Collaboration supports long-term sustainability for an imperiled global arts ecosystem. Collaboration is our expression of a fundamental commitment to the transfer of ideas across places, times, and communities and to relationships of mutual benefit. We place value in forms of knowledge that have been enriched and changed by competing perspectives.
Rivers’s collaborators are not chosen for their similarities—whether in size of organization, budget, institutional structure, or role in the arts and culture community. Our differences abound and are glaring. Our collaborators include a community-based historical archive, residencies, independent publishers, public institutions, and non-profits working across the globe and ranging in size and scale. Like rivers, our collaborative organ grows across geographies and follows the work. But in every instance, we find consensus with our partners around art as forms of thought—constructed, tested, and reshaped across communities and through transmission—and a commitment to knowledge informed by the periphery.
We are currently building a global network of long-term partners with whom we are developing future projects. Artists and their work lead us into new communities and histories.
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Through a foundational partnership with Amistad Research Center (ARC) in New Orleans, Rivers centers material history in contemporary art. Together, Rivers and Amistad commit to the full life cycle of the archive. At the heart of our partnership is the Amistad/Rivers Artist Research Residency, supported by Mellon Foundation. Together we welcome artists from around the world for sustained research in Amistad’s archives and in the community of New Orleans. The artists’ discoveries direct expanded digitization, preservation, and management of the archive, as well as its expanded distribution through publications, exhibitions, and live events and performances. Through this collaboration, artists lay new digital pathways for future research. Each season, Rivers commissions new work to enter into and grow the archive and together we imagine the living archive in new forms and contexts. Amistad and Rivers’s collaborative projects begin and end in New Orleans, but, in between, travel globally and enter into expanded networks of partnership.
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Rivers and Siglio Press sustain a serial institutional partnership, testing the forms, circulation, and boundaries of art writing and artists’ books. Recent collaborations include Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye and Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul. Rivers takes continued inspiration from Siglio’s commitment to “uncommon books that live in the rich and varied space between art and literature.” Together, we partner with artists who test the forms and technology of print publications.
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Rivers’ partnership with the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) reflects their multi-nodal attentions. We collaborate with CARA and its team in the circulation of our publications, in our collective research programs, and through our exhibitions. Together, we opened Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN at CARA in New York in Fall 2024, and will travel the exhibition to the Museo Tamayo in 2025.
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Rivers inaugurates our collaborations with Dancing Foxes Press with Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN, the first posthumous print publication on the Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard (b. 1946-d. 2020).
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Rivers’ partnership with Montez Press Radio (MPR) celebrates and explores the expanded field of publishing, and the specificity of radio histories and futures. MPR is an experimental broadcasting and performance platform with the goal of fostering greater experimentation and conversation between artists, writers, and thinkers through the medium of radio. Rivers and MPR work to produce “audio indices” of Rivers durational programming and the long-form research that undergirds the work. Our first radio program was engendered by our Confluence “Marronage; Meaning Wild,” and aired on February 2025.
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With overlapping commitments to art writing and its innovative distribution, Rivers and Triple Canopy began a partnership with the 2025 program ‘Living Equipment,’ a series of conversations, listening sessions, and performances, held in both New Orleans and New York, devoted to minor histories and radical resonances of Black electronic music hosted by Ryan C. Clarke.
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Rivers’ partnership with Contemporary Art Museum (CAM-Houston) began with the presentation of ‘Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye’ in 2022. Deepened by our shared sociogeographic position on the Gulf Coast and a long migrational history, Rivers and CAMH continue our partnership with a regional lens. We are currently collaborating towards a co-presented exhibition in 2027.
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Rivers and the California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles sustain a long-term, iterative program exploring the histories and futures of Black abstraction and the relationships between politics and form, visibility and legibility, media and technology as well as the distribution of knowledge and information. Together we have presented Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (2021), Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye (2022) and Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul (2023).
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Rivers proudly partnered with MASS MoCA to present the exhibition Yto Barrada: Ways to Baffle the Wind. A partner committed to inquiry into the shapes and possibilities of cultural platforms and their service to the complex community of the Berkshires valley, MASS MoCA joins Rivers to present a body of work that pushes against boundaries and examines human relationship to the natural world.
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Rivers’s collaboration with Cassandra Press was a manifestation of the generative power of partnership. Born out of our relationship with CAAM, our collaboration between Rivers and Cassandra Press involves both CAAM and Amistad Research Center (ARC) and and consists of an exhibition, printed matter, and hands-on programs—all extending outward ARC’s vast archives.