Biography
Renee Royale is an independent curator, artist, writer, and digital strategist. Her creative practice explores alternate ways of experiencing art, utilizing innovative methods and modern technology to break down socioeconomic and institutionalized barriers for a more equitable, authentic art world. She is the founder of Support Black Art, a digital diasporic art platform. She has curated exhibitions in New Orleans and New York City. Her artistic practice is rooted in film photography, and explores human experiences and our relationship to ourselves and environments. Her most recent digital strategy work was with the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums and Prospect New Orleans. Her writing has been featured in publications including Burnaway, YARD Concept, Departures, the Observer, and the Black Aesthetic Volume III.
Research
Landscapes of Matter is a multimedia, time-based exploration documenting the geologic and anthropogenic violence impacting the landscape between New Orleans and Venice, Louisiana, where the mouth of the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico. I utilize instant film technology and fuse it with natural elements to explore the temporality of these environments and their ongoing shifts under the arcs of slavery, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and patriarchal violence. According to John McPhee in his survey of geology, Annals of the Former World, humans exist in a comfort bubble of five generations — “two back; two forward”, with self at the center — a place from which deep time can appear as the equivalent to ancient history. “The human mind may not have evolved to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it.” This project will expose and archive the visual messages of ecological and racialized violence of the area, through a visual narrative that is micro-historical, genealogical, and geological.
