As the finale to our yearlong exploration of Water, Proteus Gowanus celebrates New Orleans, a water-challenged city with a spirit and culture built to survive. Join us Thursday evening for a final viewing of our exhibition, Water Works, featuring New Orleans artists, and for a screening of The Whole Gritty City, a 90-minute documentary that plunges viewers into the world of three New Orleans school marching bands. The film’s producer, director and editor, Richard Barber, will be on hand to introduce the film and answer questions at the end.

The film follows kids growing up in America’s most musical city, and one of its most dangerous, as their band directors get them ready to perform in the Mardi Gras parades, and teach them to succeed and to survive.

Navigating the urban minefield through moments of setback, loss, discovery, and triumph, these children and their adult leaders reveal the power and resilience of a culture.

The film features three marching bands in the years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city: the O. Perry Walker and L.E. Rabouin high school bands., and The Roots of Music, a new band for middle school-age children. These young beginners in Roots are put through their paces by the program’s founder Derrick Tabb, drummer for the Grammy Award-winning Rebirth Brass Band.

Join us for wine and New Orleans music at the opening reception of Water Works, a group exhibition featuring the work of 16 visual artists from New Orleans along with music critic and occasional DJ John Swenson spinning the history of New Orleans music from Gottschalk to Galactic!

The title of this exhibition is derived from the board game, Monopoly. It invokes the infrastructures and agencies that deliver water to our sinks and tubs while also serving as a metaphor for tears. But Water Works is not another hard-luck Katrina show. We asked this group of New Orleans artists to  consider water in all its complexity and universality. Saucedo further refined the lens to the two topics suggested by the title of the show and the board game it references: namely, infrastructure and emotion.

Curator and Artist: Christopher Saucedo

Sunday, October 27, 5pm

$5 admission
Due to popular demand, we will move en masse across the Union St Bridge to Show Room Gowanus to accommodate the demand for this event. Come early to see the exhibition, then walk the 1/2 block with us at 5pm for the event.

As part of our yearlong exploration of Water and our current exhibition, Containment, we are pleased to host Rebecca Solnit and co-authors for a discussion of New Orleans history, told as a history of containment and outbreak—of water, of disease, of power, of poison, of truth, of populations.

Rebecca Snedeker and Rebecca Solnit’s Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas describes, with the help of dozens of contributors including cartographers, writers, artists, and scholars, this remarkable place of convergence and divergence in 22 maps and essays.

Subjects include the failed attempts to control the Mississippi River via levees and engineering works, the poor via prisons and repression, the invisible contamination of lead and of lies that have so impacted the city, the toxic seepage of oil from the BP spill, segregation and resistance, the utopian proposal for a city that welcomes water in instead of shutting it out, the porousness of race and culture in the creation of the great hybrid art forms of the city and in its erotic life.

Please Note: Admission is strictly first come, first served (no seat saving) due to limited seating capacity.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books, including Savage Dreams, Storming the Gates of Paradise, and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.

Rebecca Snedeker is an Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker who has produced several feature films that take place in her native New Orleans, including By Invitation Only, Witness: Katrina, and Land of Opportunity.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is a writer, facilitator, and activist-scholar whose work has appeared in Left Turn Magazine, the Indypendent, the Oyster Knife, and Monthly Review Zine.

These programs are supported in part by public funds from the
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.