Season 3 - Ep. 6 Shana F. griffin, 2025 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow

In this episode, we catch up with last year’s Loeb/ArtLab Fellow (2025) Shana M. griffin—artist, activist, sociologist, and geographer from New Orleans. Grounded in Black feminist theory, griffin reflects on a year of making new work in the ArtLab studios and reimagining spatial politics at the GSD.While research grounds Shana’s work, she strives to represent perspectives historically left out of the archive. Projects like SOIL go beyond traditional archival materials to instead document soil from plantations in Louisiana, capturing how the earth bears witness to slavery through its environmental memory of sugar production. Another goal of Shana’s alternative archive is to improve accessibility. We touch on how her own access to archives fueled her to create more publicly available historical records. This culminated in an open studio display at the ArtLab, showing off her various projects in this more intimate setting.Join us for a thoughtful conversation about how to make art out of archival absences. Thanks for joining us for Works in Progress. We hope these conversations give you a glimpse into the creativity, collaboration, and experimentation happening at ArtLab. To learn more, visit artlab.harvard.edu.The podcast is recorded in the Mead Production Lab at the ArtLab in Boston, Massachusetts. Hosted by Bree EdwardsAudio by Luke DamrochProduction by Kat NakajiResearch by Sadie Trichler & Ria Cuéllar-Koh Design by James Blue & Sonia Ralston