About Us

BUREAU of CHANGE, Sandborn Maps (1885)

BUREAU of CHANGE is an education-centric lab for real art practice in New Orleans. We create, curate and exhibit socially and politically engaged work.

Our objectives are influenced by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project implemented during the Great Depression. We harken a lost but not forgotten era when the government stimulated jobs in the arts by employing artists to create public works and subsidizing community education centers that offered training in arts skills applicable to industrial jobs of the time. Our process commissions artists and non-artists to collaborate on creative works aimed at inciting institutional change while studying social technology, digital media theory, interdisciplinary research and artistic production.

BUREAU of CHANGE was founded by Margot Herster with a group of university art students and recent graduates to create a space outside of the existing education system for collaborative practice and development opportunities with peers and mentors. Originating out of dissatisfaction with the state of higher education, BUREAU developed into a new school in the form of an atelier-style studio where an interdisciplinary group—established artists and designers, student apprentices and young artists, scholars and community experts, and the public—interact to create.

BUREAU of CHANGE produces exhibitions, participatory and site-specific experiences, workshops and public programming, made-for-internet works, and collaborations with local and international institutions for commissioned projects. We regularly exhibit at art institutions and other community-accessible spaces, as well as US|IS (Urban Sidewalk | Installation Space), our public art space at Gravier & Magazine Streets in downtown New Orleans.

BUREAU of CHANGE, Google Maps (2015)