CURRENT TREK:

CA,LIF.POSTCARDS from the Edge of the World.

by AOLAB| Angel Brynner

Blackwater Rising picks up where Bottom of the Ninth Ward Bulletins left off. It begins with a push to motivate others who'd been tuning into Angel Brynner's blogs across platforms into heading down to New Orleans to see where they could lend a hand with the rebuilding efforts post-hurricane.

It leapfrogs over the beautiful carnage that became Cautantowwit(indian summer) and the Black Album experience that making the best of being on the run from Nyc to Montreal & Toronto to Seattle became keyed to avoiding the harassment no one knew was at the root of the launching of the AOLAB project.

This is a documentation of an artist making the best of being at her wit's end, at the moment she finally decided to stop running away and instead chose to go towards, embracing the road God was letting her traverse due to the situation.
Blackwater Rising speaks to what rises up when you trouble the water so as to be healed.

Part travelogue, part oral history and visual documentation of a honeymoon phase with a city like no place else on earth, The Bottom of the Ninth Ward Bulletins chronicle American artist and author Angel Brynner's first sojourn in New Orleans.

Originally sent out from her blog The Art of Life while she was volunteering with re-builders and missionaries alongside the American Peace Corps in New Orleans as the city continued its recovery effort, BNWB documents all she was allowed to witness for whosoever was tuning in to her blogs beyond friends and family across the globe, people with just as little clue as to what was afoot in New Orleans as she had been before arriving there that summer.

These are the tales of the survivors, those who refused to be washed away by the neglect of a country they were born and raised in, as witnessed by an artist who thought she was only passing through New Orleans the summer of 2008 before getting commissioned to help rebuild however she could in the areas affected by the Hurricanes that received little to no national coverage. This is a tale that sings with the spirit of the city that embraced that artist and allowed her to see the survivors morph into the thrivers they'd always been.

This Kokopellima Press tenth anniversary edition of the book produced from those blogs also features artwork from the NYC2NOLA series of collages from the Angel Brynner/Art of Life project, a ten+ year trek through creative communities across America, Canada. Mexico and the Caribbean where over 1500 pieces of work were created on-the-road-style. Produced in the autumn of 2008, still reeling and forever changed by what became her first summer of service in the hothouse, NYC@NOLA was the third official grouping of artwork from that road-trip.

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The original AOLAB GlobalBoho Travelogues: New Orleans, volume I & II.

info@kokopellimapress.com