Katherine Taylor: Heavy Weather

Third Text

In the decade since Okwui Enwezor asserted the relevance of art biennials staged at sites of social and political trauma, it has grown abundantly clear that art is increasingly imagined to do something in these extreme and unlikely contexts. However, what art is being imagined to do in such circumstances remains under-explored. This article considers the alchemies of art and biennial practices by revisiting the exhibition developed in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. It situates that biennial, ‘Prospect New Orleans’, within the outpouring of imagery that emanated from the storm, images that both reveal and maintain the institutionalized racism and policies of economic neglect that ensured the storm was so very devastating. The article considers the roles the biennial project and its artworks played within visual systems that produce large swathes of the population as disposable in the face of every storm. PDF available upon request

Journal of American Studies, 2010

The Flood Last Time : ''Muck '' and the Uses of History in Kara Walker's '' Rumination '' on Katrina MICHAEL P. BIBLER Kara Walker describes her book After the Deluge (2007) as '' rumination '' on Hurricane Katrina structured in the form of a '' visual essay. '' The book combines Walker's own artwork and the works of other artists into '' a narrative of fluid symbols'' in which the overarching analogy of '' murky, toxic waters'' holds the potential to '' become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth. '' This essay considers Walker's use of history within this collection of images to show how the book opens up ways to interrogate Katrina's particular significance as a wholly new, and yet eerily familiar, historical '' event. '' Nuancing a reading of Walker's book with reference to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), to which After the Deluge implicitly alludes, the essay examines Walker's artistic challenge to the notion that history is a narratable account of a past that precedes the present and demonstrates how that challenge encourages us to think about the potential uses of history within civil rights discourse after Katrina. To accept one's past-one's history-is not the same thing as drowning in it ; it is learning how to use it. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time 1 The title and cover image of After the Deluge (2007), Kara Walker's visual-arts '' rumination'' on Hurricane Katrina, invoke the ancient story of Noah and the Flood. The book is a self-described '' visual essay '' resulting from Walker's 2006 exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which she arranged works from the museum's collection alongside her own works. In red letters against a white background, the book's title connects the floods that devastated New Orleans in 2005 with the biblical

Moment to monument: the making and unmaking of …, 2009

This article examines a series of photographs from The Washington Post covering Hurricane Katrina. I argue that the modes of seeing in the images structure the possible meanings of the event. These images represent the documentary mode which, in pursuit of “objectivity,” positions the viewer in a stance of detachment and judgment. In the rush to judge, familiar identifications of left/right, culture/nature, and public/private, surface as the primary grounds for evaluation. In the photographs, the urban characteristics of the scene direct the viewers’ identification. The various judgments diverge based on how the viewer identifies with this urban scene. In short, I argue that how we saw Katrina influences how the disaster was interpreted. The stale interpretations, from cultural to natural, are both equally structured into the photographs. Producing different evaluations, from anti-globalization to the anti-racist, requires interrogation of the dominant news-media mode and the imaging of new points of view.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, several artists turned their practices towards the subject of disaster support. Drawing on the philosophy of Bruno Latour, I argue that these artistic practices come to articulate and re‐present the multitude of concerns interwoven with disaster. find it at: http://copas.uni-regensburg.de/article/view/196

American Anthropologist, 2006

Race, Gender & Class, 2015

Callaloo, 2006

Cultural Studies, 2019

On 20 September 2017, Hurricane María made landfall on Puerto Rico causing unprecedented disaster. From that day onwards, the Puerto Rican multi-layered colonial, social and political context was further complicated by the traumatic acceleration of a human disaster via this natural disaster. This crystalized the urgency of using art as vehicle for (social) catharsis, a practice that continues to be used by individual artists, collectives, community organizations, art projects, and other art institutions on the island and abroad, through mural art, community paintings, art exhibitions, literature, music, and many other aesthetic expressions. This article examines, from a decolonial and critical cultural studies perspective, post-Hurricane María artistic expressions in contemporary art as decolonial aesthetics through the cathartic use of the frame of an aesthetics of disaster. It is argued that, an aesthetics of disaster aims to reassert an artistic form that is able to accelerate the discursive nullification of a deeply rooted colonial, social and cultural problem by way of art as catharsis inspired by the way that Hurricane María unveiled these problems. The piece briefly contextualizes Puerto Rico, and it examines the idea of Puerto Rican contemporary art as catharsis. Then, it describes how Puerto Rican contemporary art exhibitions and associated aesthetic production are processing urgent post-hurricane issues through three illustrative pieces in exhibitions in PR and abroad in the United States (US). Lastly, decolonial aesthetics is reexamined and re-understood, informed by Édouard Glissant's view expressed in Poetics of Relation which aids to the conclusion that Puerto Rican contemporary art using the frame of an aesthetics of disaster functions as a powerful form of decolonial aesthetics. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2019.1607519

in Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico: Disaster, Vulnerability & Resiliency, 2021

This chapter presents a critical analysis of the Puerto Rican aesthetics crafted to "make sense" and (therefore) "purge" the posthurricane trauma through Puerto Rican visual arts produced in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The versatility in visual arts to show the complex story of Puerto Rico after Maria likely explains the significantly greater expressive surge. This chapter also provides brief contextualization of Puerto Rican visual arts and their relationship with hurricanes as well as a description of the aesthetic expressions post-Maria and illustrative posthurricane exhibitions and art pieces.