Bayou Griot was born out of my fascination with listening to people share histories real, made up, misrepresented or undetermined. Each story is a new dream world, a tool or symbol for lessons to learn or teach. Bayou Griot is a repository for stories, conversations, and research around these types of real and imagined histories.

Chelsea Lynn Jones is an artist-educator with an academic background in History and Sociology. After more than a decade teaching humanities (ELA and History) in the classroom and community, she is currently pursuing a MFA in Art and Social Practice. Chelsea also leads education programming at a local community arts organization.

Her art practice examines racialized narratives about the use and care of land, nature, and architecture, particularly in the southern United States and in connection to rural, urban, and suburban networks. Human behavior, movements, and ways of belonging inspire her research, while she uses individual and collective memories, cultural rituals, literature, cinema, and gathering spaces to guide her collection of material culture and surveying of landscapes. Chelsea’s artwork culminates in collage, installations, workshops, and publications that bring together original and found photography, renderings, ephemera, sound, language, textiles, and nature objects.