Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought invites you to join us for our first ‘Quill Session’ on Saturday, November 11, 2023, at the U.N.O. Gallery on St. Claude Avenue, featuring performances by Baba Luther Gray, ensemble members of Les Cenelles with Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, and a DJ set from Keni Anwar, in coordination with the exhibition Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul—on view in the galleries until December 17, 2023.

The ‘Quill Session’ are a public series of improvisational music sets that occur every Second Saturday in coordination with Cammock’s exhibition at U.N.O. Each set draws from the history and form of the “Bamboula”—a kind of drum of West African origins and the name of a popular drum beat and dance that arrived in New Orleans with free and enslaved people from Africa, Cuba, and Haiti across the 18th and 19th centuries. The Bamboula’s history is intertwined with the history of Congo Square in New Orleans as a site of both struggle and freedom. In her research as an artist-resident at the Amistad Research Center, Cammock learned about the quill pipe, many of them made from canes pulled from the plantations where enslaved people worked. It was played primarily by children and, at times, by adults. An innovative instrument, the quill draws together historical and musical ingenuity and represents a persistent commitment to survival, communication, and creativity by Black people.

Doors open at 6pm CT; performances begin at 6:30pm CT. This event is free and open to the public.

Location:
U.N.O. Gallery
2429 St. Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA

​Baba Luther Gray has been active in the New Orleans arts community since 1984. He co-founded the Congo Square Foundation in 1989, which was renamed the Congo Square Preservation Society in 2011. The Society has been instrumental in the resurrection of drumming and cultural activities in Congo Square. In 1993, the Congo Square Foundation was successful in placing Congo Square on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1997 the Foundation led the effort to erect the Congo Square historic marker. In addition, he with a team of drum makers including Douglas Redd carved three Bamboula drums from a one hundred year old cypress tree that are now on display at the new Louisiana State Museum of History in Baton Rouge. The Congo Square Preservation Society sponsors weekly Sunday drum circles in Congo Square that date back to 1988. In 2013, the Congo Square Preservation society launched the Congo Square Living Classroom Fieldtrip which consists of a on-site tour of the Armstrong Park Sculpture Garden followed by the Congo Square Drum & Dance Workshop. He founded two major musical groups, Percussion Incorporated in 1985 and Bamboula 2000 in 1994. He has produced 7 compact discs for these two groups; “Windswept”, “Congo Square”, “Cultural Warrior”, “New Society”, “Live at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival”, We Got It Goin’ One” and “The Wild Bamboulas”. Luther Gray and Bamboula 2000 annually teach approximately 5,000 students in elementary, middle, high schools and universities around the country with The Imagination Tour.

Bruce Sunpie Barnes is a veteran musician, park ranger, actor, former high school biology teacher, former college football All-American, and former NFL player (Kansas City Chiefs). Sunpie Barnes’ career has taken him far and wide, and he has traveled to over 35 countries playing his own style of blues, zydeco and Afro-Louisiana music incorporating Caribbean and African influenced rhythms and melodies. He is a multi-instrumentalist playing piano, percussion, harmonica, and he learned to play accordion from some of the best, including Fernest Arceneaux, John Delafose, and Clayton Sampy. With his musical group Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots, he has played festivals and concerts across New Orleans and the US, as well as internationally, and they have recorded 5 critically acclaimed CDs. Sunpie is deeply involved in New Orleans parade culture and takes his music to the streets. He is Second Chief of the North Side Skull and Bone Gang, one of the oldest existing carnival groups in New Orleans, and a member of the Black Men of Labor Social Aid and Pleasure Club.

Peter Johnson Bowling is a multi-instrumentalist improviser, composer, technologist & collaborator based in Bulbancha (New Orleans).

Joseph B Darensbourg is a native of Bulbancha (Choctaw for “place of many tongues,” aka New Orleans) from the Faubourg Treme, the oldest free people of color neighborhood in the country (predating the United States itself). This neighborhood of Gens de Couleur Libres is a tri- ethnic blend comprised of Native Americans, Europeans, and African ethnic Creoles who speak a lingua franca known as Kouri Vini as well as Colonial Louisiana French. A performer of ethnic folk musics, Joseph is a singer, violinist, and percussionist member of Les Cenelles ensemble, which specializes in music inspired by resistance and protest poetry and Les Cenelles Gens de Couleur Libres, civil rights activists opposing the Code Noir during US Reconstruction. Joseph focuses on the Bayou Ballads plantation songs (1840s–80s). A bookbinder by trade—trained at the oldest bookbindery in the United States (Harcourt, Boston)—Joseph is also a visual art alum of NOCCA, as well as a member of the oldest early music ensemble in the America, New Orleans Musica da Camera (founded in 1965, as was Joseph).

Denise Frazier is an educator, musician, and interdisciplinary artist from Houston, who has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2002. She is a 2023-2024 MLK Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recently, she was the assistant director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, a place-based research Center that grants fellowships and organizes public programming, immersive experiences, and collective contemplation about the bio-region stretching from Texas to Florida and its connections with other regions around the world. Her research interests currently include the Gulf South and the Anthropocene, sound studies and the political, social, digital, natural, and built environments of the Gulf South and Circum-Caribbean. She is also the manager, co-founder and violinist/vocalist/percussionist of Les Cenelles, a string and technological interfacing ensemble that performs African Diasporic music through a prismatic lens that honors African and Indigenous ancestors and chronicles ecological realities. She completed an M.A. (2004) and PhD (2009) in the Latin American Studies Department at Tulane University, studying the political and social dimensions of hip hop music and performance in early 21st century Cuba and Brazil. She is the proud parent of one son.

Keni Anwar is a New Orleans-based artist. Anwar’s work responds to their experience as a queer Black person in the American South. They is a writer, visual artist, and musician who studied public relations and graphic design at Loyola University, New Orleans. Anwar draws inspiration from the Nile and Mississippi Rivers, the color blue, and ancestral veneration in their exploration of past trauma and the pursuit of individual exploration and freedom. Their Southern Baptist heritage is often the lens through which they explore race, gender, and sexual identity in what are mainly self-portraits in various mediums that incorporate words, imagery, and sound. Anwar’s work invites others to examine their own worlds and origins as a path to self-liberation.