Gallery talks are casual conversations between artists, curators, and other special guests with NOMA visitors frequently scheduled throughout the year. Join writer Jeffery Darensbourg as he discusses works on view in Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana.

Jeffery Darensbourg is a resident artist at Studio in the Woods, an arts collective based in a forested area on the Westbank of Orleans Parish. Darensbourg is an enrolled member and tribal councilperson of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of mixed Native and Louisiana Creole ancestry. He is interested in the knowledge of flora, fauna, and people his ancestors carried with them and wishes to connect this sort of Louisiana-specific knowledge to the knowledge urban Natives such as himself have in negotiating indigeneity. His work explores the intersections of cultural studies and mixed ethnicity. He describes himself as an “Editor-Who’s-not-a-Chief” of the zine Bulbancha Is Still a Place: Indigenous Culture from New Orleans.

Photograph by Kimmie Tubre