Sites of Resistance was on display at the Small Center for Collaborative Design from September 2017 to February 2018.  The exhibit featured two wall scale maps of the city, covering the 19th and 20th century, highlighting sites of protest and resistance alongside panels that explored pivotal moments, movements, or sites.  An interactive central map provided an ongoing opportunity for participants to include the routes and sites of recent protests, from the 2006 crime march to the many, many protests currently happening. 

 

Our intent within Sites of Resistance was to reframe a revisionist narrative that has focused away from New Orleans historical role as a site of intense organizing, legal strategy, labor struggle, and civil rights activism.  By elevating lineages and spaces of dissent and marginalized stories of inter-racial collaboration, as well as histories of direct conflict and challenge in contested space, we hope to reconnect our audience with the possibilities for making change that have been erased from our civic framework. 

  

The framework of mapping allowed us to place spatially the lineages of protest and counter-protest that echo through the modern city, while elevating the recurrence of conflict over race, class, and gender as the primary cross-cuts in the realization of human rights. By making visible the lineage of resistance, we can hold space to interrogate the assumptions about New Orleans role as a historical and current site of resistance, while challenging our current praxis and understandings. 

  

The Sites of Resistance exhibit serves as a frame for broader interventions into the theoretical and lived experience of direct democracy.  The overall exhibit time frame will include a monthly series of panels, talks, and trainings that elevate oral histories of local movements; grounding recent struggles and new activists in the long legacies of resistance that surround and inform their experiences, often unknowingly.   

  

Speakers during the exhibit program were: 

Bill Quigley, Jer Thorp, Leon Waters, Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson, Nia Weeks, Ashley Shelton, Julie Schwamm-Harris, Lynda Woolard, Kelli Dorsey, Gavrielle Gemma, Heather Larson, Maria Harmon, Bryan C. Lee Jr. and Sue Mobley 

 

Team Credits are: 

Sue Mobley — Curator, Lead Researcher  

Shoshana Gordon — Researcher, Graphic Design 

Dana Elliot — Researcher, Graphic Design 

Jakob Rosenzweig — Lead Cartographer, Graphic Design 

Kekeli Dawes — Cartographer, Graphic Design 

Nora Fuller — Researcher