The Trouble with Prospect
It was late October and Prospect.6 was approaching. There are few things I like more than viewing art, so why, I wondered, did this oncoming art exhibition—22 venues and 51 artists—fill me with low-level dread? The Prospect, New Orleans’ triennial, is like Thanksgiving dinner, where uncomfortable family history and clashing viewpoints loom over a supposedly enjoyable, yet profoundly complicated meal.
The Prospect.1 biennial opened in 2008, in a city still damaged and depopulated by Hurricane Katrina. I had arrived in New Orleans two months before with my four-month-old son, having never seen the city. A job brought us here and not—as is the case with many pilgrims—romantic notions, post-storm opportunism, or “good intentions.” I had earned my MFA in Painting five years before, and after living in New York City, I was unsure what it meant to be an artist elsewhere. Truth be told, I didn’t really know what it meant to be an artist in New York, where notions of success often distracted from the work. When I got to New Orleans I explored my new home through the expansive lens of art-viewing in traditional art venues and hard-to-locate spaces. I saw amazing artwork and believed I had moved to a city where contemporary art didn’t exist behind velvet ropes.
Years passed and Prospect moved to a triennial schedule. Its mission statement swelled, possibly in response to criticism of carpetbagging, neglect of local artists, and cheapening local culture. The current Prospect website states, “We strive to be a model for the social and economic impact that a citywide art exhibition can have. But to us, our work is much bigger than this city. We aim to also be a global model for crafting equal and inclusive communities—where culture, history, and talent are all recognized and uplifted.” The trouble with such lofty designs is people get upset when they fail to materialize.
In 2017 Holly Devon, my editor at ANTIGRAVITY, wrote an article critical of Prospect, pointing out how their aims and claims hold up against the reality of life in New Orleans. She calls out a popular 2014, Prospect.3 artwork by Tavares Strachan, a barge floating on the Mississippi with a 100-foot pink neon sign that read, “You Belong Here.” Holly wrote, “His stated purpose in creating the piece was to explore the ‘anxiety of belonging’ in New Orleans. That it failed to occur to the curators that a Yale art school graduate from the Bahamas living in Brooklyn was unqualified to make that kind of ‘exploration’ indicated a startling disregard of the issues facing New Orleanians in real time.”
I liked the barge. I saw it unexpectedly one night by the river in 2014 when out on a non-art errand, an accidental encounter. At first, I didn’t perceive the three glowing words as Art at all, and I hadn’t read anything about the piece. The year before, my family had to vacate the $800 per month apartment where we’d lived for six years. The landlord sold the house for a fortune and the buyers gutted it. But this wasn’t on my mind when I saw the barge whose sentiment stretched beyond New Orleans. My ignorance (or innocence) played a part in my positive experience of the work.
Holly and I met to discuss our views about Prospect, where they overlap and where they clash. I considered this my first Prospect “event.” Holly is unapologetically civic-minded when it comes to art, and goes looking for trouble. She makes a point of seeing how the sausage of the “art world” is made. By contrast, over the years I have narrowed my own view, blocking out the larger art world and averting my gaze in the sausage factory. I ignore artist statements, believing the work can speak for itself. I bypass wall text and website descriptions orgsplaining the work like Butthead reading a tube of superglue: “words uh… words…huh huh.” In a noisy and verbal world, visual art can speak volumes without words or condescension.
Curators choose and arrange artworks to suggest narrative, themes, or noteworthy correlations between different works, ideally without turning art into props or propaganda. Prospect’s artistic directors have a heavy job on their hands living up to the mission statement and rhetoric. According to the website, “Co-Artistic Directors Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson posit New Orleans as a globally relevant point of departure for examining our collective future as it relates to climate change, legacies of colonialism, and definitions of belonging and home.” I recoil at the idea of art being made to carry a certain rhetoric or ideology.
In 2004, INCITE! organized a conference that gave us the term “the non-profit industrial complex.” This term pushes back on the sometimes-unexamined assumption that non-profit organizations have somehow acquired human morals or conscience. The Prospect.6 announcement concludes, “If a biennial or triennial is traditionally considered in relation to its ‘host’ city (a term with parasitic implications), what does it mean to ‘hold’ a city, a gesture that suggests care and reverence?” To borrow from Gen Z, I want to say, “You’re doing too much.”
So what is the trouble with Prospect? According to a recent Instagram post from a local artist, it includes gentrification, poor access, environmental waste, and using art to hide real issues. And yet, the same post expresses a desire to join the thing it criticizes. “It’s frustrating to see how much focus is put on national or international artists when there’s plenty of local talent here that doesn’t get the same opportunity.” The post goes on to say that Prospect “leaves local artists back where they started, with no real boost from the event.” I object. As an artist and art viewer, and a person whose travel opportunities are limited, I believe an art show that brings the work of international artists to New Orleans absolutely offers something valuable to local artists: the value of engaging with art you may not otherwise see. If you believe in Art, you believe in its power whether you made the thing or not.
When I moved to New Orleans, I discovered that when you can’t find the space or exhibition opportunity you want, you can create it, and people will come. Does this mean you will have a “successful” art career? That depends on your definition of success. I believe it’s essential, in an era where we have all drunk the career Kool-Aid, to remember that Art is special. It comes from an ancient and inviolable place within us. At its core are the dangerous energies of freedom and imagination. This is why in times of dictatorships, artists are among the enemies of the state: There are few things as threatening to power as those who can imagine beyond its rule and can inspire others to do the same.
If local artists feel left out of Prospect or disturbed by its practices, they can organize a parallel, multi-venue exhibition that upholds their values and shares their work. They can reach out to the incoming artists, invite them to a potluck, organize a bonfire the night of the gala.
The trouble with Prospect is partly that it’s just (“just”) an art show. But rather than standing squarely behind the idea that Art is important, Prospect over-inflates self-justifying language to the point of bombast, inevitably unable to deliver the “care and reverence” it promises. This bothers people. Moreover, it enlists Art in the service of its often grim and overwrought themes. This bothers me. Fortunately, much of the art in Prospect.6 is excellent—see Stephanie Syjuco‘s murals of St. Malo—open to interpretation and, removed from the rhetoric, it does what art can do: It moves imaginations, connects us to new ideas and new sensibilities. It pleases and confuses us, and if nothing else, it gets us out of the house.
Top photo: Stephanie Syjuco, Phantom Visions (The Lacustrine Village of St. Malo), 2024 wheat pasted paper mural outside Music Box Village
Photo by Emily Farranto
