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.
Raúl de Nieves, The Sacred Heart of Hours and The Trees of Yesterdays, Today, and Tomorrow, 2024
Raúl de Nieves visited New Orleans for the first time in 2007, right after moving to New York to pursue art. Back then, he collected leftover beads from the Mardi Gras parade to make the very first of his figurative beaded sculptures which would eventually make their way to the Whitney Biennial and many institutions’ collections. “The beads looked crazy and visceral,” said the Mexican artist, emphasizing the beauty he discovered in these discarded decorations. The very first sculpture which he made in celebration of his mother had “self-discovery in its essence,” he said.
Some 17 years later, the Brooklyn-based artist pays homage to this transformative moment in the Crescent City. His sculptural installation features colorful trees perched on Harmony Circle’s columns, surrounding the central heart figure. Coated in all colors imaginable, the shrubs’ sharp branches reach towards the sky, beaming with the Louisiana sun. Beads were donated by The Muses, a well-known all-female “Krewe” that forms part of the Mardi Gras parade. “The heart symbolizes turning a leaf onto a site that had a memory of racism,” said de Nieves. The artist hopes to bring the public together by placing an outdoor work on a site of collective trauma—the now-removed Confederate monument: “I wanted to give a new light and offer a moment of reflection through the simplicity of a crowned heart which everyone can understand,” he said.
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.”
While most artists’ works are shown in groups at venues such as Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Contemporary Arts Center, a few participants have sites entirely dedicated to their work. Didier William occupies a gallery at The Historic New Orleans Collection, in the heart of the city’s bustling historic French Quarter. There, the artist’s installation features larger-than-life epoxy resin sculptures of bodies similar to figures that are usually found on William’s canvases. Covered with meticulously hand-carved eyes, the bodies seem to have crept out of the accompanying paintings, which instead depict bald cypress trees, the state tree of Louisiana. “I wanted them to confront and create a circuitry of looking between themselves and the viewer,” said William.
William, who settled on the idea after a trip to the Atchafalaya Basin to research bald cypresses, is fascinated by the trees’ resistance to erosion and decay thanks to their large bodies.
On the visual side, William is mesmerized by the short protrusions at the trees’ bases, commonly called “knees.” In William’s work, these trees’ resemblance to the human form is undeniable. “Their bodily accents remind me that there is a flamboyance about the cypresses that I find incredibly powerful,” William explained.
Overall, the paintings, guarded by the human figures in front of them, radiate a sense of otherworldliness: the cypresses silently submerged in swamps with scorching sunsets behind them. Against a human understanding of time’s pace, these centuries-old trees function as “a historical archive, as well as an ancestral and geological archive,” according to William.
Ashley Teamer is another artist who explores the narrative possibilities of the cypress tree, in particular their relationship to the history of racial segregation and disenfranchisement of the local Black communities. The New Orleans–born artist presents a replica of a cypress tree in enamel and powder-coated steel, in addition to giant tambourines and tinkling wind chimes. Located near the historic Claiborne Avenue, the monumental-scale sonic sculpture stands as a reminder of the Black wealth and livelihood that was stripped away due to the construction of the Interstate 10 highway at the end of the 1960s.
Teamer said that this sculpture represents “a switch from two dimensions to three-dimensionality” in her practice, which also comprises mixed-media collage. The sculpture’s layered texture alludes to leaves as well as feathers, which are common in parades, including those that marched the pre-highway Claiborne Avenue. In her most ambitious public work, she envisions “what future landscapes can be, no matter how hard that can be,” the artist said.
The artist chose to focus on tambourines after seeing a documentary about Mardi Gras Indians at the New Orleans Museum of Art. “Instead of trumpets, drums, or saxophone, they all had tambourines as the connecting element of their tradition,” she said. “We are in a port city that has been a crossroad to many different communities for different reasons through colonization and immigration. I wanted to create a work in which nature has a role in activating the sound as a reminder of many passages.”
Inside the sculpture’s large trunk are two expressions from a book of Haitian and Trinidadian proverbs, translated into Louisiana Creole by culture scholar Clif St. Laurent. “Water always close to the river” and “Tell me whom you love and I’ll tell you who you are” are inscribed inside the tree’s body in bold yellow hues.
Arturo Kameya, Whatever comes first, 2024
Prospect’s curators have tried to place the city of New Orleans within the global discourse. “We acknowledge that there are many ways people live and exist in this city or any city while having a deeper connection with most of the globe,” said Patterson. This is made clear by the work of Arturo Kameya whose installation explores the complex relationship between the places we choose and those we inherit, with memory often building these connections.
Under clinical green lighting, Kameya’s moody installation of warped domesticity is presented across adjacent rooms of Louisiana’s Alone Time Gallery. Household objects such as chairs, a towel rack, and a bucket occupy a sand-covered floor. On the walls, paintings of enigmatic figures in a strictly green coloration appear even ghostlier in this eerie layout. “Although the paintings might seem to possess a mysterious aura, in most cases, this aura can be pinpointed to tangible and concrete contextual elements, which is urban Lima,” explained Kameya. One painting, for instance, shows a figure dressed in a Coca-Cola bottle costume (perfectly timed for the triennial’s Halloween preview), while on another large horizontal canvas, a generous spread of laundry is left to dry.
“When the paintings are accompanied by an atmosphere, the content can pass through easily because light and environments speak loudly and faster than only visual clues since their impact also involves other senses,” he said. Some of the enigmatic visuals in Kameya’s paintings in fact stem from Google Street View images of funeral processions in his hometown of Lima. Life-size cutouts of sitters occupy salvaged chairs with broken seats and dust-covered backs—their faces turned away or missing, denying any eye contact with visitors. The artist aims to select objects for the space that can “bounce back in a conversation with the paintings, electronics, and sculptures,” he said.
Abandonment and haunting coexist in these hazy paintings that, upon closer inspection, reveal faint details—such as the coy smile on the face of a child playing with his dog, or food items spread on a dinner table. Whether remembered or imagined, Kameya’s narratives throughout the installation capture the raw ethereality of inhabiting a place.
Joiri Minaya, Fleurs de Liberation: Cloaking of the Meilleur-Goldthwaite House, 2024
While Prospect’s sojourn is limited to three months, many artworks create longer-term engagement with their sites and surrounding communities—part of the curators’ goal to be a true part of the city, rather than existing temporarily on its surface. “We aim not to host but to hold,” said Patterson. For example, local artist L. Kasimu Harris’s photographs of the waning Black bars across the American South are displayed on the walls of the local jazz bar Sweet Lorraine’s; and Vietnamese artist Tuan Mami’s installation Seeding The Future (2024) at Xavier University invites the public to roll clay with the local Vietnamese elders to make seed pods.
Meanwhile, Joiri Minaya’s mammoth installation dresses the historic Meilleur-Goldthwaite House in a massive draped cloak. For the duration of the triennial, the building, in the historic Tremé neighborhood where 20% of houses were owned by Black women in the 1700s, is covered in images of the local flora and fauna, such as African rice, coral bean, lizard’s tail, okra, saw palmetto, and swamp cypress.
“I looked into plants used to resist hegemonic and colonial processes historically and in the present, mainly by the area’s Indigenous, African American, and immigrant communities,” explained Minaya. She also noted that the plants were used for various practical and spiritual purposes, such as “healing, nurture, marooning, abortions—particularly by Black women during enslavement—and tool-making.”
The New York–based Dominican artist has previously transformed colonialist monuments into washes of abundant flora in spandex material throughout Europe, U.S., and the Caribbean. For the largest “cloaking” effort of her career, Minaya chose a historic building that was originally built for the keeper of the New Orleans jail in 1829 and currently belongs to the New Orleans African American Museum. The artist found inspiration in New Orleans’s complex history of labor, enslavement, and architecture. The gentle curves of her plants replicate Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, which, she learned in her research, were secretly carved by enslaved African iron workers. “This subversion in particular inspired the way in which the plants operate as design elements within the repeating composition,” Minaya said.
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