Imagining America 2021 National Gathering’s water journey concludes in New Orleans, the site of IA’s 2022 National Gathering, with a screening of Junebug Productions’s Homecoming Project: Water and a conversation with Junebug Executive Artistic Director Stephanie McKee and Homecoming Project Lead Artists Frederick “Wood” Delahoussaye, Sunni Patterson, and Jeremy Guyton.

Homecoming Project is a community-based, storytelling performance series that aims to marry high-quality artistic practice with a commitment to maintaining the essential relationship between art and progressive social change through engagement with New Orleans communities that have been historically oppressed and exploited.

Homecoming Project: Water is a collection of stories – told in the form of dance, music, spoken word, and film – exploring the depths of our vastly different and complex relationships with water. During the pandemic, Homecoming Project Lead Artists Patterson, Delahoussaye, Guyton, Kesha McKey, free feral, and special guest Spirit McIntyre revisited Homecoming Project: Water from a distance, reimagined with stunning visuals from Melisa Cardona and Malachi Middleton artfully stitched together by Jazz Franklin.

Ron Bechet, professor of art at Xavier University of Louisiana, will open this plenary event, with closing remarks provided by Kal Alston, Imagining America National Advisory Board Chair.

Free and open to the public, this event will be live streamed on IA’s YouTube channel.