The Foreigner's Home / U.S.A. / Louisiana Premiere

“Who is the foreigner,” asks author Toni Morrison at her “The Foreigner’s Home” exhibition at the Louvre. Morrison invited artists whose work addressed the experience of migration and displacement to join her in conversation about issues she had long examined in her own writing and teaching.

Artistic Statement:

In “The Foreigner’s Home”, her 2006 exhibition, Toni Morrison drew connections among diverse figures, works, and events—from painter Theodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa to filmmaker Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, from jazz to hip-hop, from the U.S. Civil Rights movement to Hurricane Katrina—to conjure a shareable world whose well being depends on the never-ending public conversation that is art.

In Paris, she surprised many when she brought a group of local slam poets into the Louvre to highlight her belief in the power of unfettered (and sometimes disruptive) artistic expression to transform society. Referring to these poets, she observed that "young people's music is always despised and hated as corrupt, violent, sexual. . . .Mozart was despised as a kid when he was composing too many notes, too much, too fast. Jazz was the worst music you could hear. It was banned. Blues was banned. Rock music was banned. Young people's music is banned until it becomes the music of the land, and the same thing happened with hip-hop . . .But . . .despised as it is, young people's music . . . change[s] the language. And some people are afraid of that. . . .I was interested in un-policed language—language without the cops."

Our film seeks to extend Morrison’s vision, honoring both its intellectual power and subversive artistic challenge. . . .We hope to convey the substance and relevance of the incisive warning Morrison issued ten years ago: “The destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world.”