Searching for the Ghosts of the Gulf (African Pompano) by Brandon Ballengée, 2014.

Searching for the Ghosts of the Gulf (Tears of Ochun) by Brandon Ballengée, 2012

Wanted Fish Species Missing Since the 2010 Oil Spill by Brandon Ballengée, 2016-ongoing

Pointe-aux-Chenes Eco-Action, May 2017

Indian Bayou Eco-Action

Participatory educational and research field trip with the Acadiana Master Naturalist Class at Indian Bayou, Butte La Rose

RIP Spreadfin Skate by Brandon Ballengée, 2018

Holding the largest sawfish bill I have ever seen at TUBRI’s Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection. Once common in the Gulf of Mexico, sawfish are now critically endangered. Photo by Cammie Hill-Prewitt.
Cypremort Point, Louisiana, November 2020. Photo by Brandon Ballengée.
Painting with crude oil, December 2020. Photo by Aurore Ballengée.
Fish Adaptation Workshop at Phoenix High School Phoenix, Louisiana, December 2021.
Fish Drawing Professional Development workshop at TUBRI’s Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection, December 21. Photo by Brandon Ballengée.
Fishing trip with Plaquemines Parish high school students, Venice Marina, May 2022. Photo by Brandon Ballengée.
Collapse, installed at TUBRI’s Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection, Mars 2023. Photo by Brandon Ballengée.
FishSTOCK poster, March 2023.

Searching for the Ghosts of the Gulf

Brandon Ballengée is a visual artist, biologist, and environmental activist who creates work examining the impact of the Anthropocene inspired by meticulous field and laboratory research.

Artist Bio

This interdisciplinary art and environmental project seeks to activate and empower Gulf of Mexico residents through eco-actions and pop-up exhibitions in coastal Louisiana. A project focus is to collectively search for and poetically portray “missing” Gulf species that have not been reported since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Searching for the Ghosts of the Gulf premiered as part of FishSTOCK, a community celebration of art, adaptation, and fishes, in Plaquemines Parish, LA on March 25, 2023.

Discipline
Multimedia, Social Practice
Award Year
2019
Status

Completed

Themes

From the Journal

Brandon Ballengée’s Searching for the Ghosts of the Gulf will premiere at FishSTOCK in Plaquemines Parish, LA on March 25, 2023. Learn more about the project in his Artist Diary!

March 16, 2023
Brandon Ballengee

Brandon Ballengée

Arnaudville, LA

Brandon Ballengée is a visual artist, biologist, and environmental activist based in Arnaudville, Louisiana, who creates artwork inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research. Through research, he focuses on the impact of the Anthropocene on human and non-human communities, and his artistic practice combines participatory science programs with poetic interpretations of extinct or deformed animals due to human impact.

Ballengée received his Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Art and Biology from Plymouth University with the Hochschule für Gestaltung Zürich. Since 2016, he has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at Louisiana State University’s Museum of Natural Science, studying impacts from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In 2017, Ballengée was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History, examining species “missing” from the Gulf since the 2010 oil spill. Ballengée’s work has been exhibited in over 20 countries and, in 2013, the first survey of his work debuted at the Château de Chamarande in France, and traveled to the Museum Het Domein in the Netherlands. In 2016, a 20-year retrospective of his work was held at University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie, Wyoming.

From the Journal