Sunday, October 27, 5pm

$5 admission
Due to popular demand, we will move en masse across the Union St Bridge to Show Room Gowanus to accommodate the demand for this event. Come early to see the exhibition, then walk the 1/2 block with us at 5pm for the event.

As part of our yearlong exploration of Water and our current exhibition, Containment, we are pleased to host Rebecca Solnit and co-authors for a discussion of New Orleans history, told as a history of containment and outbreak—of water, of disease, of power, of poison, of truth, of populations.

Rebecca Snedeker and Rebecca Solnit’s Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas describes, with the help of dozens of contributors including cartographers, writers, artists, and scholars, this remarkable place of convergence and divergence in 22 maps and essays.

Subjects include the failed attempts to control the Mississippi River via levees and engineering works, the poor via prisons and repression, the invisible contamination of lead and of lies that have so impacted the city, the toxic seepage of oil from the BP spill, segregation and resistance, the utopian proposal for a city that welcomes water in instead of shutting it out, the porousness of race and culture in the creation of the great hybrid art forms of the city and in its erotic life.

Please Note: Admission is strictly first come, first served (no seat saving) due to limited seating capacity.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books, including Savage Dreams, Storming the Gates of Paradise, and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.

Rebecca Snedeker is an Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker who has produced several feature films that take place in her native New Orleans, including By Invitation Only, Witness: Katrina, and Land of Opportunity.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is a writer, facilitator, and activist-scholar whose work has appeared in Left Turn Magazine, the Indypendent, the Oyster Knife, and Monthly Review Zine.

These programs are supported in part by public funds from the
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.