Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick
Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick are collaborators and documentarians whose socially-engaged work has focused on their native New Orleans' vast and complicated social and cultural history. Together, the duo documents Black and immigrant subjectivity in their home state of Louisiana. Daily life, rituals, religion, laborers, musical traditions—these are all scenes the pair capture in order to preserve and remember their culture and community. Calhoun and McCormick have also documented the lives of the incarcerated men at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, and the displacement and fragmentation of the families and communities in the Lower Ninth Ward by Hurricane Katrina. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally—most notably in the 2015 Venice Biennial—and lives in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Louisiana State Museum (New Orleans); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.