Shana M. griffin (Loeb/ArtLab Fellow ’24-25) is a feminist activist, sociologist, abolitionist, artist, and geographer based in New Orleans. Her practice is research-based, activist-centered, and decolonial, centering the experiences of Black women most vulnerable to violence and social exclusion. She is the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist initiative integrating critical research methods with activism and socially engaged art. She is cofounder of Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans.
Black Rivers
Black Rivers traces the spatial violence and terror of the transatlantic slave trade across the liquid landscapes of the interior, echoing the flows, contours, braids, and fluidity of rivers, lakes, bayous, swamps, and streams as sites of resistance, fugitivity, and rebirth. This series of works recognizes the many waterways transverse in shaping the ecological and geographic realities of the Black diaspora and their flows, connections, and estuaries of belonging.
SOIL
Moving beyond the fragments and distortions of what is recorded in plantation archives, SOIL reimagines the cartographic and geographic legacies of slavery, tracing the carceral spaces of what is left behind in and on the grounds of sugarcane plantations, mapping the forgotten scars of past and present disappearances along the Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana.
Through archival research, soil collection, and photographic documentation spanning over fifty sites, the SOIL project engages the residue of centuries marked by enslavement and subjugation, executed through the architectural designs and carceral enclosures of the barracoons, slave ships, auction blocks, public markets, plantations arrangements, and residential confinement.
Untitled, Self-Emancipation & Fugitivity
In The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary, feminist scholar Kimberley Juanita Brown states, “the repeated bodies, narratives, and names make clear that it takes many generations to grasp the horrendous event of slavery. And in order to “remember everything,” black women, alive, dead, and in-between, linger and loiter, waiting to have their stories told.”
The violent gaps and distortions of archival runaway ads and jail notices routinely depict the carceral landscapes in which hundreds of women and girls sought escape in New Orleans as the city became the largest slave trading port before and during the antebellum period. While archival ads and notices offer fragmented glimpses of the lives of women and girls and their rebellious yearning for freedom, the archive also reveals the places that sought to constrain them and the unimaginable circumstances and challenges they navigated to achieve escape and freedom. Many women and girls appear in the runaway ads over weeks, months, and even years, reflecting the commitment of enslavers to retrieving those once held in bondage. The violent silences, voids, distortions, loss, margins, fragments, loose ends, edges, and erased lives of 228 women and girls who self-emancipated or engaged in fugitivity informs this new series of mixed media work of sculpture forms, textiles, maps of escape, and text art.
Related Projects:
Interdisciplinary Feminist Practices as Insurgent Possibilities: Artist Talk with Shana M. griffin
Shana M. griffin on Resisting Reproductive Violence in the Built Environment