Paris Cian with some of her oyster-based artwork. (Photo courtesy of Paris Cian)
I Make Art in New Orleans, Knowing It Will Disappear
Artist Paris Cian returned to the city as an adult after Katrina scattered her family, and built a practice around oysters, water, and the act of making art that might not last.
Paris Cian, 30, is a “movement architect” whose work focuses on devotion, impermanence, and Black life in relation to place and water. In this conversation, she describes an oyster-centered practice that includes shucking rituals, “oyster readings,” and building oyster-based installations like a floating wetland and wearable oyster reefs designed for coastal restoration and habitat creation. She frames this work as a way to honor Indigenous and Maroon ecologies, support New Orleans’ climate future, and offer Black communities accessible, story-driven entry points into conversations about land, water, and survival.
This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.
I was born here in New Orleans East and left the year before Hurricane Katrina. My mom is a dancer, so she was like, “I want to go follow my dreams.” So we moved to California. I was there from like age 7 through high school. Then I moved to Virginia for college, which is where I think my art practice and a lot of my curiosity about landscape and climate really started to formulate, because I had space to think about life and all the movement patterns I had been doing and going back and forth between L.A. and New Orleans basically my whole childhood. Those trips were shaped by hurricane season and holiday season, so my time here was also shaped by the weather and when it was safe, essentially.
I’ve been home now eight years, and now I’ve officially lived in New Orleans longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. I really have a relationship with this place and the landscape. Making and creating art is grounding. It helped me find literally the relationality of my body with the soil and the waters here. Honestly, it was like a mini obsession too, of trying to figure out my place, my people’s place, because no one else really came back after Katrina.
We lost family members in the midst of trying to figure out where everyone was; my grandma, we lost her for like three months because she was in a nursing home. Even those negotiations of how weather has changed not only our movement patterns but how we found each other, I guess, are part of it. Being in that cyclical relationship with this place allows me to re-arrive in loving New Orleans. We know every year there’s going to be something, or every other day it’s going to rain or something. Being in that repetition pattern interests me. It really informs how I consider my work and the impermanence of the things that I’m making. I don’t have an attachment to the art that I make; I think I make art with the understanding that in some way it’s going to disappear or become something else, and I think that has a lot to do with understanding this place.
I do feel protective of New Orleans. I feel like I have a responsibility in regards to being honest about our climate. From a spiritual perspective, I think about the realities of time; just because we may be experiencing something today, we don’t know what the ripple effect is or where that’s coming from. That might be coming from choices that happened hundreds of years ago.
I hope the way I’m creating and communicating can reach people. It’s subjective and up to your interpretation or what you feel or remember. Something I sit with often is the architecture of New Orleans and how that’s so prominent for so many people in their memory — the shotgun house, the porch, the way we have neutral ground structure. I think about place and homemaking and how I literally create home, how those elements show up in my work, and how that can be a way to relate. I love abstract art and I think it’s important, but I do think that as Black people we also deserve an entry point to understanding what someone’s creating. You want the person, a random stranger, to have some type of relation to your practice or for you to be able to describe it in a way they can understand, so it’s not hyper academic or scholarly.
With the oyster practice, I was shucking oysters four times a week for like five hours a day and having these one-on-one conversations with folks about water and their relationship to oyster shells and Louisiana. I had never done that before. But talking with people for that amount of time and being in that ritual, I started to learn so much more literally just by talking to people. I think art can evoke pathways for people to be open and be curious. You ask someone a question and you never know where it’s going to take them in their own memory.
