ABout CANOA
CANOA (Caribbean and New Orleanian Arts) is an artist-led initiative located in the Upper 9th Ward of New Orleans. CANOA is also a resource center, gathering place, workshop space, and lecture and performance venue.
CANOA supports arts practitioners from the local Caribbean diaspora and facilitates exchanges among New Orleanian and Caribbean artists and community members. We work to foster new cultural and artistic connections between New Orleans and the wider Caribbean, both locally and internationally. Born from the recognition that New Orleans is in fact a Caribbean city, CANOA brings New Orleanian and Caribbean artists and culture workers together in solidarity around our mutual histories and cultural practices.
Throughout the year, we present events, workshops, gatherings and exchanges rooted in Caribbean art and identity. And we make CANOA available at an affordable price to community members seeking to use the space to produce events, organize a gathering, host a class or workshop, or throw a party.
CANOA is the Spanish word for “Canoe,” from the Arahuakan/Taíno word “caná-oua”, a composite of the words “canâa” (carve or excavate) and “ueé” (tree). The word was first rendered in the Roman alphabet when it was written in the Diarios of Christopher Columbus on October 26th, 1492.
CANOA is the first indigenous word from the “New World” to enter the European lexicon. We use the word for this project space as a multivalent symbol- to remind ourselves of:
-the connectivity of water (between islands of land, islands of culture, and even the organs of our bodies.)
-the modest importance of travel (physical and virtual) as a strategy to investigate the commonalities and the differences that describe us.
-our everlasting hybridity as a species that constantly re-forms and combines ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices.
-the ability of small things to overcome or infiltrate big things (in an age of colonial/corporate hegemony, such a notion can offer hope!)