Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) was founded in 2019 by curator Andrea Andersson. The seismic events that would soon follow reinforced Rivers’ belief in art as diaspora—forms and ideas that express our intertwining geographic, social, political, environmental, economic histories, and migrations. Indeed, diaspora has long driven the imaginations of the most rigorous contemporary artists, those whose practices are rooted in exchange and the complexity of translation. The conditions at the time of Rivers’ founding also heightened the need for cultural institutions to center collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and build trust with artists who are well-poised to re-envision our shared histories and migrational futures.
In 2023 Rivers began an institutional climate planning process, with sensitivity to our particular environment and our programmatic commitments to artists of the global diaspora. At the core of our plan is energy sovereignty for the Rivers Residence, divorced from the Entergy Grid which so regularly fails (during both major and more common storm events) and remains dependent on the petroleum industry. All of the elements of our plan depend upon two central systems—solar panels to draw energy and two solar batteries to store it for use.
Banner: 833 Montegut Street Garden Celebration, at the Rivers Residence in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, LA, May 2023 (Pictured: Rivers Staff with a group of New Orleans-based artists and cultural professionals). Above: Screening of Alia Farid’s film Chabayish, The Small Center at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. Image courtesy of the artist and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought. All images courtesy Alex Marks.