Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought

Located in New Orleans, Rivers Institute recognizes art as forms of thought, shaped by geographic, social, political, environmental and economic histories. We commit to research at the confluence of diverse bodies of knowledge. We support artists in the construction of alternative futures–literal course shifts in art, landscape, & society—and share transdisciplinary seasons of inquiry on-line, in communities, and in our galleries. Critically positioned at the Mississippi River Delta, at the southern tip of the American South and the upper limit of the Global South, we believe the challenges of the 21st century are not hard to see from here. And yet, Rivers Institute is not defined by any single place, but rather by a set of conditions. Our perspective, informed by both long rootedness and displacement, confers us with a reverence for otherness and curiosity about what we do not know. Rivers carry ideas, goods, and people from here to there, and from there to here. Rivers Institute recognizes exchange and estrangement as tools for radical discovery and empathy. We learn from artists who share in this conviction and provide a context and support for their research and practices. This organization is born both of belief in and experimentation about the potential for an institution, operating outside of financial and historical art centers, to shape art and social histories and futures through rigorous scholarship and equitable, sustainable models of production. In an historically under-resourced cultural economy, we value artists, cultural workers, and the broader networks that support and service art practices. We place value in the ideas that materialize in the margins of books and societies.