Plastic, The New Coal

Plastic, the New Coal is a visual and community engagement designed to prompt knowledge sharing and inspire action addressing global truths and local challenges of plastic production along the Mississippi River in Southeast Louisiana. Since the 1980s, an 85-mile corridor between Iti Ouma (Baton Rouge) and Bvlbancha (New Orleans) has been known as Cancer Alley, due to the 200 petrochemical facilities that line the riverbanks. But for the residents, descendants of generations of families, this place is called home and is where they have a 95% greater chance of developing cancer than the average American. A more accurate accounting of this “alleyway” should include another approximately 170 miles down to the Gulf of Mexico, with some of the highest concentrations of plastic waste in the world and severely impacted Southeast Louisiana and the Planet, from soil to sky.

The exhibition, sited in the historic rivertown of Wallace, at The Descendants Project education and cultural district, is located 18 miles downriver from Saint James Parish, where the corporation Taiwanese Formosa Plastics is planning to build one of the largest plastics complexes in the world. Curators Monique Verdin and Patricia Watts have invited artists who were born, raised in, or have lived in the region to share their work responding to the histories and current realities of how plastic production, a ubiquitous byproduct of the fossil fuel industry, has severely impacted Southeast Louisiana and the Planet, from soil to sky.

Hannah Chalew is an artist, educator, and environmental activist based in New Orleans whose work connects fossil fuel extraction and plastic production to their roots in white supremacy, colonization, and capitalism. Her artwork explores what it means to live in a time of global warming with a collective uncertain future, and specifically what that means for those living in Southern Louisiana. Chalew’s practice explores the historical legacies that got us here to help imagine new possibil ties for a livable future. Her wall sculpture Miscible Zone and floor sculpture Bottomland Chimera are made with a combination of inks derived from fossil fuel pollution, iron, oak gall, and indigo, and paper made from sugarcane with disposable plastic waste (“plasticane”), symbolic of environmental issues surrounding the Crescent City. The medium as the message.

Shana M griffin is a research-based, activist-centered, decolonial artist whose work crosses fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, land-use planning, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. She engages her practice with the lived experiences of the Black Diaspora, especially Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, pollution, and climate change. griffins’ work SOIL is a cartographic exercise in Black feminist geographic thought, documenting the violent subjugation and dispossession of Black bodies on former and current sugarcane plantations lining the East and West Banks of the Mississippi River in Southeast Louisiana. Through archival research, soil collection, and photographic documentation spanning fifty-five sites, SOIL traces the carceral spaces of what is left on plantation grounds, mapping forgotten scars of past and present disappearances.

Formerly a resident of New Orleans, Heather Bird Harris, now based in Atlanta, Georgia, creates paintings with pigments derived from soils of disturbed sites across the American South. Her work examines environmental loss, how landscapes hold history, and mothering amid ecological collapse, often using maps of lands and waters shaped by industrial expansion and contamination. Harris’ painting Spilhaus Plastisphere maps the world’s oceans as they are, a single interconnected body of water. Overlaid are six plastic circles marking gyres where plastic islands have amassed globally. These “garbage patches” have given rise to plastispheres: an ecosystem of microorganisms colonizing plastic waste, creating new fossils of the Anthropocene. Rendered with copper oxide, a conductive and toxic material, her work remaps inextricable ties between our bodies, water, and pollution.

Pam Longobardi’s global collaborative Drifters Project has removed tens of thousands of pounds of vagrant plastic from natural environments and resituated individual pieces such as body care packaging, fishing nets and floats, industrial parts, and items formed by their journeys into a vast range of sculptural installations. Longbardi’s wall sculptures, Darkening Skies (deep water), are a series of black birds created from ocean plastics collected in Alaska, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Florida and Indonesia. The black coloration points to plastic’s origins in oil, and the abstracted forms are symbolic reminders of the myriad oil-soaked birds that have perished in drilling disasters prominent to the Gulf region. With this work comes the realization that retrieved plastic objects are not just garbage; they are information, a mirror to humanity’s ingenuity, hubris and insatiable appetites.

In 2022, Juan Quintana initiated a body of work while artist-inresidence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, which led to researching Louisiana’s petrochemical industry along the Mississippi River. The artist was born in Saint James Parish (Lutcher), where he spent his childhood on the grounds of a sugar cane refinery and later with his Cuban immigrant family in a dilapidated plantation house in Saint John the Baptist Parish (Reserve). Quintana’s painting Tour 2, Sacrifice Zone, narrates “Cancer Alley” with the names of chemicals being made, used, and emitted there, including Ethylene Oxide, Polystyrene, Benzene, Formaldehyde, and Chloroprene. He also collaged images of plantation homes cut from tourist books and hand-painted images of state-sponsored advertisements from the 1940s promoting industrial business. This work is infusedwith the current ideological conundrums of the plastics industry and lost idealism from an era past that has led to the region’s current ecological condition.

Landscapes of Matter is a photo-based series by Renee Royale, a time-based exploration documenting geologic and anthropogenic violence impacting lands from New Orleans to Venice, Louisiana, where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Using instant film technology Royale captures the temporality of natural environments under the arcs of slavery, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and patriarchal violence. The work exposes and archives visual messages of ecological and racialized violence.Royale’s Polaroid images Industrial Canal (Dredging I) and End of the World, Venice, were taken within the 100 mile stretch, where they were further immersed in dirt, water, plant matter, and sunlight. The defunct images echo the closed industrial plants and eroded lands they depict. Recent experimental Super 8 video is also included as part of the artists’ micro-historical, genealogical, and geological image collection, with nature operating as a direct influence and co-creator.

Luba Zygarewicz, is a Chilean-Ukrainian artist raised in Bolivia and based in Mandeville, Louisiana the last twenty years, who explores the histories of objects and places while addressing cultural and environmental concerns. By isolating and re-contextualizing the familiar in unexpected ways, she creates place-based works that reflect themes of belonging, fragility, and restoration. Zygarewicz’s ALVEARE Luminoso (GLOWING Hive) is a suspended, super-hive structure that activates its environment through light and movement. Inspired by bees for their interdependence and vital role in our ecosystems, the work is constructed from layers of acrylic hexagons, intricately woven together. Situated outdoors and facing the river, ALVEARE serves as a beacon of hope, anchoring communal histories. It symbolizes how collective efforts to combat plastic pollution are a unifying force for environmental change.

The Descendants Project in partnership with Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies and Design Jones propose a Liberation Labyrinth that will serve as a reimagined physical space to uplift and celebrate liberation efforts, struggles, and victories of the Black communities of Southern Louisiana. It will serve as a meditation ground that focuses on Black joy and healing amidst historical and contemporary trauma faced by local residents and descendant communities. Sites across southern Louisiana feature the glorified remains of slavery and plantation economy through tourist destinations and the petrochemical plants along River Road. However, few public spaces are dedicated to the stories of descendants’ stories of freedom, resistance, and resilience spanning many generations. The Descendants Project, a Wallacebased environmental justice organization co-founded by twins Jo and Dr. Joy Banner, are working to protect sites of resistance while seeding sustainable, just, and abundant visions for the future. In 1992, the community of Wallace successfully rallied against the construction of a Formosa Plastics Group’s proposed rayon plant that would have displaced residents—including the founders of The Descendants Project. The Sunshine Plant, currently proposed in neighboring Saint James Parish (Welcome), plans to include multiple facilities across 2,400 acres where they will produce resins and polymers used to manufacture products like single-use plastic bags and artificial turf. The plastics industry is on track to release more greenhouse gases by 2030 than coal-fired plants in the United States. Plastic, The New Coal, highlights the environmental injustice of allowing high concentrations of petrochemical facilities that manufacture plastics situated in low-income areas and near ecologically sensitive ecozones such as wetlands and coastal areas. Microplastics are now identified in plant cellulose, our lungs, heart, and digestive system; even in our brains, breastmilk, and the placentas of unborn babies. Health impacts include neurodevelopmental and metabolic disorders, cancers, and cardiac, respiratory, and hormonal diseases. This global plastics phenomenon is unacceptable and unsustainable.

Patricia Watts, Monique Verdin
Open Call Exhibition
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