Imani Jacqueline Brown (b. 1988) is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans, based in London. Her
work investigates the 'continuum of extractivism', which spans from
settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production and climate change. In exposing the
layers of violence and resistance that form the foundations of US
society, she opens up space to imagine paths to ecological reparations.
Her practice combines photography and videography, archival research, ecological philosophy, legal theory, peoples’ and oral history, remote sensing, and counter-cartography. Mobilizing these strategies, her artistic research disentangles the spatial logics that make geographies, unmake communities, and break Earth’s geology. Her research is disseminated internationally through art installations, public actions, reports, and testimony delivered in courtrooms and forums of the United Nations.
Imani’s work has been exhibited in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and the United Arab Emirates. Exhibitions include Gulf, a solo exhibition at Storefront for Art & Architecture (2024), and group exhibitions at UCSC Institute of Arts and Sciences (2024), the Carnegie Museum of Art (2023), and the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022).
Among
other things, she is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University
of London, a research fellow with Forensic Architecture, a 2024 Monument Lab Fellow and an Artist-in-Residence at UCSC Institute of Arts and Sciences.
Imani
received her MA with distinction from the Centre for Research
Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London (2019), and her BA in
Anthropology and Visual Arts from Columbia University (2010).
––
In 2018, Imani founded Fossil Free Fest (FFF), a biennial gathering of art, music, food and difficult conversations about the ethical contradictions of fossil fuel philanthropy and celebrate the impending end of the Fossil Fuel Era. The Fest was presented by Antenna, a multi-arts incubator in New Orleans.
From 2011–2018, Imani was a member of Occupy Museums, an artist-activist collective formed in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street to challenge the commodification and financialization of art and culture. Occupy Museums’ project, Debtfair was featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
From 2016-2018, Imani worked as Director of Programs at Antenna. In 2014, Imani co-founded Blights Out, a collective of artists, activists, and architects who worked for four years to demystify and democratize development in post-Katrina New Orleans. She was a board member of Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, a community land trust that built New Orleans' first permanently affordable housing from 2017-18.
In 2015, Imani traveled to COP 21 to help establish the international Museum Liberation Movement as part of #FossilFreeCulture. In 2014, she served under the artistic direction of Franklin Sirmans as Curatorial Associate and Manager of Publications for Prospect.3, the international biennial of contemporary art in New Orleans. In 2013, she took part in Winter Holiday Camp, the democratic takeover of the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland, in support of a union labor strike against the then-director. In 2009, she worked as the Oil and Gas Accountability Campaign Leader for Healthy Gulf, known then as the Gulf Restoration Network.
All images and texts on this site are the creations of Imani Jacqueline Brown, unless otherwise noted, e.g. photodocumentation of works or collaborative projects.
