A high school marching band approached New Orleans’s Tivoli Circle, blasting the Spice Girls hit “Say You’ll Be There.” Yes, it was Halloween morning, but that had nothing to do with it. The crowd, instead, was present for the launch of the sixth edition of the triennial Prospect New Orleans, titled this year “The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home.”
As part of the show, the traffic circle, which was once home to a monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee, has been adorned with artist Raúl de Nieves’s kaleidoscopic bead sculptures. Members of the local drag wrestling group Choke Hole climbed the circle’s tall steps. In the center, de Nieves’s heart-shaped sculpture is perched on top of the towering pedestal, in lieu of the bygone army man. Cheers were heard as a group member dressed in a flamboyantly futuristic outfit declared: “May you always be on the right side of history!” This roaring sentiment in fact sweeps across many of the works in the citywide triennial.
Organized by artist Ebony G. Patterson—who was featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2019 and had participated in the triennial’s third edition—and Miranda Lash, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the event is focused on both the future and the past. The curators have chosen artworks that explore New Orleans as a historical site of both social and environmental atrocities. Most significantly, the show references the impact of Hurricane Katrina, as well as the city’s role in transatlantic slave trade. But the artists included also look to the future through personal or collective experiences that have shaped them. This attempt to present experiential, and occasionally site-specific, undertakings is visible particularly in new artworks, which have been commissioned from 43 out of the total 51 artists included.
The curators prompted the artists to think big: “We asked them to imagine what their most ambitious work would be at the moment, if they could do anything,” said Patterson. The invitation, according to Lash, taps into their goal to maintain a “practice-driven” curatorial outlook by “looking across years of each artist’s practice to get a sense of their motivations and concerns.”
The artists hail from a broad geography that spans Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central, South, and North America. From a disused car manufacturing factory on the bank of the Louisiana River to a beloved Black-owned jazz bar, the venues vary in shape and history. A cohort of international names, such as Haitian artists Myrlande Constant and Jeffrey Meris, join well-known 20th-century figures like Mel Chin and Joan Jonas. In addition to rising multimedia artists Abigail DeVille, rafa esparza, and Bethany Collins, a broad range of local talent is also included, such as L. Kasimu Harris, Hannah Chalew, and Ruth Owens.
Below, we spoke to six standout artists about their artworks from the Prospect.6 triennial.
Maia Ruth Lee, The Conveyor, 2024
The majority of massive-scale works at this year’s edition of Prospect can be found at Ford Motor Plant in the city’s Arabi district. Built for car production, the gargantuan warehouse previously stored weapons for the U.S. army during World War II, as well as set equipment when the city’s film industry boomed after Hurricane Katrina. Labor is a running thread among many of the statements across the two-story venue, particularly its connection to immigration and exploitation. “This was a space where thousands of workers made cars, so here we talk about the ways capitalist economies require individuals to move away from home,” said Lash.
This is made starkly clear in Maia Ruth Lee’s disarming installation of a functioning airport carousel with plastic trays that carry personal objects submerged in mud. The Colorado-based artist called these objects, which are in constant rotation over the rubber circle, “imagined belongings of a traveler far from home.” Large panels of canvas covered in dark blue ink hang on lines slung above the conveyor belt like ghosts.
Lee, who created the installation in collaboration with Art Production Fund, sourced mud from the Louisiana River that runs alongside the warehouse. “The river is another channel of migration, often connected with histories of colossal violence,” added the artist. “The objects may never return home, but the soil is its witness and record.” Lee has also added a suite of tightly wrapped personal objects near the moving sculpture in reference to belongings abruptly packed by travelers, such as refugees, during an unexpected departure.
Despite the alarming nature of the work, the artist noted that it’s “a site for meditation.” Besides the rhythmic movement of objects, she also sees in the constant cycle a “spiritual evocation of ancestors and stories of people who are in perpetual migration and movement today.”
—Osman Can Yerebakan
