Tracing Shade | Throwing Shade

The lines between heat and shade, which frame life both daily and in heatwaves, are largely produced, built by legacies of infrastructure and policy. The distinction serves as a color line.

While the damage inflicted upon space has produced heat, community desire and resistance, fixed in social infrastructure, have produced shade networks.

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Desire includes privately owned black parks in the early twentieth century, mutual aid organizations known as Social, Aid and Pleasure Clubs, the inhabitation of the neutral ground (the New Orleanian name for the street median), and parading. The framing of damage and desire questions how we can both acknowledge the past and celebrate the power of people and place when imagining a more just future.