Alison Saar | Breach Sept. 17–Dec. 17, 2016

Alison Saar explores issues of gender, race, racism, and the African diaspora. She mines mythology, ritual, history, music, and her biracial heritage as sources for her work.

During a 2013 residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Saar was dismayed to see how little had been done to rebuild African American communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina eight years earlier. Upon her return to Los Angeles, she began researching the histories of American floods and the effect on African Americans. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, described as one of the worst natural river disasters in U.S. history, piqued her interest. Heavy rains resulted in the river breaching levees, creating a historic catastrophe that had a profound impact on the life of African Americans living in the Mississippi Delta. The flood exposed the conditions of poor African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers and their relationship with cotton plantation owners. The flood also resulted in social, cultural, federal policy, and political changes.

With water imagery woven throughout, Breach is the culmination of Saar’s creative research on American rivers and their historical relationship to the lives of African Americans. Through mixed media sculpture, paintings, and works on paper, she explores floods not only as natural phenomena; but also the complex interaction of social, cultural, and political factors associated with flooding and its aftermath.

galleries.lafayette.edu artgallery@lafayette.edu 610 330 5361

1. Breach, 2016 wood, ceiling tin, found trunks, washtubs and misc objects 155 x 60 x 51 in. (393.7 x 152.4 x 129.5 cm) (Inv# AlS16-15) $ 95,000

3 parts: 1) Figure: 72 x 22 x 18 in. 2) Trunks Nest 3) Raft: 4 x 36 x 41 in.

Left 2. Silttown Shimmy, 2016 wood, ceiling tin, enamel paint, tar and silt 28 x 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (71.1 x 21.6 x 14 cm) (Inv# AlS16-14)

Right 3. Black Bottom Stomp, 2016 wood, acrylics, ceiling tin, silt, tar and wax 30 x 9 x 7 in. (76.2 x 22.9 x 17.8 cm) Inv# AlS16-34)

Left4: Painting Staunch, 2016Charcoal, call and acrylics on found seed sacks, & linens. 64 x 27 Inches

Right: 5. Painting Breach, 2016 Charcoal, chalk and acrylic on found seed sacks and linens 65 x 30 inches

Right: 7. Painting MuddyWater Mambo, 2015 acrylic, gesso and charcoal on found and dyed denim, sugar sacks and linens 50 x 25 in. (127 x 63.5 cm)

Left: 6. Painting Sluefoot Slag, 2015 acrylic, gesso and charcoal on found sugar sacks and linens 53 x 26 1/2 in. (134.6 x 67.3 cm)

Right: 9: Painting Backwater Boogie, 2015 acrylic, gesso and charcoal on found indigo-dyed sugar sacks and linens 50 x 27 in. (127 x 68.6 cm)

Left: 8: Painting Swampside Shag, 2015 acrylic, gesso and charcoal on found and indigo-dyed denim, sugar sacks and linens 48 x 27 in. (121.9 x 68.6 cm)

11. Drawing on found -trunk drawer Silted Brow, 2016 charcoal, chalk & acrylic on linen and found trunk drawer 17 x 27 x 3 in. (43.2 x 68.6 x 7.6 cm) (Inv# AlS16-36)

10. Drawing on found -trunk drawer Acheron, 2016 Charcoal and chalk on found trunk drawer and sugar sacks 29.5 x 16 x 4 in. (74.9 x 40.6 x 10.2 cm) (Inv# AlS16-23)

12 Mixed media installation Hades D.W.P., II, 2016 with poems by Samiya Bashir, Acheron, Phlegethetha, Lethe, Styx, and Cocytus

etched glass jars, water, dye, wood, cloth and ink transfer, electronics, found ladles and cups 30 x 50 x 16 in. (76.2 x 127 x 40.6 cm) Note: D.W.P. is the Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles

13. print Deluge, 2016 Woodcut on hand dyed paper 23 1/2 x 14 1/2 in. (59.7 x 36.8 cm), Tandem Press Framed Dimensions: 26 5/8 x 17 3/4 x 1 1/2 in. (67.6 x 45.1 x 3.8 cm) Edition of 30 (Inv# AlS16-24)

14. print Backwater Blues, 2014 Woodcut and chine colle 27-3/8 x 14-3/8 in. (69.5 x 36.5 cm) Tandem Press framed: 30 3/8 x 17 3/8 in. (77.2 x 44.1 cm) Inv# AlS14-4)

Alison Saar-Breach, 2016 crate sizes from Los Angeles to PA US Art shuttle service

Crate 71.000 51.000 47.000Crate 12.000 98.000 8.000Crate 42.000 48.000 24.000Crate 36.000 78.000 28.000Bin Box 28.000 48.000 24.000Bin Box 28.000 48.000 24.000

Total Cubic Feet : 217

One additional box might be added, approx 24 x 30 x 30

Artist’s book During spring 2016 Alison Saar and poet Evie Shockley collaborated on an artists’ book at Lafayette’s Experimental Printmaking Institute, E.P.I. See photos of work in progress below and following page. Saar will complete the edition during her September 2016 residency

15. Artist’s book, collaboration between Alison Saar and poet Evie Schockley

mami wata (or, how to know a goddess when you see one), 2016

Consists of 20/20 Box editions5/5 artist proof sets

each in a unique found box with3 poems—one on cloth, one two-part and sewn, one folded and tied—3 woodcuts, and a colophon (digital print) Interior of case

Etching, serigraph, embossed letter press text, (Rives BFK) cotton rag paper; part III of poem, etched and embossed with letterpress; folded and tied with hand dyed cotton

Serigraph, distressed stained fabric, col-lograph, hand sewn (print coming out of the mouth) 26 inches long; part II poem

Etching, serigraph, distressed ink stained rice pa-per(Kinwashi), hand sewn edge; part I of poem: etch-ing, 2-part print, sewn at top; rolled; approx 18 inches x 7-3/4 inches

4. Distressed cigar box (found object), Lethe serigraph on plexiglas, overall size varies based on cigar box dimensions

5 a,b,c. Digital pigment prints on dissolvable paper

mami wata (or, how to know a goddess when you see one)

i. a deity’s history

if you show your taili’ll spank it, the mamaswould say to the daughters

meaning keep your behindbehind you, meaning ass-backwards is the wrong

direction. later, this threatenedshowing called up negro chapsin paris, uniformed, fighting

wwii-era stereotypes. now tailsspeak of grown-ass womenwho catch the secrets of fish,

whose bare blue breasts hint at the source of their power stirring beneath the water.

ii. mami speaks

you make me with wood and the fear- sharpened knife’s edge. you make me with paint and awe. you carve me with snakes,spotted and diamond-backed, you wrap me in their tails or give me my own. you make me a ritual figure: i am the second story of your masks.you make mewith fabric and fiber with pigment, braid and thread. you make me with myth, fantasy, and affection. you make me with dreadsand dread. you shapeme from copper, cut me from patterned tin. you make me with borrowed cultures, with local need. you make me your tormentorand deliverer: i amthe demon-goddess of your home’s floral and perfumed altar, i am the irresistible thief, who flashes and fills your eyes with my full breastsbefore i rob youblind. you make me powerful as tides, with rushing rivers of hair, you flood me with mystery and desire, so—no wonder— i do what you have given me to do.

iii. migrant’s prayer

is that you, mami, wrapped in that softwhite fleece, casting that cold, hard glance

in all directions? is that your spray swirling,stinging, in the bitter wind, your blue bosom

glittering with diamonds thick as ice floes?i recognize your excess in this, your muscle,

but miss the wildness of your free: rushingmirror-gray green golden muddy into every

crevice, trailing delta silt in cool deadly fingers as long as your nom de guerre—miss-

issippi—over every surface, swallowingwhat you will. miss. fear. yearn to possess.

Evie Shockley January 24, 2016

15. Artist’s book, collaboration between Alison Saar and poet Evie Shockley, produced at EPI

Installation views of Silt, Soot and Smut

Silt, Soot and Smut at L. A. Louver, Venice, Calif., May 25 - 1 Jul 2016, was a larger version of the exhibition Breach, Grossman Gallery, Lafayette College.

http://www.lalouver.com/exhibition.cfm?tExhibition_id=1206

review in LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-knight-saar-review-20160614-snap-story.html

review in Bermudez Projecthttp://www.bermudezprojects.com/silt-soot-smut/

Installation view of Silt, Soot and Smut at L. A. Louver, Venice, Calif., May 25 - 1 Jul 2016, a larger version of the exhibition Breach at Lafayette College. The mixed media sculpture, Breach can be seen in center.

Installation view of Silt, Soot and Smut at L. A. Louver, Venice, Calif., May 25 - 1 Jul 2016, a larger version of the exhibition Breach at Lafayette College. The sculpture Silttown Shimmy can be seen on pedestal at left; a different version of Hades D.W.P. is to the right.

Installation view of Silt, Soot and Smut at L. A. Louver, Venice, Calif., May 25 - 1 Jul 2016, a larger version of the exhibition Breach at Lafayette College. Paintings on found fabric

Interdisciplinary opportunities• Early twentieth century African American history• The Great Northern Migration• Civil engineering: such as the pre-1928 Army Corps of Engineers levees-only policy; dams and

other means of “controlling” rivers• FEMA; flood insurance; buyback programs, • Climate change and future flooding events• Bushkill Creek; Delaware River and other regional floods, for example, Susquehanna River and

Hurricane Agnes, 1972• Environmental justice, environmental racism• Engineering ethics• Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy• Music: Delta Blues musicians responded to the flood of 1927 with an estimated 50 songs

including Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” (1927), Charley Patton‘s “High Water Everywhere, Part 1” (1929), Lonnie Johnson’s “Broken Levee Blues” and 1929’s “When the Levee Breaks,” by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. (A song also covered by Led Zeppelin in 1971 and Dylan.)

• 50th anniversary of devastating the Arno River flood in Florence November 3 & 4, 2016; “Mud Angels”

• The floods and/or rivers in religious traditions; floods as cleansing; floods as destructive events; baptisms; rivers as symbols; rivers as boundaries

• Theater productions or readings, such as Gilgamesh• Economics of sharecropper-based agriculture• Poetry, including Evie Shockley’s collaboration with Alison Saar on an artists’ book created at EPI• Literature• Film and documentaries• Mami Wata

The Coast and Geodetic Survey was directed to map the history of the great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. (Re-cords of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, RG 23)

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD 20740-6001 Telephone: 1-86-NARA-NARA or 1-866-272-627

http://www.archives.gov/global-pages/larger-image.ht-ml?i=/publications/prologue/2007/spring/images/coast-miss-flood-l.jpg&c=/publications/prologue/2007/spring/images/coast-miss-flood.caption.html

Brief summary of the Flood of 1927 An excellent summary of the history of the flood, the social changes, etc., can be found in the Weather Channel’s series “When Weather Changed History,” The Great Flood of 1927 & The Treatment of Blacks. https://youtu.be/hgPPTQPPM9c

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927The flood inundated 16 million acres of land across Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. Seventeen million acres—27,000 square miles, or an area that spanned 99 miles long and 50 miles wide—were underwater, some areas under 30 feet. In many areas of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, flood waters remained until July of that year. One million Americans were directly affected; hundreds of thousands were displaced.

The flood exposed the conditions of poor African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers and their relationship with cotton plantation owners. An estimated 200,000 African Americans were displaced by the flood and lived for long periods of time in relief camps. There was racial disparity in how relief aid was distributed. Seventy-five percent of the population of the Delta was African American, and 95 percent of agricultural workers were African Americans. Planters feared that if laborers were evacuated from the region, they would not return, resulting in a labor shortage.

Among the consequences of the flood:

• Many African American men were impressed into service and were never paid. Many would subsequently leave, joining the Great Migration.

• African Americans shifted from the Republican Party—the party of Lincoln—to the Democratic Party, a consequence of broken promises by Herbert Hoover. Racial abuses during the flood eventually cost Hoover the support of national black leader Robert Moton, who had been in charge of investigating racial abuses in relief camps.

• Americans begin to reconsider the view on government responsibilities for providing relief. After 1927, the federal government agreed to provide relief following natural disasters.

• The floods undermined the faith in and underscored the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers’ levees-only system—described by Gifford Pinchot, chief of the forest service under President Theodore Roosevelt as “the most colossal blunder in engineering history”—and resulted in a revised Flood Control program in 1928. In 1917, the Army Corps of Engineers commenced a “levees only” project to control the Mississippi River, the 10-year plan to build 40-foot-high, 100-foot wide levees running a length of 1,000 miles on both sides of the river. In August 1926, heavy rain began, lasting eight months. The river ran at record levels. On Jan. 7, 1927, a 49-foot flood crest passed Cairo, Ill.; levees were the only protection. Hundreds worked around the clock to reinforce the levees with sandbags. The Army Corps of Engineers assured that the levees would hold, but they did not. The first levees failed in Illinois, and approximately 120 failed before the flooding ended. On April 21, 1927, the main stem was 9.5 feet above flood stage. At Mound Landing, a section of the levee collapsed.

• A significant change in flood management policy was made. The 1928 Flood Control Act led to additional measures to reduce stress on levees with floodways, reservoirs, and strengthened levees.

• Blues musicians wrote more than 50 songs about the devastation caused by the levee breaks. Examples include Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” Lonnie Johnson’s “Backwater Blues,” and Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie’s ‘When the Levee Breaks.”

See resources pages for sources.

The Army Corp of Engineers

In 1917, the Army Corp of Engineers established the “levees only” policy, to control the Mississippi River, a ten-year project to build forty-foot-high one-hundred-foot wide levees running a length of one thousand miles on both sides of the river.

In August 1926, heavy rain began, lasting eight months. The river ran at record levels. On January 7, 1927, a forty-nine-foot flood crest passed Cairo, Illinois; levees were the only protections. Hundreds worked around the clock to reinforce the levees with sandbags. The Army Corp of Engineers assured that the levees would hold, but that didn’t prove to be the case: The first levees failed in Illinois, and approximately one hundred twenty failed before the flooding ended. April 21, 1927, the main stem was nine and a half feet above flood stage. At Mound Landing, a section of the levee collapsed.

The floods undermined the faith in and underscored the failure of the Army Corp of Engineers’ levee-only system–described by Gifford Pinchot, chief of the forest service under President Theodore Roosevelt as, “the most colossal blunder in engineering history,” and the revised Flood Control program in 1928 lead to additional measures to reduce stress on levees with floodways, reservoirs, and strengthened levees.

See resources pages for sources

The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 Frontispiece - beginning of crevasse breaching levee at Mounds Landing, Miss. From: “The Floods of 1927 in the Mississippi Basin”, Frankenfeld, H.C., 1927 Monthly Weather Review Supplement No. 29

Image ID: wea00733, NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) Collection Photographer: Archival Photography by Steve Nicklas, NOS, NGS. Public Domain

wea00740 The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 Arkansas City, Arkansas on April 27, 1927 The river stage was at 52.8 feet From: “The Floods of 1927 in the Mississippi Basin”, Frankenfeld, H.C., 1927 Monthly Weather Review Supplement No. 29. Photographer: Archival Photography by Steve Nicklas, NOS, NGS.

public domain

Barge loaded with poor African American refugees on the Sunflower River in Mississippi during the 1927 Flood. Relief officials did not evacuate African Americans out of the flood areas in fear of losing plantation workers, whowould have little incentive to return to low wage cotton field work.File size: 1800 x 1224 px | 6 x 4.1 inches (150dpi) | 6.3 MB, Image ID: CWBPTX Contributor: Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock PhotoModel release: NoProperty release: No Check if you need a release, Alamy.com, licensing fee for use.

1927 Flood & Mississippi RiveR

ResouRces, by no Means coMplete. An excellent summary of the flood of 1927, the impact on Southern African Americans, the social and political changes, the levee system, etc., can be found in the Weather Channel’s series “When Weather Changed History,” The Great Flood of 1927 & The Treatment of Blacks. https://youtu.be/hgPPTQPPM9c.

HistoRy

John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America (Simon & Schuster: 1998),

Richard M. Mizelle, Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the African American Imagination, (University of Minnesota Press: 2014).

From the publisher:The Mississippi River flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, reshaping the social and cultural landscape as well as the physical environment. Often remembered as an event that altered flood control policy and elevated the stature of powerful politicians, Richard M. Mizelle Jr. examines the place of the flood within African American cultural memory and the profound ways it influenced migration patterns in the United States.

In Backwater Blues, Mizelle analyzes the disaster through the lenses of race and charity, blues music, and mobility and labor. The book’s title comes from Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” perhaps the best-known song about the flood. Mizelle notes that the devastation produced the richest groundswell of blues recordings following any environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, with more than fifty songs evoking the disruptive force of the flood and the precariousness of the levees originally constructed to protect citizens. Backwater Blues reveals larger relationships between social and environmental history. According to Mizelle, musicians, Harlem Renaissance artists, fraternal organizations, and Creole migrants all shared a sense of vulnerability in the face of both the Mississippi River and a white supremacist society. As a result, the Mississippi flood of 1927 was not just an environmental crisis but a racial event.

Challenging long-standing ideas of African American environmental complacency, Mizelle offers insights into the broader dynamics of human interactions with nature as well as ways in which nature is mediated through the social and political dynamics of race. Includes discography.

Backwater Blues was reviewed in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Sept 2015, Vol 5, issue 3, 491–92. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13412-015-0287-z

PBS documentary: Fatal Flood http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/flood/

In the spring of 1927, after weeks of incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, inundating hundreds of towns, killing as many as a thousand people and leaving a million homeless. In Greenville, Mississippi, efforts to contain the river pitted the majority black population against an aristocratic plantation family, the Percys, and the Percys against themselves. A dramatic story of greed, power and race during one of America’s greatest natural disasters.

Susan Scott Parrish, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History , (Princeton Univ Press, forthcoming Dec 2016)

from publisher: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which covered nearly thirty thousand square miles across seven states, was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history. Due to the speed of new media and the slow progress of the flood, this was the first environmental disaster to be experienced on a mass scale. As it moved from north to south down an environmentally and technologically altered valley, inundating plantations and displacing nearly a million people, the flood provoked an intense and lasting cultural response. The Flood Year 1927 draws from newspapers, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, vaudeville, blues songs, poetry, and fiction to show how this event took on public meanings.

Americans at first seemed united in what Herbert Hoover called a “great relief machine,” but deep rifts soon arose. Southerners, pointing to faulty federal levee design, decried the attack of Yankee water. The condition of African American evacuees in “concentration camps” prompted pundits like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells to warn of the return of slavery to

Dixie. And environmentalists like Gifford Pinchot called the flood “the most colossal blunder in civilized history.” Susan Scott Parrish examines how these and other key figures--from entertainers Will Rogers, Miller & Lyles, and Bessie Smith to authors Sterling Brown, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright--shaped public awareness and collective memory of the event.

The crises of this period that usually dominate historical accounts are war and financial collapse, but The Flood Year 1927 enables us to assess how mediated environmental disasters became central to modern consciousness.

Parrish is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. She is the author of American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World.

Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy. An Environmental History of the Mississippi and its Peoples. From Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012) Morris is a historian at University of Texas, Austin.

Christine A. Klein & Sandra B. Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies A Century of Unnatural Disasters (NY: NYU Press, 2014) Both authors teach at law schools. Includes a chapter on environmental justice and environmental justice

John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar. Straus and Giroux, 1989). First section recount the role of the Army Corp of Engineers in “controlling” the lower Mississippi River.

Richard Hornbeck and Suresh Naidu, “When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration an Economic Development of the American South,” 2013, examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on black out-migration and subsequent agricultural development in the lower Mississippi region.

Keith Wailoo (Editor), Karen M. O’Neill (Editor), Jeffrey Dowd (Editor), Roland Anglin (Editor), Keith Wailoo (Introduction by), Karen M. O’Neill (Introduction by), Jeffrey Dowd (Introduction by) Katrina’s Imprint. Race and Vulnerability in America. (Rutgers University Press, 2010)

Mike Swinford, “When the Levee Breaks: Race Relations and The Mississippi Flood of 1927. 2007 http://www.eiu.edu/historia/Historia2008Swinford.pdf

John M Barry, “The Great 1927 Mississippi River Flood,”http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/roaring-twenties/essays/great-1927-mississippi-river-flood

http://www.oralhistory.org/2013/06/25/oral-history-on-backstory-voices-from-the-1927-mississippi-river-flood/

http://backstoryradio.org/shows/that-lawless-stream/?segments=remembering-the-rising-tide

Charles C. Eldredge, John Steuart Curry’s Hoover and the Flood. Painting Modern History (University of North Carolina Press, 1927)

poetRy and liteRatuRe

Susan Scott Parrish, “Faulkner and the outer weather of 1927, “American Literary History Volume 24, Issue 1, p. 34-58

Jay Watson, Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985, The New Southern Studies, (University of Georgia Press, 2012)

Poet Evie Shockley (at Rutgers) has written about and is a collaborated with Saar on the EPI produced artist’s book

Shockley, on teaching Sterling Brown’s poem, “Ma Rainey,” students listen to a Bessie Smith recording of “Backwater Blues,” Boston Review, January 14, 2016; http://bostonreview.net/poetry/evie-shockley-teacher-feature-ma-raineys-blues

Camille T. Dungy, editor, Black Nature, Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009) The natural world seen through the eyes of black poets. http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/black_nature

“Just as nature is too often defined as wilderness when, in fact, nature is everywhere we are, our nature poetry is too often defined by Anglo-American perspectives, even though poets of all backgrounds write about the living world…Dungy enlarges our understanding of the nexus between nature and culture, and introduces a ‘new way of thinking about nature writing and writing by black Americans.'” —Booklist (starred review)

Richard Wright, “The Man Who Saw the Flood,” New Masses 24, 1937 (short story); and “Down by the Riverside,” in a collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children

Natasha Trethewey, Beyond Katrina, A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, (Athens, Ga., University of Georgia Press, 2010)

S. McMillin, The Meaning of Rivers: Flow and Reflection in American Literature American Land and Life Series, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011) McMillin is in the department of English at Oberlin

Sterling Brown, “Children of the Mississippi,” 1931, from Southern Road, 1932, poem

Bill Cheng, Southern Cross the Dog (Ecco, 2014), novel

Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, The Tilted World (Morrow: 2013), novel

Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, “What His Hands Were Waiting For,” short story, ca. 2010.

William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son, with 1973 introduction by Walker Percy, (originally published Knopf: 1941) later editions have a 1973 introduction by Walker Percy, memoir

William Faulkner, The Old Man, 1939, novella

Robert Penn Warren, Flood: A Novel, 1963

Michael Farris Smith, Rivers: A Novel, Simon & Schuster: 2013

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes are Watching God, 1937, novel

Ross Gay and Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., River, Monster House Press, 2014, chatbook

GRapHic novels J.G. Jones and Mark Waid, Strange Fruit, in four volumes, 2015 & 21016

From publisher:Two of the industry’s most respected and prolific creators come together for the first time in a deeply personal passion project. J.G. Jones (52, Wanted, Y: The Last Man) and Mark Waid (Irredeemable, Superman: Birthright, Kingdom Come) take on a powerful, beautifully painted story set during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Strange Fruit is a challenging, provocative examination of the heroic myth confronting the themes of racism, cultural legacy, and human nature through a literary lens, John Steinbeck’s classic novel, Of Mice and Men.

It’s 1927 in the town of Chatterlee, Mississippi, drowned by heavy rains. The Mississippi River is rising, threatening to break open not only the levees, but also the racial and social divisions of this former plantation town. A fiery messenger from the skies heralds the appearance of a being, one that will rip open the tensions in Chatterlee. Savior, or threat? It depends on where you stand. All the while, the waters are still rapidly rising.

http://www.boom-studios.com/strange-fruit-01-j-g-jones-cover.html

Mat Johnson (author) and Simone Gane, Illustrator, Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story, (Vertigo: 2010)

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, two men who fell through society’s cracks travel to evacuate New Orleans to pull off the bank heist of a lifetime. Up against the clock and eluding armed competitors, the men find themselves in the middle of one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in American history. All around them, the institutions that form the pillars of our society are falling apart. Surrounded by death and misery, the men face a moral challenge greater than any other obstacle they’ve had to overcome. Is it possible to beat the system, even when it

lies in ruins? Can they save even one person–or themselves? Or will those institutions come crashing down right on top of them?

Josh Neufeld, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, written and illustrated by Neufeld (Pantheon: 2009)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/books/24neufeld.htmlNeufeld known for his graphic narratives of political and social upheaval, told through the voices of witnesses. He is the writer/artist of the bestselling nonfiction graphic novel A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (Pantheon).

aFRican aMeRican HistoRy/MateRial cultuRe

Henry John Drewal, Mami Wata: Arts for Water Sprits in Africa and its Africa Diasporas. (University of Washington Press: 2008)

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Random House, 2010)

Music

Blues musicians responded to the flood of 1927 with at least two dozen songs including Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” (1927), Charley Patton‘s “High Water Everywhere, Part 1” (1929), Lonnie Johnson’s “Broken Levee Blues” and 1929’s “When the Levee Breaks,” by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. (A song also covered by Led Zeppelin in 1971 and Dylan.)

See extensive discography in Mizelle Jr’s Backwater Blues, The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the African American Imagination, p 191-192

David Evans, on the origin of Bessie Smith’s song, “Backwater Blues,” http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2004/02/nashville-flood-the-origin-of-bessie-smith-hit-scholar-reveals-david-evans-makes-revelation-during-blues-class-at-vanderbilt-59762/

David Evans, “High Water Everywhere. Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood,” Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From. Lyrics and History. Edited by Robert Springer, (Jackson, Miss.:

University Press of Mississippi, 2006)

DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor, “Come Through the Water, Come Through the Flood” Black Women’s Gospel Practices and Social Critique,” http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2011/2011-42.pdf

AbstractThis article explores gospel music created by Black women as a form of protest that critiques social injustice. Using the tragic circumstances the 1927 Mississippi River Flood, the author argues that in the first half of the twentieth century the emergent gospel music became a vehicle through which African American women could circumvent the restrictive gender dictates of Black churches. In music created immediately following the flood and years later, Black women challenged the rhetoric and practice of hegemony through an alternative oral discourse that recognized the whole self as integral to spiritual and subjective fulfillment, and simultaneously critically assessed their cultural milieu

Tim A. Ryan, Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner’s Fiction and Southern Roots Music, LSU Press, 2015

“Flood Songs, Dylan and The Mississippi Blues,” http://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/node/7342

American Routes, Nick Spitzer host, Wade in the Water: Songs and Stories of the River: http://americanroutes.wwno.org/archives/show/746/wade-in-the-water-songs-and-stories-of-the-river

American Routes, After the Storm, takes you in story and song to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Nick blends music and commentary that describes the place of storms and floods in the history and culture of the city and region. Featured are classic blues about broken levees and broken hearts, celebratory jazz funerals and memories of the city in song. Artists include Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Fats Domino and Randy Newman, others. http://americanroutes.wwno.org/archives/show/139/

http://www.library.olemiss.edu/guides/archives_subject_guide/1927-flood/publications

Article from the Wall Street Journal “When Bad Times Make Good Art”

FilMs

Wild River, 1960. director Elia Kazan, (Tennessee Valley)Beasts of the Southern Wild, 2012, director Ben Zeitlin

which is a more general description of the Delta Blues and the 1927 floodhttp://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122973726066823379

NPR story: Singing the Blues about 1927’s Delta Floodshttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4860785

NPR story: When The Levee Breaks: Ripples Of The Great Floodhttp://www.npr.org/2011/05/18/136427246/when-the-levee-breaks-ripples-of-the-great-flood

docuMentaRies

The Great Flood by Bill Morrison and Bill Frisell about the 1927 flood, the documentary consists of archival film footage and photographs, is presented without narration with captions inserted occasionally

Trailer https://vimeo.com/86573792

reviews: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/coming-terms-one-americas-greatest-natural-disasters-180953044/?no-ist

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/movies/the-great-flood-explores-tragedy-on-the-mississippi-in-27.html?hpw&rref=movies&_r=0

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/american-refugees-bill-morrison-s-great-flood

Spike Lee: When the Levees Broke

Spike Lee: If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, 2010

“The Johnston Flood,” 1989, Academy Award for best documentary short subject

Helen HIll’s Home Movies (2000-05)

These are home movies Helen Hill made of her neighborhood in New Orleans a year before Hurricane Katrina hit. Preservation of these personal films is a memorial to a unique city and to Hill’s work and life. An award-winning filmmaker, animator and teacher, Hill consistently documented

her life and the lives of the people around her with a series of Super 8 home movies. Between her return to New Orleans in 2001 and her first visit back to her devastated neighborhood in October 2005, she shot forty-two 50 foot Super 8 reels, totaling approximately 80 minutes of running time. Film labs refused to handle Hill’s flood damaged home movies so she hand-cleaned the films with soap and water, halting their decay. Hill’s Super 8 images are poignant evidence of unseen neighborhoods and local culture lost in the hurricane.

Hill was an independent filmmaker, teacher, and animator. She is well known for her extraordinary use of drawings, paintings, photographs, cut-out paper and three dimensional cloth puppets. Her techniques expanded to include hand-processed film, found film footage, her own home movies and camera-less animation as well as traditional animation.

http://www.nywift.org/article.aspx?ID=3207

Peter Hutton. Study of a River, 1997 , experimental film, winter on Hudson River

Pare Lorentz, The River, 1938, short documentary, about importance of Mississippi River

Caroline Bacle, Lost Rivers, 2012

The Great FloodA film by Bill MorrisonMusic by Bill Frisell

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its earthen embankments in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles. Part of its legacy was the forced exodus of displaced sharecroppers, who left plantation life and migrated to Northern cities, adapting to an industrial society with its own set of challenges.

Musically, the Great Migration fueled the evolution of acoustic blues to electric blues bands that thrived in cities like Memphis, Detroit and Chicago becoming the well-spring for R&B and rock as well as developing jazz styles.

THE GREAT FLOOD is a collaboration between filmmaker and multimedia artist Bill Morrison and guitarist and composer Bill Frisell inspired by the 1927 catastrophe.

In the spring of 2011, as the Mississippi River was again flooding to levels not seen since 1927, Frisell, Morrison, and the band traveled together from New Orleans, through Vicksburg, Clarksdale, Memphis, Davenport, Iowa, St. Louis and on up to Chicago.

For the film, Morrison scoured film archives, including the Fox Movietone Newsfilm Library and the National archives, for footage of the Mississippi River Flood. All film documenting this catastrophe was shot on volatile nitrate stock, and what footage remains is pock marked and partially deteriorated. The degraded filmstock figures prominently in Morrison's aesthetic with distorted images suggesting different planes of reality in the story-those lived, dreamt, or remembered.

For the score, Frisell has drawn upon his wide musical palette informed by elements of American roots music, but refracted through his uniquely evocative approach that highlights essential qualities of his thematic focus. Playing guitar, Frisell is joined by Tony Scherr on bass, Kenny Wollesen on drums and Ron Miles on trumpet.

In THE GREAT FLOOD, the bubbles and washes of decaying footage is associated with the destructive force of rising water, the filmstock seeming to have been bathed in the same water as the images depicted on it. These layers of visual information, paired with Frisell's music, become contemporary again. We see the images through a prism of history, but one that dances with the sound of modern music.

80 minutes / b&w Release: 2013Copyright: 2013Sale/Institutional: $298

African American Studies, American Studies, Black & White, Cinema Studies, Communications, Economic Sociology, Environment, Film History, Geography, History (U.S.), Media Studies, Race and Racism

http://icarusfilms.com/new2013/fld.html

http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?fisk

THE ALLUVIAL VALLEYOF THE LOWERMISSISSIPPI RIVERHarold Fisk, 1944

For the Army Corps of Engineers, Fisk’s maps of the historical traces of the Mississippi River; fifteen maps, stretching from southern Illinois to southern Louisiana.

"Birdsong Camp at Cleveland, Miss. 4-29-27" African-American flood refugees stand in line at Birdsong Camp. Tents in background. Collection: 1927 Flood Photograph Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and HistoryCall Number: PI/1992.0002System ID: 97135., Birdsong Camp at Cleveland, Miss., 4-29-27Scanned as tiff in 2008/01/03 by MDAH.Credit: Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History