Living and working in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick have documented the city and its people for forty years. This comprehensive exhibition will present their photographs of laboring communities including the last sugar cane and sweet potato harvesters, unionized dockworkers, musician day laborers, hospitality and restaurant workers, domestic caretakers and one of the largest workforces in the state of Louisiana, the inmates of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. This will be the first exhibition to present Calhoun and McCormick’s extensive documentation of the city’s changing labor force. On Friday, December 14 there will be gallery talk & exhibition walk through with the artists, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, and Andrea Andersson, the CAC’s Chief Curator of Visual Arts. This event is free and open to the public. Please mention PhotoNOLA at front desk to be given access to the second floor galleries free of charge. ABOUT THE ARTISTS Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick were born and raised in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans, Louisiana. As husband and wife team, they have been documenting Louisiana and its people for more than 40 years. Calhoun and McCormick have documented the soul of New Orleans and a vanishing Louisiana: the last of the sugar cane workers, the dockworkers, the sweet potato harvesters, and the displacement of African Americans after Katrina. In New Orleans, they have documented the music culture, which consists of Brass Bands, Jazz Funerals, Social and Pleasure Clubs, Benevolent Societies, and the Black Mardi Gras Indians. They photograph the traditions of black church services and religious rituals; community rites and celebrations, such as parades, and jazz funerals; and the cruel conditions of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a former slave-breeding plantation named for the African nation from which “the most profitable”...
