BUREAU of CHANGE exhibits at Contemporary Arts Center
Piñata that belongs to Casa Borrega, a Mexico City heritage community center in New Orleans
HERE/HOME is an installation of objects of material culture borrowed from heritage centers across New Orleans.For the exhibit, the artist group BUREAU of CHANGE invited local heritage associations to participate in an exchange by selecting and loaning artifacts, artworks and objects of significance to their community to the BUREAU. The menagerie of objects gathered from cultural centers is featured at the Contemporary Arts Center. The installation transports objects of material culture from their original context – in semi-private spaces throughout the city – to form a unified public display.
BUREAU of CHANGE’s HERE/HOME project is exhibiting in the collective exhibition, TANK DRAMA: Deliberations from The Wet Grave, curated by Jan Gilbert. Artists working in a multiplicity of art forms—theater, writing, visual art, film, music, dance, and more—are brought together under the umbrella of The VESTIGES Project to present their work in the Lupin Foundation Gallery, along with scheduled events in the Freeport-McMoRan Theater and additional off-site venues.
These greatly varied works have evolved over the course of the past eight years, many winding their way through several iterations in different locales. The artists and works often traveled to cities with a high concentration of New Orleanians in diaspora, such as Houston and Atlanta. Others reached out to people and places with parallel coastal experiences and concerns. Some works passionately address issues such as global warming, public health, racism, and economic inequities, while others gently touch upon modes of peaceful escape, meanderings of memento mori, and metaphors and tools for intimate community healing and rebuilding.
Assembled together, these works are a potent representation of just some of the creative networks documenting, remembering, and re-visioning post-Katrina New Orleans. The ongoing efforts to think through the past while establishing fresh connections propels us toward new collaborative possibilities as we envision the future of New Orleans.
Contemporary Arts Center
900 Camp St. New Orleans, LA
Open July 6 – September 22, 2013. August 3rd is Whitney White Linen Night Art Openings & Outdoor Celebrations (6 – 9pm) up & down Julia Street & the New Orleans Arts District