Black Creativity in New Orleans: Art, Culture, and Creating Futures

Beginning with New Orleans, this Community Engaged Learning (CEL) course explores how communities sustain and renew cultural life through art, collective care, and traditions carried across generations. Students examine how the city's cultural bearers - particularly within Black communities - keep culture alive and thriving amid displacement, environmental change, and struggles over land and belonging. Visual art, music, performance, and everyday practices become ways to understand how people carry knowledge, strengthen relationships, and create futures. Students develop their own art practices as a means of inquiry, reflection, and processing what they encounter throughout the course. Through research, material experimentation, critique, and revision, they explore how their experiences and relationships inform their creative work. Extending beyond the classroom, students engage with Bay Area communities to build reciprocal relationships grounded in listening, exchange, and shared learning. New Orleans provides a starting point for considering how cultural continuity and renewal take shape in other places, guided by each community's distinct histories, knowledge, and priorities. Students bring these encounters into their evolving art practices, exploring how creative work can contribute to the conditions cultures need to survive and thrive.