“Diasporic Depository: Convergences of Land, Water, Space, and Identity”

Black Portraiture[s] V: Memory and the Archive. Past/Present/Future, New York University, New York NY.

Diasporic Depository: Convergences of Land, Water, Space, and Identity” is a panel that explores the hybrid and reimagined outcomes in art and activism, that emerge from diasporic sites, icons, landscapes, and identities. Danielle Abrams will introduce the remains of a Jim Crow African-American beach and amusement park in New Orleans. Although Lincoln Beach has been glossed over in most of the city's historical accounts, Abrams has been interviewing the beach’s former patrons -- the last generation of African-Americans to have direct accounts of legal segregation. In art workshops at senior centers, Abrams is documenting the elders’ memories and working with them to create artworks that reimagine the now abandoned beach. Ellen Tani’s research encompasses the intersection of black studies and conceptual art. Tani will discuss the role of architecture, whose logic drives memorial practice, as archival source in the work of contemporary black artists whose practices attend to the preservation of historic spaces and structures of black community in new forms. Marla McLeod’s paintings are large-scale photorealistic portraits of African-American women and children. She will present these paintings, along with her latest work, which emerges from an archive of unarmed black men that were murdered by police. With the same classical precision, McLeod is painting a memorial of engraved bullets that bear the names of the deceased. Robin McDowell will explain the systematic derailment of the discovery of African and African-American slave cemeteries beneath The Bonnet Carré Spillway in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. The building of the Spillway guaranteed work for African-Americans during the Great Depression, while rendering the erasure of their ancestors’ histories. As activists in New Orleans pronounce their victories by abolishing fictitious American narratives, how will we archive and reimagine sacred burial grounds?