Tools of Resistance
Tools of Resistance is a series of interactive audio sculptures made from interviews with organizers, cultural workers, and advocates whose lives connect resistance to memory, land, law, culture, and collective care. Each sculpture holds a recorded conversation inside an object. Headphones invite viewers to listen while materials such as library cards, flowers, cassette tapes, and collection buckets. Handwritten questions become physical extensions of the stories being told.The series asks how resistance is preserved, practiced, and passed on.
Tools of Resistance: Pat Bryant, 2022
Mixed media sculpture with audio interview
This work centers on a recreated library card referencing Pat Bryant’s father becoming the first Black person to integrate the Smithfield, North Carolina Public Library. Headphones play excerpts from an interview with Bryant on organizing, history, and cultural change.
The recreation of Bryant’s father’s lost library card was made through research in the State Archives of North Carolina, with guidance from members of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Tools of Resistance: Mariah Moore, 2022
Mixed media sculpture with audio interview
This work uses shared land and flowers as symbols of care, inheritance, and housing justice, inspired by Mariah Moore’s work founding House of Tulip, a Community Land Trust creating housing solutions for transgender and gender nonconforming people in Louisiana. Headphones play excerpts from an interview with Moore on land ownership, community care, and collective futures.
Tools of Resistance: Ernest Jones, 2022
Mixed media sculpture with audio interview
This work references evidence and language as tools used by civil rights attorney Ernest Jones in defending Black liberation organizers in New Orleans. Headphones play excerpts from an interview with Jones on law, resistance, and using systems of power to protect oppressed communities.
Tools of Resistance: Anne Rolfes, 2022
Mixed media sculpture with audio interview
This work focuses on the bucket, an accessible air-testing tool used by residents to collect air samples near refineries and chemical plants. Connected to Anne Rolfes’s work with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the sculpture considers how communities transform lived experience into evidence they can use to understand, document, and challenge toxic pollution.
