Hannah Chalew Repurposes With Purpose
Hannah Chalew
New Orleans-based artist Hannah Chalew (MFA Painting 2016) works with Black-led community activist organizations in Louisiana’s River Parishes, also called Cancer Alley, to call public attention to what she describes as social injustice and environmental issues brought on by the fossil fuel and plastic industries. In her art and community work, she equates these industrial sites to old plantations – victimizing Black residents many of whom are descendants of enslaved people.
Environmental advocacy has been a part of Chalew’s interest but it was a 2018 Fossil Free Festival’s “toxic tour” of the River Parishes that changed her life and the direction of her artistic practice. Her installations, drawings, prints, and conceptual sculpture are created with pollutants she finds in the streets and near industrial sites. She believes “art is a tool for change, a tool for survival, a tool for social and environmental justice and responsibility.”
In 2022, she was awarded a South Arts Southern Prize, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a South Art Louisiana Fellowship, and a Platforms Grant from Platforms Fund a regranting effort of Antenna Gallery, Ashé Cultural Arts Center, and Junebug Productions with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
“I want to make work that imagines the future and, hopefully, helps inspire people to want to change and reconsider the way we are living. We can’t avoid using plastic products in our everyday life, but there are individual decisions we can make to live more sustainably and in harmony with the environment. To me this work is like imagining what the future might look like if we don’t change course. The remnants of all of this will still be here on the planet but maybe we’re not.” – Hannah Chalew
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