Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Changing Landscapes writer-in-residence will read from her work in progress in conjunction with the museum’s Drapetomania: A Disease Called Freedom exhibition.
New Orleans African American Museum
1418 Governor Nicholls St.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010 from 6:30-8:30pm
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, a writer, Texas native and graduate of Harvard University, is A Studio in the Woods’ seventh Changing Landscapes resident. Inspired by a grisly footnote to Louisiana’s slavery past, Rhodes-Pitts plans to incorporate history and natural history, disappearance and preservation in a project that will tell the story of a 1811 slave uprising with consequences that most decidedly changed the landscape. Rhodes-Pitts is interested in this juxtaposition between an act of human violence and the natural environment, where the decomposition and disappearance of human remains was an accelerated version of events taking place in nature and the violence and domination of men echoed similar acts against the land.
In addition to the reading, the project will take the form of a hand-bound, letterpress-printed limited edition of her writing about the River Road area and the 1811 slave uprising. It will also include experimental artifacts she will create using handmade paper and calligraphy. She intends to craft paper using refuse fiber from the three main cash crops of Louisiana’s plantation economy: cotton rag, bagasse from sugar cane, and rice straw.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is a writer whose work has appeared in Transition, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe. She has received awards from the Independent Press Association, the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. Originally from Houston, Texas, she graduated in 2000 from Harvard University and was a Fulbright Scholar in the United Kingdom. Sharifa is writing a trilogy on African-Americans and utopia; her first book, Harlem is Nowhere, will be published in 2011 by Little, Brown & Company.
For more information about the reading please call (504) 392-5359. For more information about the museum, please call 504-566-1136.
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Drapetomania is an exhibition of 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century material culture of the African experience in the Americas from the collection of Derrick Joshua Beard. The title of the exhibition is taken from an 1854 article in the monthly Southern journal entitled The Georgia Blister and Critic where noted Louisiana surgeon Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright coined the term “drapetomania” by combining the Greek words for runaway slave and mad or crazy. It was used to describe the mental disease that “induces the negro to run away from service, [and] is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule.”
Photo by Monique Michelle Verdin.
