Paper Monuments combines public education and collaborative design to expand our collective understanding of New Orleans.
Lydia Nichols
Lydia Y. Nichols is a writer native to New Orleans. Her work blends critical theory, empirical research, and creative non-fiction in examining images and language in visual art, literature, film, and vernacular culture.
She writes the Modern Maroon living anthology that explores the relationship between contemporary aesthetics and traditions of Black survival independent of the State. Modernity is an aesthetic conveyed through the material culture of the First World, the "developed" Global North, the three most prominent symbols of which are the skyscraper (post industrial intellectual labor-based economy), the car (mobility), and the computer (automated communication and documentation) - with the photograph as an auxiliary through which these symbols have been consecrated and disseminated. Marronage is the practice of escaping enslavement with no intention of return or of eventual integration into the dominant social fabric.
