Uncommon Exchanges: Indigo

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

April 21, 2021. Newcomb Art Museum in partnership with A Studio in the Woods, The ByWater Institute at Tulane University, and New Orleans Center for the Gulf South presents „Uncommon Exchanges: Indigo“, a unique dialogue between unlikely pairings of Tulane and Gulf South experts that explores the topic of indigo. Moderated by Jeffery Darensbourg, artist LaChaun Moore and Dr. Sabia McCoy-Torres use the museum’s current exhibition, „Transcommunality“ by Laura Anderson Barbata, as a catalyst for conversation to remedy missing narratives and provide paths forward –through creative means – to a more equitable and just future. Followed by a live Q&A with panelists and exhibiting artist, Laura Anderson Barbata.

About the panelists:
Sabia McCoy-Torres is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Anthropology and Program in Africana Studies. She has a Ph.D. in social and cultural anthropology from Cornell University. Her research focuses on the English and Spanish speaking African Diaspora, race, gender/sexuality, transnationalism, and Black popular music and performance. Dr. McCoy-Torres’ current book project uses reggae culture as an ethnographic lens to interpret these dynamics within the West Indian Diaspora in Costa Rica and Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been published in Popular Music & Society; Black Music Research Journal; and Transforming Anthropology, for which she is a Contributing Editor. She has a forthcoming article in The Global South. Dr. McCoy-Torres’ course offerings include: The Anthropology of Race; Urban Music: Race, Class, and Sexuality; Blackness in Latin America; Black Transnational Culture; and Race and Migration.

LaChaun Moore is an interdisciplinary artist who engages the public with her ethnographic fiber making and research practice. Her practice focuses on plant species that are linked specifically to Black and Indigenous farmers who have been systematically exploited for their agricultural ingenuity. She earned her BFA in Integrated Design at Parsons, The New School for Design with a focus on Alternative Fashion Strategies and Social Practice. There she began her grant-funded research “Perceptions of Cotton and Agriculture within the African American Community.” She has since built a small-scale farm growing naturally-colored green and brown cotton as well as ancestral indigo sourced from a Low Country plantation. As part of her research LaChaun co-hosts the WEAVE podcast. Her work envisions investigating, documenting, and implementing ancestral knowledge as the start to chipping away at the inequalities within the fiber system.

About the Moderator:
Jeffery Darensbourg is interested in the knowledge of flora, fauna, and people his Atakapa-Ishak ancestors carried with them and wishes to connect this sort of Louisiana-specific knowledge to the knowledge urban Natives such as himself have in negotiating Indigeneity, within the contemporary milieu of city life in our current social and economic climate. Jeffery U. Darensbourg is an enrolled member and tribal councilperson of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of mixed Native and Louisiana Creole ancestry. His work explores the intersections of cultural studies, mixed ethnicity, and Indigeneity.