Launching Lantana Labs

My name is Willow Naomi Curry. I'm a multidisciplinary social practice artist and writer born and based in Houston, Texas. My work focuses on Black and other subaltern communities in the American South and explores the historical and contemporary mutual, extractive, and hostile relationships between the landscape, the built environment, and the bodies of subaltern Southerners that are created by government and industry. I've received a number of grants, fellowships, and awards for my work, most notably the Center for Cultural Power's Cultural Disruptor Award. I'm also at work on a YA novel, Arcadia, to be published by Levine Querido, which tackles the themes above for a youth audience.

Lantana Labs was born out of my observance of the fluidity of the Texas-Mexico border and how so much of Texas has remained an extension of Mexico both culturally and politically, and my research about the histories of back-and-forth migration of Indigenous, Chicano/Tejano, Black American, and Afro-Mexican populations. From political refugees in revolutionary Mexico making new homes in San Antonio and Houston to slaves in the antebellum South, and South Texas specifically, fleeing south to Mexico, and so much more, there is much more shared history than is understood or acknowledged in mainstream understanding of Texan-Mexican relations.

This portal between worlds aspect, if you will, makes the Texas-Mexico border a point of destabilization of the Global North/Global South dichotomy, and therefore a good place from which to organize and create international solidarity. Lantana Labs projects will tackle environment, land, labor, and the policing of bodies that rebel against what we as subaltern American and Global Southerners are made to carry.

Lantana Labs will include my existing projects that cover these subjects (my YA novel Arcadia; my soon-to-start community-engaged environmental toxicity memorial project Brownfield Pastoral, and a textile and performance piece dealing with environmental and reproductive justice called The Burdens of Libertas), as well as future projects that fall under the themes discussed above. It will be based in Houston to start, and travel to Coatepec, Veracruz, MX where I’ll be living and working at La Ceiba Grafíca, a teaching museum with an artist residency program. I'll be working in close collaboration with Houston Climate Justice Museum, where I am already a frequent artist-collaborator, as well as Bayou City Waterkeeper.

Your donations go towards supporting the projects above and the establishment of this binational studio practice--specifically, a ten-month work stipend; the costs of the existing projects mentioned above; and the establishment of new projects and collaborations. For a more detailed breakdown of expenses and projected income from grants and major donor solicitation, please click here