Featured Event
Coat Drive Benefitting The Bowery Mission
01/03/2024
11AM
IdeasCity
IdeasCity New Orleans
Cover Image:
The Great Hall at Bell Artspace Campus in Tremé. Courtesy Artspace
IdeasCity New Orleans, a five-day residency program for emerging practitioners, culminates with a free public festival on April 20, 2019 featuring conversations, 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 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”:
o Storytelling and Entrepreneurship: looking to the circulation of stories as an alternative to the economy of resource extraction
o Culture and Landscape: exploring the potentially contested preservation and future of waterfronts, open space, industrial landscapes, and social histories
o Data as Ecology: addressing questions of public urban data
o 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 oldest surviving Black community in the United States.
FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
ACT I
Noon
Preshow music by free feral
Words by Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes
12:15–1:00 PM
Opening Keynote
Speaker Kate Orff in conversation with Mayor LaToya Cantrell
1:00–2:00 PM
Storytelling and Entrepreneurship
Panel discussion with Black Thought, dream hampton, Franklin Leonard, and Stephanie McKee, moderated by Hermione Malone
Performance by Make Music NOLA
2:00–3:00 PM
Culture and Landscape
Panel discussion with Kate Orff, Austin Allen, and Anne Rolfes, moderated by Gia Hamilton
3:00–4:00 PM
Data as Ecology
Panel discussion with Sue Mobley, Beth Coleman, and Marshall Brown, moderated by Anne Rolfes
Performance by Kesha McKey and Jeremy Guyton
4:00–4:30 PM
Break
ACT II
4:30–5:30 PM
Build the Prototype
Presentation of work by IdeasCity Fellows. Moderated by Bryan C. Lee
5:30–6:00 PM
Poetry Feature
Performance by Sunni Patterson, Frederick “Wood” Delahoussaye, and local artists
6:00–7:00 PM
Art Everyday: Beyond the Museum
Panel discussion with LOT-EK, Katey Red, and Gia Hamilton, moderated by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts.
Performance by Washitaw Nation with Big Chief David.
7:00–8:00 PM
Closing Keynote
Black Thought in conversation with Imani Perry
8:00–9:00 PM
Film Screening
Curated by dream hampton and Shantrelle P. Lewis
Please visit ideas-city.org for more information
Sponsors
Leadership support of IdeasCity New Orleans is provided by the Kresge Foundation.
Major support for IdeasCity New Orleans is provided by:
Lambent Foundation
Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust
Lead support for the IdeasCity fellowship program is provided by The Rockefeller Foundation.
This project is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional support is provided by the Helis Foundation.
Special thanks to Hotel Peter and Paul, IdeasCity Hospitality Partner, and The Drifter Hotel.
Saturday’s festival is presented in collaboration with media partner PIN-UP Magazine for Architectural Entertainment.