Tori bush
Writer, editor, and scholar of environmental humanities, postcolonial literature, and critical ethnic studies
Selected Writings
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Against the Flow
The Lesson of the West Bay Sediment Diversion by Tori Bush • Photos by William Widmer Published in Louisiana Cultural Vistas • Spring 2018 Earl O. Armstrong’s airboat chugged out of Venice, Louisiana, and skated over winding bayous until finally, the boat went quiet near West Bay. Armstrong leaned over and said, “Look at those…
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An Archive Apart: The Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection
Published Jan. 1, 2018 New Orleans Advocate Green bookshelves are stacked to the ceiling with a menagerie of preserved fish in large glass jars: a pocket shark from Florida, dogfish from Somalia, minnows from Pearl River and hammerhead sharks from Florida. Walking into the Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection, the largest fish archive in…
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Beyond the Canvas: Contemporary Art from Puerto Rico at Newcomb Museum
Published May 24, 2017 Daily Serving Ni de aqui, ni de alla—neither from here or there. This is something you might hear on the streets of Puerto Rico as people consider what it means to be both citizens of the United States and colonized subjects of an antiquated political system. This year, Puerto Rico had…
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Flight Maps
Published in The New Orleans Advocate Wednesday, March 9, 2016 Gray, white and red feathers fly out the back of a red pickup truck onto the following car’s windshield. As the sun rises, Larry Decareaux, a member of the Delta Pigeon Racing Club, drives crates of pigeons from New Orleans, Metairie, Slidell and the West…
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John Isiah Walton: Rodeo at The Front
Published February 26, 2016 dailyserving.com At first glance, John Isiah Walton’s exhibition Rodeo, now on view at The Front in New Orleans, seems innocuous, even playful, with paintings of bulls diving through Pepto-Bismol pink skies toward men, frozen in space. But after a closer look, a smiling cynicism arises from the works. We, the viewers, are implicated as voyeurs…
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An Interview with Nick Cave
Shreveport is a border town at the crossroads of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The city is known for its musical history—the term “Elvis has left the building” was coined there. But Shreveport also suffers from crippling issues of injustice. Shreveport prosecutors use peremptory challenges to bar people of color from juries, and juries in Caddo Parish…
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Three Katrinas
Published August 15, 2015 on Daily Serving / Art Practical http://dailyserving.com/2015/08/three-katrinas/ “Memorials are the way people make promises to the future about the past.” Alice Greenwald, director of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum, reminds us that a memorial is as much how we describe who we arenow as it is about a prior event. The 10th anniversary of…
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Two Approaches: Camille Henrot and Zarina Bhimji
Published January, 2015 Pelicanbomb.com In the beginning there was nothing; nothing at all. No light, no life, no movement, no breath. — Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013 Artist and musician Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh’s booming voice pounds through the monologue of Camille Henrot’s film Grosse Fatigue, now on view at Longue Vue House and Gardens for Prospect.3. A dense,…
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Totems Not Taboo at Newcomb Gallery
Published January 16, 2015 Dailyserving.com January 6 was the official start of the Carnival season in New Orleans. Totems Not Taboo, an exhibit at Newcomb Art Gallery as part of Prospect.3: Notes for Now, is an ode to Jermayne MacAgy’s 1959 exhibit of the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. MacAgy assembled one of the…
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José Antonio Vega Macotela at Prospect.3
Published December 9, 2014 Dailyserving.com “My eternity has died and I am waking it.” –Violence of the Hours, Cesar Vallejo It sounds like a riddle: No one can buy more of it, and few have enough of it; it wears on the rich and poor equally; loss of it produces deep fear. Time’s ability to…
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Disarmed: Guns in the Hands of Artists at Jonathan Ferrera Gallery
Published in ArtPulse Magazine Fall, 2014 New Orleans, LA has a tragic reputation. In 2011, New Orleans had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. and it is the only city in the U.S. with the dishonorable distinction of having had the nation’s highest murder rate twelve times since 1985.[1] As of September…
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Prospect.3 Opens in New Orleans
Published November 11, 2014 Daily Serving Honoré de Balzac wrote: “Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a natural kingdom, a sort of flora, of which the iconography will one day be outlined by some man who will perhaps be accounted a madman.” This passage was included in Camille Henrot’s writings about her video Grosse…
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Sculpture to Honor Ruby Bridges
Published October, 2014 The Art Newspaper Six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked into her first day of school November 14, 1960 at William Franz Public School in New Orleans through a large crowd of screaming protesters. Ruby Bridges was one of the first African American students to attend an integrated school in the Southern United States. Bridges…
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Dread Scott’s Slave Uprising Reenactment
Published October 2014 The Art Newspaper The artist Dread Scott is planning to restage the largest slave rebellion in US history as a performance piece. The New York based artist is inviting hundreds of participants to wear period costumes and carry arms as they trace the steps of the German Coast Uprising of 1811, a…
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Juan Logan: Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Published October, 2014 Art in America Since the 1960s, Juan Logan (b. 1946) has mined Southern histories to produce a powerful alloy, one joining abstraction to a narrative that yokes the social injustices of the pre-Civil Rights era to today. Logan’s exhibition, “I’ll Save You Tomorrow,” organized by curator Bradley Sumrall at the Ogden Museum…
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AnnieLaurie Erickson: Data Shadows at Carroll Gallery
Published September 30, 2014 Daily Serving Review Photographer AnnieLaurie Erickson has spent a lot of time lately being watched by law enforcement. In her recent trip this year to Oklahoma, she stood on public property, taking photographs while security guards, local officers, and state police looked on. One might ask, what has she been photographing that requires…
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Where to Look: On Arts Writing in Shreveport
Published September 4, 2014 on Pelicanbomb.com Image by Josh Chambers Last month, the Shreveport Regional Arts Council (SRAC) hosted a symposium titled “Conversations on Criticism: The Future of Intelligent Writing on the Arts.” This is not the first time that SRAC has invited outside arts writers to meet, write, and reflect on the city’s surprisingly…
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Meow Wolf: Moving Still at the Front
Published on Daily Serving July 25, 2014 Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe-based art collective, explores the persistence of collective memory in their deeply introspective exhibit, Moving Still, at the Front in New Orleans. A twelve-person-core collective of artists, Meow Wolf has developed a following around their sensorial and immersive installations that have previously taken the form…
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A Short Text on Will Ryman
Published October , 2014 Catalogue for Prospect.3 The New York–based sculptor Will Ryman (b. 1969) looks to the natural world as a theatrical set. In 2011, on the Park Avenue Mall in Midtown Manhattan, he installed forty massive fiberglass-and-steel roses. For Prospect.3, Ryman again explores this most fickle of flora. Ryman’s rose sculptures contain a…
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Loving and Loving; Mixed Messages.4 at Antenna Gallery
Published on Daily Serving July, 2014 Just over forty-seven years ago this month, it was illegal for interracial couples to marry in sixteen states throughout the United States. Richard and Mildred Loving, the serendipitously named couple, were married in 1958 and then promptly arrested under anti-miscegenation laws. The legacy of Loving v. Virginia, the landmark…
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Ernest Littles at Dillard University
The words “I think it shows how art is helping me find myself,” are written across Just a Thought, one of the works in Ernest Littles Senior show at Dillard University. Littles throughout this show explores themes of perceptions, and varying degrees of truth as a basis for the majority of his work to date.…
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Mel Chin: Rematch at The New Orleans Museum of Art
Published on Daily Serving on April 5, 2014 Mel Chin’s Rematch, now on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art, is the artist’s first retrospective, long overdue and particularly prescient this week as a new U.N. report highlights the dire conditions of the Earthcreated by pollution, energy, and population, among other factors. Chin, while making visually stunning work,…
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Striving for the Divine
March, 2014 for Artvoices And how would such incomparable beauty not move us, seeing its beautiful face like unto perfect glass through which rays of Divinity were shining?-Sor Juana de la Cruz, Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Reply to Sister Philotea) What is holy? And how do you express it? For thousands of years there has…
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30 Americans at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
Published on Daily Serving on Feb. 25, 2014 In a nod to Linda Nochlin’s famous query, Michele Wallace asked, “Why are there no great black artists?”[1]30 Americans is the response to this question, a beautiful, rambunctious show that gathers the work of 31 African American artists. Unfortunately, 30 Americans, similar to Thelma Golden’s Freestyle in 2001, is not about a specific curatorial theory or…
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Bad Apple: Katrina Andry at the Isaac Delgado Fine Arts Gallery
Published on Pelican Bomb on Feb 21, 2014 According to the original exhibition poster, this should have been the last week to catch Katrina Andry’s “Together We Stare out from the Shadows; Hiding from Their Prejudiced Stares” at the Isaac Delgado Fine Arts Gallery. The show opened on January 23. Seven days later, it was down.…
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Review: Paulina Sierra at the Consulate of Mexico
November 27, 2013. Pelican Bomb.com Baked, fried, rolled, diced, grilled, or eaten plain; the works in Paulina Sierra’s exhibition all examine the quintessential Mexican staple—tortillas. As a symbol, the tortilla might be an obvious choice, yet Sierra executes her work with a keen sense of appropriation. In her silkscreen Pila de Tortillas/Tortilla Piles, blue, yellow, and…
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Camille Henrot: Cities of Ys at the New Orleans Museum of Art
October 22, 2013. Daily Serving.com French video artist Camille Henrot creates parallels between the mythical and the contemporary. In her first solo exhibition in the United States at the New Orleans Museum of Art, she investigates the legendary city of Ys in France and the vanishing coastal area of southern Louisiana that is occupied by the ancestral Houma…
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Messy Love: Bob Snead at Isaac Delgado Fine Art Gallery
Published on Daily Serving August 5, 2013 Bedfellows, Bob Snead’s exhibition at Isaac Delgado Fine Arts Gallery, is a study of the intimate and quotidian moments in the life of a family. Staring at the computer, folding laundry, sleeping in a chair—these paintings and digital drawings depict friends and family members in poses of recess. All together,Bedfellows is…
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Last Call: Chad Harris and John Harlan Norris at Du Mois Gallery
Published on Pelican Bomb June 14, 2013 Not only is it the last weekend to catch “Intorsion: Chad Harris and John Norris” at Du Mois Gallery, it is the gallery’s last exhibition at their current address. Before it’s gone, Tori Bush reviews. Intorsion describes the inward rotation of a limb or organ, especially the eye…
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Bonnie Maygarden: Spatial Trickster
A Review for Tulane Fine Arts Department Published May, 2013 Bonnie Maygarden, a first year MFA student at Tulane, is a trickster- a breaker of rules. Her art intentionally leads the viewer astray through tromp l’oeil and illusion, sometimes obscuring flatness and other times confusing texture. Ironically however, through the evolution in her body of…
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Caleb Henderson; The Fall
A Review for Tulane Fine Arts Department Published May, 2013 The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven. – John Milton, Paradise Lost Solitary and timeless figures fill the canvases of Caleb Henderson’s most recent work, inhabiting the vacant landscape like Spartan sleepwalkers. Landscapes…
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Last Call: “Self-Taught, Outsider and Visionary Art from the Permanent Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art”
Published on Pelican Bomb April 6, 2013 Over 10,000 visitors attended February’s Outsider Art Fair in New York—triple the number from the previous year. While many in New Orleans may have missed this extensive fair, there is still time to catch the panoptic “Self-Taught, Outsider and Visionary Art from the Permanent Collection” at the Ogden…
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Short Review: Casey Ruble at the Foundation Gallery
Published on Pelican Bomb March 14, 2013 “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked…
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Post-Fordlândia: A Critical Look at a Failed Development
Published Daily Serving September 6, 2012 Megs Morley & Tom Flanagan, “Interior American Village Fordlândia”, Lamda print, 20×31, 2011 Post-Fordlândia, the new exhibit at Good Children Gallery, is a palimpsest for modern times: it calls from faded pasts to warn us of an ill-advised future. A series of high-def videos and large format photographs, taken…
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The Road To: An Interview with Franklin Sirmans
Published Daily Serving June 6, 2012 Issues of under-financing, administrative inadequacy and lack of community support are some of the problems that can be found currently in multiple organizations in New Orleans. Prospect New Orleans, a nascent biennial founded in 2008 has had its share of these issues. However, new leadership and the selection of…
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Review: “The Glass Menagerie”
Pelicanbomb. April 6, 2012 For years I would pass by museum exhibits of blown or cast glass in silent judgment. I regarded the medium as tacky; from millefiori paperweights to the art of Dale Chihuly, it all seemed frilly at best and ridiculously bourgeois at worst. While I have great respect for the processes of…
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Round Up: The Best of Prospect.2 New Orleans: Lorraine O’Grady
Pelicanbomb. November 9, 2011 “Avant garde art doesn’t have anything to do with black people.” This statement made by one of Lorraine O’Grady’s acquaintances was the impetus for the artist’s 1983 performance piece Art Is…, which emphatically proclaimedthat avant-garde art is black people, black neighborhoods, black culture, and black issues. Thephotographic documents of this performanceare…
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From Street Wall to Great Hall: A Perceptual Shift
Pelicanbomb. August 24, 2011 Down on Poland Avenue there’s an empty building with a secret. Standing guard of that old corner store is a man made of parchment. Driving by, you would most likely miss him, but to the evening stroller his presence can spark a magical moment. Callie Curry, more commonly known as Swoon,…
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Review: Hypothetical Development Organization
Pelicanbomb. May 3, 2011 Hypothetical Development Organization, or H.D.O., has wildlyimagined the future of twelve buildings throughout New Orleans. H.D.O.’s concepts enter into two distinctcontextual realms: urban redevelopment and architectural fiction. At the same time, they open the next conversation held by street artists on those same derelict buildings. While many of the city’sprolific street…
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Tableau Vivant: A Wandering Retrospective
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NOLA NOW Part II: Landscape, Seascape, Cityscape (1986 & 2012)
Pelicanbomb. March 7, 2012 NOLA NOW, Part II: Landscape, Seascape, Cityscape (1986 & 2012)” had the potential to be merely a romantic reminiscence of live oak trees and water-filled expanses. Curator Don Marshall, however, balanced the classical images of Louisiana environments with edgier installations to achieve an egalitarian look at the city’s contemporary visual arts…
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Unnatural Communities
Daily Serving. March 22, 2012 One of the most informative moments in SPACES, the latest exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, is a timeline of the birth of the St. Claude art scene handwritten in black charcoal pencil on the wall. Born out of the reinvigoration of community action in post-Katrina New Orleans,…
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The Next Phase: An Interview with Dan Cameron
Daily Serving. December 22, 2011 Commonly founders of organizations are so caught up in the building, growing, and running of the organization that questions of the sustainability after said founder leaves are left unanswered. This is far from the truth for Curator Dan Cameron, the founder of Prospect New Orleans, an international art biennial in…
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Kathy Grayson: An Interview
Artvoices, February 2012 Over the last decade she has emerged as one of visual art’s most intriguing curators: part irreverent, part visionary, part revolutionary. Now, Kathy Grayson is entering the next stage in her remarkable evolution: opening her own gallery, The Hole, on New York’s Lower East Side. Tori Bush: You got your start at…
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Intimate Portraits: A Meeting with Mirriam Waterman
June, 2012 for Artvoices Remember if You Walk Away From Me You Are Nothing Without Me. This title is taken from Miriam Waterman’s Verbal Abuse series, a photography project that records the history of verbal abuse suffered during the artist’s past relationship. Waterman’s works are explorations of her subject’s psyches as well as her own.…
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A Little Corner of the Universe: A Conversation with Tom Zuk
Artvoices. April 2012 When Virginia Beach-based artist Tom Zuk left his career as an architect in 2007 to become a full-time visual artist, the U.S. economy was not kind to him. However, the intricate level of detail in his work combined with a naturalistic world view has allowed Zuk to reach a level that affirms…
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