For the last three years, Shana M. griffin has been collecting soil, nineteenth-century nails, acorns, and fragments of bricks from sugar plantations along the Mississippi River in southeastern Louisiana. Now, in her Harvard ArtLab studio, the rusty, hand-hewn nails sit in a jumble inside a large glass jar, bearing silent testimony to the labor that went into making and using them, by people whose lives were shaped by racial violence. Beside the table stand two figures in coarsely woven cotton dresses, a crown of upside-down nails atop one of their heads. Beside the door, she has posted a list of women’s names and nineteenth-century dates—the year they ran away and were listed in New Orleans newspaper runaway slave ads and jail notices.
griffin says she is “excavating people out of the archive. How do I create a narrative that’s historically based on their lives?”
An activist, artist, sociologist, and geographer, griffin is the Graduate School of Design’s 2024–2025 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow. She works from a foundation of Black feminist theory to question and reimagine spatial politics. This winter at the GSD, griffin offered a J-Term course, “The Political Economy of Reproductive Violence in the Built Environment: Critical Conversations Towards Intersectional Feminist Spatial Practices.” In a pair of two-hour sessions, she asked GSD students, who attended both in person and via Zoom, to consider how reproductive violence is interwoven with the built environment, from historical and contemporary perspectives. She defines reproductive violence as “the methods used to sustain reproductive oppression and reproductive subjectivity—institutional and systemic control of the sexuality and reproductive lives of women and marginalized communities.”
In order to understand that history and context, griffin turned back to the colonial era in the United States, explaining that mercantilism—generating products to export so the nation could develop a profitable economy—pushed white settlers to attempt to erase Indigenous people through genocide. Colonists used “sexual violence, disease, and the systemic killing of Indigenous women and children during massacres,” griffin explained. By controlling Indigenous women’s bodies, white settlers controlled their land.
Similarly, European’s enslavement of Africans and African Americans included the “control of reproduction for the production of profit,” as well as forced labor to “clear forests and swamps, build roads, houses,” and everything else required to develop the nation. Tracing US policies across hundreds of years to the present day, griffin illustrated how white colonists have long attempted to control Black women’s bodies and “discourage the reproduction of Indigenous, Black, and women of color”—for example with mandated birth control, the “criminalization of women of color and queer communities’ sexuality and motherhood,” the exclusion of immigrants and Latinx women, presenting “Arab and Muslim women’s reproduction as a terrorist threat,” and “coercive incentives,” among many others.
While most people are aware of how racism is made manifest in the built environment, griffin explains, “racialized gender policies” are “often rendered invisible” in our landscape, infrastructure, buildings, and cities.
“Whenever you talk about housing,” she explained, “whether you say it or not, you’re talking about gender.”
Homeowners have access to security and equity; affordable housing is stigmatized, especially for Black mothers, and the materials that create those structures are substandard. In addition, she added, Americans are supposed to be safe inside our own homes, but, as in the case of Breonna Taylor, police entered her home and killed her. griffin described housing policies built on the nation’s racist systems, starting with enslaved people’s confinement in plantation houses, to issues such as racial zoning, systemic divestment from neighborhoods, “urban renewal” that displaces communities of color, redlining, subprime mortgages, and foreclosures. She shared images of 1930s posters by the US Housing Authority with the headlines, “Slums Breed Crime” and “Cross Out Slums.”
Her interdisciplinary work as an artist and activist rises out of her resistance to systemic racism and sexism. In DISPLACED, a book art, atlas, community center, and New Orleans walking tour project, griffin explains how slums, blight, and increased incarceration rates for Black people result in, as one page of the DISPLACING Blackness chapbook reads, “Black Disposability and Displacement.” griffin writes, “In neighborhoods that are majority Black, one in four renters experienced a court-ordered eviction,” while in white neighborhoods, only “one in twenty-four renters” are evicted. Aiming to mitigate these disparities, griffin has planned a “multiuse art space for communal infrastructure building and civic engagement,” with a research lab, gallery, and activist studios.
During the walking tours, “Geographies of Black Displacement,” griffin invited listeners to recognize other racist ideologies and histories that have formed New Orleans: “land-use planning, housing policy, and development, starting with the violent formation of New Orleans as a carceral landscape and colonial enterprise of extraction, enslavement, genocide, and conquest.” And, her interdisciplinary project, PUNCUATE, responds to the “violent subjugation and objectification of Black women’s bodies, reproduction, and sexuality,” with research, art, publications, activism, and pop-up stores.
Like SOIL, the project for which she gathers nails, soil, and bricks from plantations, her book Theirs Was A Movement Without Marches: Black Women in Public Housing creates a “counter-archival narrative,” using photographs and essays to reintroduce to public record women whose work was forgotten. The book celebrates Black women organizers who helped improve conditions in New Orleans public housing, where griffin herself grew up. While she always knew of her mother’s work as an activist, she was pleasantly surprised to come across an archival photo of her—Mrs. Irene B. Griffin—delivering a meal to elderly residents as part of her work as president of the Iberville Residents’ Council. Mrs. Irene and her co-organizers are listed in the book, in recognition of how they improved living conditions in the apartments and grounds, organized programs for children and the elderly, and advocated for the rights of people living in public housing.
SOIL is part of the 2023-2024 group show Finding Grounding at Barnes Ogden Art and Design Complex Gallery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in the 2023 solo exhibition “ERASED / Geographies of Black Displacement,” at Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery. “ERASED” also includes paintings from her “Cartographies of Violence” series—maps caked in black paint and swirled into waves—as well as rooms she designed to bring to life the late nineteenth-century parlor entrance of the White Rose Mission, founded in 1897 Manhattan by Victoria Earle Matthews, a writer and activist who was born into enslavement and then emancipated, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a Harlem Renaissance poet. The White Rose Mission was in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of New York, an African American community displaced in the 1950s for “urban renewal,” and replaced with Lincoln Center and Fordham University’s Manhattan campus. griffin reimagines the Mission space, down to replicated business cards and Victorian era furnishings, once again excavating women’s stories from the archive to recognize their contributions.
And, for the 2022-2023 exhibition “First Frame: The Preludial exhibition of SEEING BLACK: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 & Beyond,” at the New Orleans African American Museum, griffin designed and furnished Florestine Perrault Collins’ studio as she imagined it might have looked when Collins worked there. Collins was the first documented Black woman photographer in New Orleans.
griffin is currently at work on a series of sculptural waves reminiscent of bodies emerging from the water, referencing the Middle Passage and the waterways around Louisiana’s sugar plantations. And, in addition to creating her own work, she’s curated shows on photography and the intersection of race and water in contemporary art.
In concluding her course this winter, griffin asked the class to consider what a feminist city might look like, and, if control and regulation of the built environment starts with control and regulation of our bodies, how we can form our own sites of resistance. If we don’t want to reproduce violence, what are we aiming for? She left students to consider the questions: “How is the legacy of slavery spatialized in the built environment? How is colonial violence implicit in the production of space?” Following her lead, the answers might be found by sinking deeply into our geographies to come to know the histories that surround us, starting with the dirt at our feet.
“In thinking about slavery through soil,” said griffin, “soil becomes the witness.” It allows her to engage with the history of enslavement without reproducing its violence in images.
She left students to consider how they might develop their own feminist spatial practices, and how they could apply care to reimagine the built environment and right some of these wrongs—questions especially relevant in an era that has many looking to history for a path forward.