kai lumumba barrow (b. 1959, Chicago) is a visual artist based in New Orleans.
Barrow is interested in the praxis of radical imagination. Together with her muses: Absurdity, Sarcasm, Myth and Merriment, she experiments with abolition as an artistic vernacular. Her sprawling paintings, environmental installations, and sculptures are sited in traditional and non-traditional spaces to transgress ideological, geographic, and carceral borders. Using materials associated with Black women’s labor, the work performs queer, Black feminist theory as an aesthetic genre.
Barrow is a member of the Antenna Collective in New Orleans, and a founding member of Gallery of the Streets, a national network of artists, activists, and scholars who work at the nexus of art, political education, social change and community engagement. She was recently awarded an “Artists of Public Memory Commission” from Prospect New Orleans and has received residencies, fellowships, and awards from Project Row Houses; the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center; the Joan Mitchell Center; A Studio in the Woods; Alternate Roots; the Kindle Project, and the Weavers Project Fellowship.
A social-movement organizer for over forty years, barrow has worked with numerous grassroots organizations including SLAM!, FIERCE!, Critical Resistance, UBUNTU, and Southerners on New Ground. She is currently the Program Director at the Weavers Project, which provides fellowships for Black Feminist artists.
artist statement
My work aims to evoke a paradigm shift at the crossroads of cultural work, art practice, environmental sustainability, and direct confrontation with power. For me this art is dialogic: inviting participation through investigation and/or physical interaction, oppositional: critical, bold, and embracing of contradictions, and erotic: emerging from the underground, passionate in its quest to transform. These characteristics are also fundamental to an intersectional politic that guides my activism. I am drawn to Black surrealism and ecofeminism as aesthetic movements that, to quote Robin D.G. Kelley, “invites dreaming, urges us to improvise and invent, and recognizes the imagination as our most powerful weapon.” In this sense, my work aims to demonstrate how imaginative play can challenge and expand social, cultural, economic, and environmental organizing and movement-building.