Where They At: An Archive of New Orleans Hip Hop

A sampling of this exhibition will be showing with the group show Frontier Preachers at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis; June 6th, 2009.

Spanning from the onset of Bounce with DJ Jubilee's hit "Back That (ass) Thang up" to the 2005 Southern hip-hop diaspora created by Hurricane Katrina, WTA is a full archive of the emcees, djs, performers, producers and architects of the uniquely New Orleans hip hop subgenre of BOUNCE. Working intimately with NOLA-based music journalist Alison Fensterstock and our handful of partner organizations and community members, this project will span the course of the next year, culminating in April 2010 with a full exhibition at the Smithsonian-affiliated Ogden Museum of Southern Art. This project will couple my portraits, candids and landscape imagery with Fensterstock's narrative and conducted oral histories of participants, providing a visual and audio living history of a distinctly New Orleans musical culture.

Through a maintained multimedia resource website, a community accessable blog, panels, performances, events with partner organizations and a traveling exhibition, we anticipate this project to be insanely awesome.

Partners include:

Neighborhood Story Project
Wild Wayne/Industry Influence
Ponderosa Stomp Foundation
Sweet Home New Orleans
New Orleans Airlift
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities TBA
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Matt Skakeeny, PHd Tulane University

Juvenile