The Lower Mississippi Watershed Open School welcomes artist and herbalist Stephanie Lindquist to Carbondale for two workshops in plant learning, sensing and preparing.
Originally from LA, Lindquist studied for her BA at Columbia University and received an MFA at the University of Minnesota. Her work has been shown at Franconia Sculpture Park, Smack Mellon, The New York Public Library, The New Museum, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio among others.
Inspired by historical and botanical research of indigenous food plants from Africa and beyond, Stephanie examines ideas around sustainability, natural farming and dieting proposed by farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka, Kenyan agricultural scientist Mary Abukutsa-Onyango and Potawatomi scientist Robin Kimmerer.
When we respect plants’ gifts and limits, we respect humans’ too. When experienced intentionally pleasure with plants can be a positive feedback loop that encourages us to make healthy sustainable decisions for ourselves and environments. It’s time for those of us who have forgotten our plant connections to reclaim them. Our bodies crave them and our world will be richer for it.
Join us to pleasure the craving to be close with the green world.
April 24 at 5 at Bucky's dome (Campus lake trail), see QR code in poster for location
April 27 at noon at Washington Street Garden, 209 N Washington St.
All free. Children welcome. Open to all.
Confluence 3 will take place in Memphis from October 18-20, 2024. Details will be forthcoming later this year.
Join us from 2pm - 6pm.
Shaw Field
Macalester College
125 Snelling Ave S
St Paul, MN 55105
FRIDAY, MARCH 22, 2024 | 6 P.M. – 8 P.M.
11TH ANNUAL KURTH-SCHAI EDUCATION AND ADVOCACY LECTURE FEATURING EVE TUCK AND K. WAYNE YANG
Eve Tuck, an Indigenous studies scholar from the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, has just joined NYU as the founding director of the Center for Indigenous Studies. She is professor at both the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
K. Wayne Yang is a professor and scholar of community organizing, critical pedagogy, and Indigenous and decolonizing studies. He is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego and Provost of John Muir College. He writes about decolonization and everyday epic organizing, often with his frequent collaborator, Eve Tuck.
Currently, Tuck and Yang are convening The Land Relationships Super Collective, editing the book series, indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, and editing the journal, Critical Ethnic Studies.
TUESDAY, MARCH 19
Join us at Nanih Bvlbancha on the Lafitte Greenway (1900 Lafitte Ave.) for the AnthropoSonic + Bvlbancha Liberation Radio Spring Equinox Celebration, and an introduction to the Gulf South Open School.
We'll be sharing our "syllabus" for Spring 2024, and inviting you to join us for a series of hands-on explorations, celebrations, and community tables starting this month. More info to come.
See you there!
Austin Harrison will also be hosting the “Teaching Social Action Institute,” a two-day workshop at Rhodes College (March 9-10, 2024) on how to incorporate active campaigns and policy into their classes in a concrete way. The workshop is open to faculty and staff and is free, but participants would need to cover their own travel and lodging. He encourages Open School partners to participate. More information is available at this link.
This activity is not open to the public, but stay tuned for public events later in April. Come to the Minnesota Northwoods for an Indigenous-led Land Based Learning and Winter Camping Retreat. Enjoy the company of fellow activists and learn about the land in this 4-day winter camping trip in the Northwoods on the banks of the Mississippi River. Programming is still being finalized, but activities will include learning about medicinal plant identification, relaxing in the sauna and participating in other Indigenous led activities.
Monique Verdin is working with a group of Indigenous artists to build Nanih Bvlbancha, an earthen mound in the Lafitte Greenway in Bvlbancha (New Orleans). They request samples of soil, four tablespoons or less, to become a part of the mound. More information on the project, and where to mail your soil, can be found here.
Freedom Village Gathering will be an insightful conversation with Faye Dant, Roberta Rogers, and Gwen Moore on black place-making in our communities along the Mississippi River, including Hannibal, Missouri, and Brooklyn, Illinois. Speakers cross land and generations, sharing their lived experiences, historical references, and future visions. Performance Artist Basmin will hold space for Honoring the Water. Afterwards, a Sunday Meal will be shared. All are welcome to join for this free event.
Black place-making with facilitants:
Roberta Rogers from the Historical Society of Brooklyn, IL
Gwen Moore from the Missouri History Museum
Faye Dant from Jim's Journey: Huck Finn Freedom Center, Hannibal MO
Basmin Performance Artist Honoring the Water
Free public event including a Sunday meal.
Hosted by the Middle River Field School “Crossings” of the Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange and Spillway
Special thanks to Alicia Ajayi for her work on Freedom Villages
Boozhoo / Hey everyone!
Just a quick update about our community poetry event this weekend. Unfortunately, one of our artists/facilitators won't be able to make it this time around. We totally understand that life can throw us unexpected curveballs, so we will reschedule the poetry workshop and concert to a later date when our fantastic facilitator can join us!
On a brighter note, tomorrow night at Big Sandy Lodge, we still have Annie Humphrey & David Huckfelt performing. It's going to be fabulous! Annie will be singing songs from her hauntingly beautiful new album, The Light In My Bones (listen here). She's on tour right now and will be adding more stops, so make sure to follow her on social media (here) for tour updates! Her soulful voice will give you goosebumps, while her heartfelt lyrics will tug at your heartstrings - I highly recommend checking out a show if you can!
Take care,
Hannah Cook
(any pronouns)
Law Warschaw Gallery, Macalester College
1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105
Phone: 651-696-6416
The Law Warschaw Gallery at Macalester College is proud to partner with the Mississippi Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange, to present an important and timely exhibition that challenges our perceptions of human-environmental relationships. Insurgent Ecologies: Hotter than July, brings together the work of 26 artists, collaborative projects, and initiatives who live and work throughout the vast Mississippi River watershed.
Exhibiting Artists:
Jeremy Bolen, Andrea Carlson, Jennifer Colten, AnnieLaurie Erickson, Tia-Simone Gardner, Beate Geisler, Shana M. griffin, Ryan Griffis, Ana Hernandez, Brian Holmes, Sarah Kanouse, John Kim, Stephanie Lindquist, Jon Lund, Dan O’Keffe, Heather Parrish, Matt Rappaport, Renee Royale, Oliver San, Witt Siasoco, Dameun Strange, Corinne Teed, Diver Van Avery, Monique Verdin
“This common assumptions and false solutions while imagining new ecologies that can repair the violence of the ‘plantationocene’.” - Imani Jacquiline Brown and
Shana m. griffin
Join artist and cultural organizer Rory Wakemup (Anishinaabe, Bois Forte Band) and other knowledge bearers for a weekend of harvesting sacred manoomin (wild rice) and learning together.
All experience levels are encouraged to sign-up. Guests are welcome to come for any or all of this weekend. Campsites will be available nearby. This is family-friendly event.
The exact location is still to be determined, and may change ~ as we will set up camp on public land where the rice is ready. We may be adding some additional activities to the weekend as it approaches.
Please fill out the registration form to learn the final location and to receive other important information and updates.
If you have any questions about attending this camp please contact hannah [at] honorearth [dot] org
For the 2023 expedition we plan to travel from the Headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico, traveling approximately 800 miles of that distance on the water (with the remainder traveling in vans). We would cover that distance on the water over the course of 40 days of sailing or paddling, with the remainder being spent in layover days camping on islands or with site visits in locations along the way. Programming and curriculum are being developed in coordination with River Hubs that are part of the “Mississippi River Open School,” funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times program.
Social and environmental justice organizers - whether experienced or new to movement - are encouraged to apply to join Indigenous and allied organizers with Honor the Earth, and community partners, for a three-day organizer summer camp! Participants will gather to build our organizing skills and deepen our relationships with others working from within Indigenous-led movements across the region.
This weekend-long camp will be held at Honor the Earth’s emergent organizing and resource hub in Anishinaabe territory / north central Minnesota. When registration is confirmed you will receive a welcome packet with more information. Attendees will be invited to stay onsite or at a nearby hotel, depending on their preference and their needs. Travel and stipend support is available. Only 20 spots are available - priority will be given to Anishinaabe community members from this region and other Indigenous organizers.
The exhibition is open from April 8 – May 28, 2023.
“Insurgent Ecologies: Resisting Watersheds of Conquest, Enslavement, and Extraction Among the Mississippi River” engages artwork, projects, and collaborative initiatives across the Mississippi watershed that disrupt systems of racial enslavement, coloniality, displacement, and industrial encroachment, which rupture space-time to form a “continuum of extractivism.” together, we interrogate common assumptions and false solutions while imagining new ecologies that can repair the violence of the “plantationocene”.
Insurgent Ecologies is curated by Imani Jacqueline Brown & Shana M. griffin and organized by Antenna and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, with support from the Gulf South Open School, PUNCTUATE, and TU Newcomb Art Department.
Annual meeting of river hubs to share past activities and plan for the coming year and the Fall 2023 River Semester.
The preliminary plan for Confluence 2 is to have four sessions that enable us to reflect on our work on the project, in particular, themes that were generated during Confluence 1 (Welcoming, Repairing, Crossing, Open School). An intention for each session is for it to be a hands-on illustration of how the themes are or will be put into practice in our activities and provide opportunities for conversation, collaboration and reflection. More details on programming and the schedule to follow.
The Dillard University Minority Health and Health Equity Research Center and Tulane University's A Studio in the Woods proudly present:
This year's Inspiring Health Justice student and scholar residency will culminate on April 13, 2023 at 5pm with an art opening and performance at Dillard University. Restoring Humanity: The Fight for Reproductive Justice in a Post-Roe World will showcase the work of three Dillard University students-in-residence; Tia Green, Olivia Johnson, and Gabriel Prewitt; who have been meeting all year with Dr. Robert Maupin (Professor of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at the LSU Health Sciences Center and Associate Dean of Diversity & Community Engagement) and Dillard faculty members John Barnes (Associate Professor of Visual Arts) and Ray Vrazel (Associate Professor of Theater).
The aim of Inspiring Health Justice is to bring the arts and public health together to address our region’s long-standing health disparities through creative, cross-disciplinary mentorship focusing the energy and passion of Dillard art students towards fostering health equity. This year’s focus has been on reproductive health disparities and the intersecting challenges for everyone affected by the issue of reproductive health — particularly Black women — historically as well as now in a post-Roe v. Wade world.
WHEN: April 13, 2023 at 5:00pm
WHERE: Cook Theater in the Samuel DuBois Cook Fine Arts and Communications Center
2601 Gentilly Boulevard, New Orleans, LA 70122
Free and open to the public.
Very proud of our students. This is a collaboration between the Dillard University Minority Health and Health Equity Research Center and A Studio in the Woods. This is also made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation to the Mississippi River Open School project. A Studio in the Woods is a program of the Tulane University ByWater Institute.
Lillian Holden is the final speaker in the spring 2023 Space Place and Humanities Seminar series with her talk titled "Openlands: African American Heritage Water Trails Project"
Lillian Holden is the Education and Outreach Coordinator at Openlands and works with volunteers, teachers, and staff to build and inspire advocates for nature. Lillian believes that a positive introduction to nature at an early age can change the trajectory of the world’s current climate crisis and inspire careers in science. She also believes that exploring the environment in a child’s neighborhood can cultivate a life-long appreciation for nature and can rebuild communities. Bird watching in one’s neighborhood, planting native plants, and growing fresh collards, bell peppers, and basil in the schoolyard can create an awareness that nature lives not only at the park and farm but can be found and created in your front yard and backyard. After completing her 10-month Ameri-Corp apprenticeship with Openlands as a Public Ally, Lillian worked for The Student Conservation Association (SCA) as a program assistant/nature guide for Chicago Park District’s summer campers and had the privilege to teach hands-on environmental education to grades 3rd – 8th in parks such as Montrose Beach, Gompers Park, The South Shore Cultural Center, and Big Marsh. Now a full-time Openlander, Lillian is excited to use the skills gained during the time of her Ameri-Corp apprenticeship and occupancy as the program assistant with The SCA. Lillian is CPR trained, restorative justice trained, and trauma-informed certified. She is also a certified Openlands TreeKeeper. Lillian holds an Associates Degree in Arts from the City Colleges of Chicago.
All seminars will be held in Olin-Rice Room 250 in conjunction with the Department of Environmental Studies Enviro-Thursday Series.
Regina Agu continues the spring 2023 Space Place and Humanities Seminar series with her talk titled "Passage"
Regina Agu’s seminar will discuss the history of the panorama as a visual form, with a focus on depictions of the Gulf South and Mississippi River as panoramic spaces. The artist’s work, Passage, will serve as an entry point to examining the precarious environmental, social, and political geographies of the Gulf South through visual representation, socially-engaged research, and mining the intertwined historical legacies that shape the contemporary landscapes and waterways of the region.
Regina Agu was born in Houston, TX and raised between the United States, Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland. She relocated to Chicago at the beginning of 2020, where she now lives and works. Her work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, publications, and performances internationally. Agu was a 2022 Radicle artist-in-residence in the Jackman Goldwasser Residency at Hyde Park Art Center. Her first solo museum show, Passage, was presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2019-2020). Her work has been supported by an Artadia Houston award, grants from Houston Arts Alliance, The Idea Fund, and the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research project A Psychogeography of Emancipation Park. She has attended residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans through a partnership with For Freedoms, A Studio in the Woods, Open Sessions at The Drawing Center in NYC, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Lawndale Artist Studio Program, among others. From 2014-2017, Agu was the co-director of Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run art space in Third Ward, Houston, which received a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Agu is the founder of the Houston-based WOC Reading Group, and her other collaborative projects include Friends of Angela Davis Park. Agu holds a BS from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of t
he Art Institute of Chicago.
All seminars will be held in Olin-Rice Room 250 in conjunction with the Department of Environmental Studies Enviro-Thursday Series. Refreshments provided.
Erin Sharkey continues the spring 2023 Space Place and Humanities Seminar series with her talk titled "In Search of a Darker Wilderness"
Erin Sharkey is a cultural producer, writer, arts and abolition organizer, and cultural worker based in Minneapolis, on Dakota land. She is the co-founder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental production collective called Free Black Dirt and a steward of The Fields at Rootsprings, a retreat and respite place centering BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks in central MN. She is the editor of A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, an essay collection from Milkweed Editions (Feb 2023). Erin was recently awarded the Ashé Lab Fellowship from Penumbra Theatre, and the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. Currently, she teaches with Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.
All seminars will be held in Olin-Rice Room 250 in conjunction with the Department of Environmental Studies Enviro-Thursday Series.
Ebony Aya continues the spring 2023 Space Place and Humanities Seminar series with her talk titled "Spirituality and Ecology (Re)Membering Black Women's Legacies"
Ebony Aya works at Macalester College as a Program Manager for the Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching. She is also a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota in Curriculum and Instruction, with minors in Culture and Teaching and African American and African Studies. Additionally, she is the founder of the Aya Collective, a space that centers the expertise and experience of Black women in writing and is the author of published books, The Gospel According to a Black Woman and Incomplete Stories: On Loss, Love, and Hope, and recently launched the Aya Collective’s first anthology, Let the Black Women Say Ase’. All books can be purchased at ayamediapublishingllc.com.
All seminars will be held in Olin-Rice Room 250 in conjunction with the Department of Environmental Studies Enviro-Thursday Series.
Join us online for an exchange on projects, upcoming events, and ways to engage with the Anthropocene Commons network. The Mississippi River Open School will talk about its collaborative work with the AC.
Artist-in-Residence Stephanie Lindquist opens the spring 2023 Space Place and Humanities Seminar series with her talk titled "Infrastructures of Care"
Stephanie Lindquist received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited at Franconia Sculpture Park, NXTHVN, Google, SooVAC, Smack Mellon, the New York Public Library, the Allen Hospital, The New Museum, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Memorial Union Gallery at North Dakota State University among others. She is an Artist-in-Residence at Macalester College working with activists, artists, humanities professors, and scientists around the Mississippi River.
All seminars will be held in Olin-Rice Room 250 in conjunction with the Department of Environmental Studies Enviro-Thursday Series.
We also would like to invite you all to meet as a Twin Cities Hub and introduce you to our two activists and artists-in-residence this year, Stephanie Lindquist and Roxanne O’Brien. Please fill out this availability poll and Google form below for a larger hub gathering where we can provide a fuller orientation to the river grant project, facilitate introductions and think through thematic connections and potentially collaborate on projects together. Contact: info@mississippiriver.school
Campus Antropoceno Brasil offers a week of debates and experiences focused on the challenges of our time. The event promotes a space for collective and interdisciplinary imagination about the world we want to inhabit and the life we want to live in the immediate and distant futures.
The search for the coordinates, overlaps, convergences and tensions that arise when myriad cosmologies converge around a common intent.
By linking five research questions to a series of activities, the search for a common planetary practice becomes tangible.
AC initiatives from around the world come together to envision a transformed future for the long-term collaborations of the network.
The Disaster Haggyo is a disaster studies school aimed at accelerating the implementation of cutting-edge disaster research for maximum benefit to communities.
Seeking interactive, participatory and experimental works for an exhibition-season that will call into question our relationship with carbon.