Sixth edition of Prospect New Orleans will feature 49 artists’ works throughout the city

Joiri Minaya, Container #4, 2020. 40 x 60 in.
Image courtesy of the artist.

The organisers of the sixth edition of Prospect New Orleans, one of the most closely watched recurring exhibitions in the Americas, revealed the 49 artists who will be featured today (25 January). Co-curated by Miranda Lash of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and artist Ebony G. Patterson (the first artist to curate an edition of Prospect), the artists participating in Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home include many with ties to Louisiana and the Caribbean, as well as a host of internationally renowned artists and a significant contingent of artists from Southeast Asia.

Among the most recognisable artists are the famed video and performance artist Joan Jonas, the Mexican American sculptor Raúl de Nieves, the Botswana-born and US-based painter Meleko Mokgosi, Vietnamese video artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Canadian First Nations artist Brian Jungen, the Haitian American painter Didier William, the Canadian performance artist Brendan Fernandes and the US conceptual and social practice artist Mel Chin. The list of participants also includes artists who have risen to fame in recent years, some very young and others achieving success later in life; they include the Haitian artist Myrlande Constant, the Los Angeles-based sculptor Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio and the New York-based multidisciplinary artist Joiri Minaya.

L. Kasimu Harris, Big Chief Peppy, Estabon Eugene, at Big Man Lounge, A Young Men Olympian Sunday, 2021.
Image courtesy of the artist.

New Orleans artists will have pride of place in the next Prospect, which launched as a biennial in 2008. Local artists who will participate include the Peruvian sculptor Blas Isasi, the textile artist and sculptor Abdi Farah, photographer L. Kasimu Harris, painter and video artist Ruth Owens, painter Brooke Pickett and the collage artist Ashley Teamer.

“New Orleans is a global place and reflects the fact that most of the world is occupied by people of colour,” Patterson said in a statement. “Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home presents a challenge to our perceptions of ‘home’— it asks us to consider that what we hold dear about the places where we live may, in fact, share commonalities with places we’ve never considered. This triennial is about decentering our understanding and viewing New Orleans through a lens that transcends North American narratives and anchors the city in a global discourse.”

Didier William, Cursed Grounds: Cursed Borders, 2021.
Image courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes Gallery, New York

As in past editions, Prospect.6 will span traditional art spaces like museums and galleries, public spaces and unconventional venues, manifesting at around 20 sites throughout New Orleans. Featured works will be a mix of existing pieces and large-scale commissions created specifically for Prospect. The exhibition’s theme, centred on the question of home, resonates with Prospect’s origins as a project spearheaded by curator Dan Cameron to fuel and foreground the city’s art scene in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.

“This triennial offers a critique and discussion of how people, communities, and regions like Louisiana have been and continue to be regarded as sites of extraction for resources and labour,” Lash said in a statement. “At the same time, New Orleans offers profound insight into how culture, neighbourhoods and deep histories tether us to people and places, even in the face of mounting challenges. We see this tension between attachments to home—however one defines it—and the shifting climate as one of the defining issues of our foreseeable future.”