The following is an excerpt from a blog co-written with Now + There Curator Leah Triplett Harrington after visiting New Orleans during Prospect.5’s final week to observe how artists were celebrating the city’s complex geopolitical position, grappling with its peoples’ past, and inviting visitors to help imagine tomorrow, today. With an eye towards collaboratively building a contemporary art festival in Boston, we call for more overt community engagement from visiting artists while lauding the vision and tenacity of each and every one of Prospect.5’s creators and funders. This post also appeared in Boston Art Review.
Prospect New Orleans, a triennial citywide contemporary art exhibition and the young, scrappy American cousin to more established European exhibitions like documenta and Skulptur Projeckte, recently wrapped its fifth iteration with an exhibition as in flux as these pandemic times.
“Yesterday We Said Tomorrow” was all about the future. As we traversed New Orleans East to Tremé to Bywater and Uptown, the most powerful work we encountered acknowledged the traumas of the past while heralding new futures.
Exploring NOLA by way of the exhibition’s map, we saw how Los Angeles-based curators and Prospect’s co-artistic directors, Diana Nawi and Naomi J. Keith, collaged artists, artworks, and institutions. Their approach was less conductor, more jazz improvisation, embracing the possibilities of unexpected juxtapositions of site context and artistic voice. With the evident care of their curation, you might think that Nawi and Keith are natives or long-time residents of the city. But our experience of New Orleans through Prospect made clear how they used their outsider position as an advantage to contextualize the local within the international.
Simone Leigh’s Sentinel (Mami Wata) in Tivoli Circle, January 22, 2022 Photo (c) Kate Gilbert
The morning of Saturday, January 22, 2022, the unveiling of Simone Leigh’s Sentinel (Mami Wata) offered the sharpest example of these forces at play. Erected at the site where a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee stood from 1884 to May 19, 2017, Nawi and Keith purposefully placed Sentinel (Mami Wata), at the base of the soaring plinth so as to be approachable, a gesture that refuses the hegemony of white supremacy and its physical manifestation in elevated monuments like the Lee that previously lorded over downtown New Orleans.
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