Violent Articulations
Cartographies and Sites of Violence
The Selling
Policies of Exclusion

DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability 

DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability is a visual conceptualization of what the DISPLACED Project's forthcoming exhibition may entail. Created by Shana M. griffin during her visual arts residency at the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans in the Fall of 2020, and presented as part of SOLOS:  Exhibitions and New Work Showcases from January 9 to April 25, 2021, DISPLACING Blackness engages the spatial  and geographic complexities of Black life impacted by violent housing and  land-use policies rooted in racial slavery, conquest, and land thief. 



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The Concept 

Using archival research, historical images, maps, ephemera, found objects, original artwork, personal narratives, and stories of  resistance, DISPLACING Blackness: Cartographies of Violence, Extraction, and Disposability chronicles the slave trade and slavery’s afterlife through the institutionalization of racial and gender violence in spatial segregation and discriminatory policies designed to make Black people  disappear. 

From abstract work depicting the violent screams of bondage and dispossession to the re-creation of a federal housing office where policymakers  made discriminatory housing decisions to reimagined maps illustrating the  violent formation of the city to personal narratives and moments of refusal,  highlighting the organizing efforts of Black women living in public  housing, DISPLACING Blackness examines the multiple ways displacement takes place and shapes Black life and becomes sites of everyday violence, subjectivity, resistance, and possibilities.


Themes Explored 

Violent Articulations

Cartographies and Sites of Violence 

The Selling 

Policies of Exclusion 

The Formation and Dismantling of Public Housing

Theirs Was A Movement Without Marches 

Displacement by Evictions 

Erased and Replaced 


"We Had No Choice."

Erasure | Witness 

Displacement: A Definition in 10 Words

Book Art


Source Material Installed


Gallery View

The documentation of DISPLACING Blackness was made possible by the Louisiana Cultural Equity Arts Grant of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. 


Using Format