CREATIVE ACTIONS & INTERVENTIONS

My Louisiana Love traces a woman's quest to find a place in her Native American community as it reels from decades of environmental degradation. Monique Verdin returns to Southeast Louisiana to reunite with her Houma Indian family.  But soon she sees that her people's traditional way of life: fishing, trapping, and hunting in these fragile wetlands, is threatened by a cycle of man-made environmental crises.

Cry You One/Mondo Bizarro

Louisiana is vanishing. It is breaking apart into the sea. Every half hour we lose nearly a football field's worth of coast to the Gulf of Mexico - more than twenty-four square miles a year. Cry You One is a celebration of the stories and cultural traditions housed in that rapidly eroding land. Like a New Orleans jazz funeral, it is generative because "when we hold a funeral here, we celebrate. We cook and play music; we parade the body through the streets, sharing stories from the life of the departed, only then can we release. Cry You One does that for the land."  

LIFE Is LIVING is a festival and mobilizing campaign that uses art to foster environmental justice. The campaign includes a traveling environmental caucus & concert, an invitational Graffiti Battle, live action sports, sustainable materials and construction projects, and a Speak Green youth poetry event. "As we reflect the voices of an emerging cultural majority, we recognize that our arts practices must echo and sustain the lives of the communities we engage."  

The True Cost of Coal/Beehive Collective

In 2008, the Beehive Design Collective allied with Appalachian grassroots organizers fighting mountain top removal coal mining, a practice which blasts mountains into moonscapes to fuel the ever-growing global demand for electricity. Their team of volunteer artists and educators put countless hours into designing the visually stunning graphic tool, The True Cost of Coal.   

The Environmental Health Clinic is a clinic and lab that approaches health from an understanding of its dependence on external local environments rather than on the internal biology and genetic predispositions of an individual. You make an appointment to talk about your particular environmental health concerns and you walk out with a prescription for actions: local data collection & urban interventions directed at understanding & improving your environmental health; plus referrals to projects and organizations that can use the data and actions prescribed to promote social change.