MoFA Hosts Brandon Ballengée’s “Le Sang Noir”
“Collapse” by Brandon Ballengée
Le Sang Noir
February 15-March 31st
Opening Reception February 15, 6-8pm
Museum of Fine Arts
The Museum of Fine Arts (MoFA) is excited to announce the opening of Brandon Ballengée’s exhibition Le Sang Noir on February 15. Please join us for the opening reception and meet and greet with the artist from 6-8pm.
In 2010, Louisiana-based artist and biologist Brandon Ballengée saw firsthand the largest environmental disaster in United States history—the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Le Sang Noir (“Black Blood”) is a visual response to this tragedy. Locked in jars, suspended in alcohol, posed in petri dishes, Ballengée’s forms tell stories of species altered and obliterated. His prints, sculptures, and field projects are a narrative of human impact in the Anthropocene. By implicating us in their creation, the projects also inspire us to learn more about life in these complex, often fragile ecosystems. Le Sang Noir will be on display from February 15 through March 31.
Brandon Ballengée
About the Artist
Information Courtesy of brandonballengee.com
Brandon Ballengée (American, born 1974) is a visual artist, biologist and environmental educator based in Louisiana.
Ballengée creates transdisciplinary artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research. In 2009, Ballengée and SK Sessions published “Explanation for Missing Limbs in Deformed Amphibians” in the Journal of Experimental Zoology and received international media attention from the BBC and others. In 2011, he was awarded a conservation leadership fellowship from the National Audubon Society’s TogetherGreen Program (USA). In 2014 he received his Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Art and Biology from Plymouth University (UK) in association with Zürich University of the Arts and Applied Sciences (Switzerland). In 2015, he was the recipient of a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).
Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Biological Sciences Department at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), studying the impact on fishes from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. His project, Crude Life Portable Museum: A Citizen Art and Science Investigation of Gulf of Mexico Biodiversity after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, is ongoing thanks to an Interdisciplinary Projects Grant Award from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI), a project of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.