at U.N.O. St. Claude Gallery 2429 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans ,LA
An exhibition of film, poetry, performance, archival documents, and books, Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul is rooted in the social history, geography, and community of New Orleans. British artist Helen Cammock arrived in New Orleans for the first time in January 2022 as part of a residency with the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and the Amistad Research Center. I Will Keep My Soul gathers encounters and observations, figured in text and image, of her experiences in the city—it is a gathering on gathering, on the indissociable relationship between art, politics, and the power of assembly.
Drawn in part from archival materials in the Amistad Research Center, I Will Keep My Soul tells the story of artist Elizabeth Catlett’s struggle for agency, creative autonomy, and support throughout her 1976 commission for the Louis Armstrong sculpture in New Orleans’s Armstrong Park. Catlett’s protracted process, revealed through letters and fraught exchanges, acts as a mirror to both past and present, asking how to be artist and activist—and free.
Through a polyphony of contemporary and historical voices—from archivists, artists, writers, and musicians to the protagonists of the civil rights movement, both seen and unseen—Cammock invites both rhyme and dissonance. To these voices she adds her own poetry—and the sound of her trumpet—an instrument she began practicing in New Orleans.
I Will Keep My Soul is an extended query into an American story of art and activism, of culture and capital, of being and belonging. It is accompanied by an eponymous publication co-imprinted by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, the California African American Museum, and Siglio Press (March 2023).
In New Orleans, Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul is organized by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) and presented at the University of New Orleans’s St. Claude Gallery. This exhibition is curated by Jordan Amirkhani and Andrea Andersson (Rivers). A previous iteration of the exhibition was organized in partnership with Essence Harden (CAAM) for Art + Practice (Los Angeles) as part of a multi-year collaboration between CAAM and Rivers. CAAM at A+P is a five-year collaboration.
This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the RosaMary Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, The Teiger Foundation, and the generosity of Stephen Reily. Research for this exhibition was conducted in the archives of the Amistad Research Center as part of the Amistad-Rivers Research Residency supported by the Mellon Foundation.
Image Credit: Helen Cammock, I Will Keep My Soul, 2023 (film Still). Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London.
