By: Elizabeth Kwan

Imani Jacqueline Brown resists the pressing climate disaster in her native hometown, New Orleans, Louisiana. One of her latest and most powerful exhibitions, Strike Gulf, “draws” attention from June 22, 2024, to August 31, 2024, in Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and architect. Brown uses a colorful palette of art mediums that combine photography, videography, oral history, and more.

She describes her own artworks as the “continuum of extractivism,” which describes the removal of natural resources for economic purposes, including topics of slavery to fossil fuel production. For Strike Gulf, Imani Jacqueline Brown applied audiovisual layering and archival recontextualizing. Audiovisual layering involves combining different audio recordings to create depth, meaning, and texture, while archival recontextualization is mass-media news and advertisements. She dances across the planetary evolution of oil and gas geography, specifically for infrastructural use. Oil extraction in Brown’s hometown of New Orleans polluted the Mississippi River, causing it to earn the nickname of “cancer valley.”

Hurricane Katrina’s arrival in 2010 and the Deepwater Horizon explosion also contributed to dirtied water in the river. Little to no improvements have been made in the area since, pushing Brown to act and spread awareness.

Strike Gulf also engulfs other themes such as multinational power and infrastructure.

Brown tries to spread awareness of other places like the Mississippi River through her abstract artworks. “You might not have noticed, but the world as we humans have known it, as we built it, is coming to an end,” she stated, implying the continuous dangers of climate change that the world is facing.