cuillier, Bryce Detroit, Chloe Dewberry, Hayrettin Günç, Ariel Jackson, Ajax Jackson, Yin Kong, John Ludlam, Maxwell Mutanda, Santiago Pinyol, Kristina Kay Robinson, Caroline Sinders, jackie sumell, and Banu Çiçek Tülü.
IdeasCity supports projects that have a local impact beyond the program week. Locally based Fellows Hannah Chalew and Atianna Cordova will have the opportunity to prototype and present design projects in New Orleans. Chalew’s Solar Cart—a portable structure used to power living artworks through renewable energy—will expand upon her recent public installation, Terraforming in the Anthropocene, at New Orleans’s Grow Dat Youth Farm in 2018. Cordova will transform Water Block—a planning tool for managing flooding at the level of the neighborhood block—from a workshop concept to a toolkit that can be distributed across local communities. This design component of IdeasCity is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“As New Orleans knows well, a festival is a site of intense reimagination of bodies, streets, space, and time,” said V. Mitch McEwen, Curator of IdeasCity. “Through the logic of the festival, we are looking for ways of opening ourselves up to radically new ideas.”
IdeasCity New Orleans follows IdeasCity Toronto, which was presented in partnership with The Bentway, on September 15, 2018, and was centered on the theme of Toronto as a “City of Cities.”
About IdeasCity
IdeasCity is a collaborative, civic, and creative platform that starts from the premise that art and culture are essential to the future vitality of cities. This international initiative provides a forum for designers, artists, technologists, and policymakers to exchange ideas, identify challenges, propose solutions, and engage the public’s participation. The initiative was cofounded at the New Museum by Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, and Karen Wong, Deputy Director. Past IdeasCity programs have taken place in New York (2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017), Istanbul (2012), São Paulo (2013), Detroit (2016), Athens (2016), Arles (2017), and Toronto (2018). For more information, visit ideas-city.org.
About New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.