HANNAH CHALEW
Hannah Chalew is an artist, educator and environmental activist raised and currently working in New Orleans. Her artwork explores what it means to live in a time of global warming with a collective uncertain future, and specifically what that means for those living in Southern Louisiana. Chalew’s practice explores the historical legacies that got us here to help imagine new possibilities for a livable future. She received her BA from Brandeis University in 2009, and her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016. Chalew has exhibited widely around the U.S. Her work has been featured in Garden&Gun, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, the LA Times, the Boston Globe and more. Chalew’s work is included in two creative atlases by writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, co-authored with Rebecca Snedeker and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, co-authored with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. She is the 2022 South Arts Southern Prize winner as well as the South Arts Louisiana State Fellow.
Hannah Chalew writes, of this image: “This is an image of my full palette of inks/paints that I make. On the top right is an image of a ditch outside of a coal export facility located upriver from New Orleans in the industrial stretch of the Mississippi River nicknamed “Cancer Alley” for the high-rates of illness people living nearby suffer from. This ditch is full of coal-runoff and I collected this mud to create the black pigment below that, on the shelf below that image is a coal rock also collected on that site.
Between the image of the coal and the rock, an oak gall is pinned to the wall and so is a bit of sheetrock. The swatch of paper between the gall and sheetrock starts with oak gall ink at the top and the coal ink at the bottom and than sheetrock ink running along the rightside. This is the palette I use for my black and whites.
Next to these swatches is a sample of my “plasticane” paper, which I hand-make combining bagasse, the waste product of sugarcane refining, with bits of shredded single-use disposable plastic waste. With these two materials, I’m connecting the legacies of how we have extracted and exploited people and landscape from the time of enslavement (sugarcane was a chattel slavery crop in Louisiana) with how we continue to mistreat people and environment in our petrochemical age (plastic refining is a major industry in Cancer Alley today). This is the paper I use for most of the color swatches.
On the right side of this wall are all my swatches of greens created combining goldenrod with copper (top right half of the wall, and there is a bit of copper pinned to the wall right next to the pure copper swatches) and indigo (bottom right half of the wall). The center is swatches of goldenrod, with swatches of copper above and indigo below and than the various greens I’ve made from these combinations radiate out from there.”
Buoyancy Factor
Handmade ink from iron, oak galls, coal pollution runoff, found sheetrock, goldenrod, copper, indigo on paper made from sugarcane and shredded disposable plastic waste (“plasticane”), thread, metal
75” x 50” x 14”
2022
Image courtesy of Hannah Chalew.
Detail of Buoyancy Factor. Image courtesy of Hannah Chalew.
Hannah Chalew and Ms. Gail Leboeuf (right) holding a banner the artist created for the organization Ms. Gail leads, Inclusive Louisiana (IL), which uses the fossil-fuel pollution ink. IL is a grassroots community advocate organization dedicated to protecting St. James Parish and neighboring parishes from environmental harm caused by industrial pollution. Ms. Gail advised and guided this ink project, and with support from grant funding Hannah was able to directly support IL’s work in honor of LeBoeuf’s guidance on the project.