“Welcome to the Neighbourhood. Taste our cultural fantasy!” is emblazoned on a bright orange poster beckoning viewers to visit a bright Caribbean spot. In another poster, a woman smiles slyly, her eyes slightly lifted toward a pale blue sky with the inset words, “I love you / Only in our imagination.” The faux promotional materials are some of the artworks by Ewan Atkinson filling a room at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. A native of Barbados, he’s created an elaborate and imaginary Caribbean place he calls “the Neighbourhood,” and in his art practice, he documents its happenings with posters, fake newspaper front pages and more. At Ogden, there’s a vinyl record of the theme song for a Great Exposition, “plus ten swinging tropical gems,” a box of the official sugary cereal of the Great Exposition and more artifacts.“He is the curator and archivist of the history of the Neighbourhood,” says Prospect.6 co-artistic director Miranda Lash. “His project is: The Neighborhood tried to mount a Great Exhibition, but it is so ambitious and complicated that it fails. It never happens.”Atkinson calls his own collection of works “pieces of a secondhand puzzle,” which he hopes will offer some insight into the mishap and what went wrong in the Neighbourhood. One fake news article on yellowed newsprint reports the event was “Quickly Cancelled and Quickly Forgotten” following accidents like a fire at the ferry dock. Another wall features scientific panels with paintings of viruses that afflicted the Neighbourhood and disrupted plans for the expo.
‘Only in Our Imagination’ by Ewan Atkinson at Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Photo by Will Coviello / Gambit
“It’s a satirical take on what’s involved with an endeavor like this,” Lash says. “It’s delightfully small, with collages, fabricated newspaper articles, fabricated board games. It’s a show within a show. It’s very small scale, but he built a world in there.”The Great Exhibition is in part inspired by World’s Fairs, but it is an amusingly ironic and engaging inclusion in the massive expo that brought it to New Orleans: Prospect.6, the international art triennial.Prospect.6 is now open on a grand scale, spread among 22 venues, from Warehouse District museums and Harmony Circle to the Batture along the river near Audubon Park and the massive former Ford Motor Plant in Arabi. The official visitor center is at Merchant House in the Lower Garden District, where there are paintings by Ronald Cyrille, aka B. Bird, from Guadeloupe.The expo features 51 artists from across the globe, from Malaysian weaver Yee I-Lann to synthetic hair works by Danish multi-media artist Jeanette Ehlers to Surinamese artist Marcel Pinas’ work relating to the maroon communities of escaped slaves. Prospect.6 officially runs Nov. 2 through Feb. 2, 2025, and is bracketed by opening and closing weekends full of performances and curated experiences.
Jeanette Ehlers used braided synthetic hair in installations at the Ford Motor Plant and CAC.
Photo by Maddie Spinner / Gambit
The range of contemporary art spans traditional painting and sculpture to multi-media work, video, large-scale, site-specific installations and more. Some work directly addresses New Orleans, but much of it was selected by co-artistic directors Lash and Ebony G. Patterson for the ways the artists’ practices resonated with the triennial’s themes.Prospect.6’s title is “The Future is Present, the Harbinger is Home,” and some of its common threads are exploring what home means and looking at change not as looming in the distance, but as already here. Climate change is one area where the effects are already having an impact, but there are many focuses in which change is already part of history and repeating itself, especially in the effects of colonialism and migration, whether it’s voluntary or forced migration.While New Orleanians celebrate their home with a sense of exceptionalism, Lash notes, Prospect looks both at its uniqueness and the many ways it resembles other places in the world.“New Orleans is a Creolized space,” says Patterson, a native of Kingston, Jamaica. “It’s fair to say that most places in this hemisphere are Creolized. Many groups of people have passed through them and left imprints on those cultures and social behaviors, and therefore making a unique pot.”***Prospect.6 is the sixth full iteration of Prospect New Orleans. The art expo was founded by Dan Cameron in response to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures, and it featured many installations in areas destroyed by flooding, like wiped out blocks of Lower 9th Ward neighborhoods.Though it debuted in 2008, Prospect New Orleans is already the oldest multi-venue art biennial or triennial in the U.S. There are older single-venue shows, like the Whitney Biennial in New York, but there are very few large expos that aim to fill a city with art and installations under one banner. Prospect.6 has a budget of roughly $5.5 million, says Prospect New Orleans Executive Director Nick Stillman.Lash was the curator of contemporary art at the New Orleans Museum of Art when Cameron launched Prospect.1.“He said you have to dream big,” Lash says. “You have to think on an international scale. It’s an international conversation. One of the only prompts a biennial offers is that it should be ambitious.”With Prospect.6, Lash and Patterson have embraced that vision, selecting artists from across the globe and spreading shows and installations across New Orleans neighborhoods. They include a handful of long-established artists, like Mel Chin, who had a retrospective organized by Lash at NOMA, and Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier. But many are artists early in their career. None of the artists have shown work in previous Prospects, and to emphasize new work, 42 of the artists are presenting pieces commissioned for Prospect.6.
Prospect.6 opened with events like ‘Love Burst’ at Harmony Circle, which featured the drag wrestling group Choke Hole, the Edna Karr High School marching band and more.
Photo by Will Coviello / Gambit
Prior to the official opening day of Nov. 2, there were a series of performances. Most conspicuously, there’s the installation of a giant heart with a golden crown atop the pedestal at Harmony Circle. Mexican artist Raul de Nieves also installed four figures in the giant urns at the foot of the column. On Halloween, the performance “Love Burst” featured the drag wrestling show Choke Hole, the Edna Karr High School marching band and more activating the new monument at the site.Performance pieces also included “Magic Maids” at the New Marigny Theatre. Filipino dancer Eisa Jocson and Sri Lankan performance artist Venuri Perera’s piece explores the accusations of witchcraft aimed at women brought to Western countries as domestic laborers. A video of that work will be part of their installation at the Ford Motor Plant.Some of the visiting artists are digging into local history. Stephanie Syjuco, a native of the Philippines who now lives in Oakland, California, focused on the early Filipino link to New Orleans, the fishing village at St. Malo. The village was established by Filipino sailors in the mid-1700s, and it was wiped out by a hurricane in 1915.Syjuco created billboard-sized murals depicting the village. One image is inside the CAC, and others are outdoors along St. Claude Avenue and at Xavier University. Since the paper works are exposed to the elements, they are impermanent, like the village itself.
‘The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night’ by Brian Jungen at Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Photo by Will Coviello / Gambit
Based out of treaty territory in Canada, First Nations artist Brian Jungen has both Swiss and Dane-Zaa Nation ancestry. His piece at the Ogden features hundreds of blonde-wood arrows stuck into a dark wood table from colonial-era Louisiana.The shafts of the arrows aren’t stuck in perfectly parallel, in part because Jungen shot them into the table with a bow. The feathers are from all sorts of birds, many of them off limits to hunters, except where Indigenous people have permission to continue their traditional ways of life.The piece is both beautiful for its natural materials and delivers a sharp critique of the legacy of colonialism.“It’s such a poignant and poetic work, but at the same time, incredibly complex,” Patterson says. “It doesn’t shy away from the violence.”At the CAC, Meleko Mokgosi re-evaluates South African director Jamie Uys’ 1980 comedy “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” which became the nation’s best-selling film of all time following its release. In the movie, a tribe of San Bushmen discover a Coke bottle that has fallen from an airplane and decide it is a gift from the gods. Their attempt to return the bottle to the gods becomes an odyssey that takes them far from home.Mokgosi is a native of Botswana who now teaches at Yale University. In his work, he often explores depictions of Africans in painting and film. At CAC, he evaluates the “The Gods Must Be Crazy” in a frame-by-frame look at its images and narrative.At the Ford Motor Plant, the form of the Millennium Falcon spaceship is immediately recognizable, hovering just above the floor in the cavernous warehouse space. The round, flat body of the ship has the two unmistakable mandible-like extensions in front and the side-mounted cockpit.But this vessel is made of adobe, the red brick building material used throughout Mexico and the American Southwest. The top of the ship is marked by the rough-hewn imprinted runes of the Aztecs. It’s a fusion of the 16th-century Aztec sunstone, detailing their cosmology, and the sci-fi world of the Star Wars franchise’s stars and galaxies.
‘Mexica Falcon after Dewey Tafoya’ by rafa esparza at Ford Motor Plant
Photo by Maddie Spinner / Gambit
“Mexica Falcon after Dewey Tafoya,” is by Los Angeles artist rafa esparza, and is inspired by an image created by Tafoya, a printmaker and also a Prospect.6 artist. Esparza often chooses materials to focus his works’ themes about power structures and colonialism.There’s another link to the Caribbean in the atrium at the CAC. Shannon Alonzo unfurled an abstracted vision of Carnival in her native Trinidad and Tobago. Revelers from the Paramin area color their skin a bright cobalt blue (traditionally with a type of laundry agent instead of paint) and dress as devils and parade in the streets. At the CAC, there is a central body with many extended limbs, and blue streamers drape through two levels of heavy wooden beams above the gallery entrances.
At the CAC, Shannon Alonzo’s ‘Three Whistles and a Howl’ was inspired by Carnival in her native Trinidad and Tobago.
Photo by Maddie Spinner / Gambit
There are nine artists representing New Orleans, including the relatively recent transplant, Blas Isasi, a native of Peru who moved here to study. His sculpture is at the Ford Motor Plant. Some more familiar work includes L. Kasimu Harris, who is known for photos of Black-owned bars in New Orleans. His work is being shown at Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club and the Ogden Museum.Vietnamese artist Tuan Mami’s work has evolved from traditional objects and site-specific installations to more performative experiences. In an early precursor to his project at Xavier University’s Art Gallery, he met a migrant community of Vietnamese women in South Korea. He was interested in women who had moved to Korea as brides in brokered marriages.
Vietnamese artist Tuan Mami created murals, video installations and a performative experience making seed bowls at his installation at the Xavier University Art Gallery.
Photo by Maddie Spinner / Gambit
What he learned was that many of the women’s mothers followed them to help raise children and support their daughters, but they were not allowed to live with the families. They ended up a very isolated community of older women, who supported their daughters but also had to support themselves, often through farm work. Mami created a show that focused on plants, particularly the native Vietnamese plants that brought those women some sense of connection to home.When the pandemic started, Mami was stuck in Taiwan for an extended period, and he created the first of his Vietnamese Immigration Gardens. He later did a similar project in Germany. It made him a ripe candidate for Prospect.6 and reaching out to New Orleans’ Vietnamese community.Many migrants arrived in New Orleans after fleeing the Vietnam War. Mami learned that many older Vietnamese people in New Orleans East had in fact fled twice, he says. When Vietnam was split into north and south, many Vietnamese Catholics who lived in coastal areas in the north fled to the south as the communist party rose to power. Some of those same people then fled the country a second time when South Vietnam fell in 1975.But despite originally coming from a region near his native Hanoi, they were suspicious of him, he says.“I had many questions in the beginning,” Mami says. “‘Are you communist?’ ‘Are you working for communists?’ Many (Vietnamese residents in New Orleans) have never been back.”Starting on his first visit to New Orleans in spring, Mami started meeting people in the community in New Orleans East and building trust. He found many older people suffering from forms of isolation, including language barriers in reading street signs, and being separated from young generations that don’t speak Vietnamese as fluently.
At the CAC, Danish artist Jeanetter Ehlers’ ‘We’re Magic. We’re Real #2’ uses braided synthetic hair.
Photo by Maddie Spinner / Gambit
Hurricane Katrina was another setback and caused many younger people to be displaced or move elsewhere. But many of the older residents stayed. And they maintained full gardens, Mami says. There was no need to build another Vietnamese Immigration Garden project.Instead, he asked for seeds and collected about 50 types of plants. For his project at Xavier, he is sharing the seeds. Visitors can take seeds and roll them in small clay balls and create their own seed bowl to take home and plant. The installation features murals by Mami, as well as three rooms of videos featuring interviews with the local Vietnamese community.Every Wednesday afternoon through Prospect.6, members of the Vietnamese community will be on hand to help visitors make seed bowls and to share stories or chat.“The performative element is hidden, it’s something you cannot see,” Mami says. With “all the activity, all the stories behind the plants, I want to highlight the invisible thing. Can we see the performance without actual performing? I want to highlight a lot of hidden parts of the stories.”***Prospect.6 is a sort of homecoming for Lash, and Patterson also has built connections with New Orleans.Lash was the founding curator of contemporary and modern art at NOMA. From 2008 to 2014, she curated large shows like the Mel Chin retrospective, and ushered in performances and residencies and large installations, like the massive sea goddess hung in the museum’s grand entrance hall by the artist Swoon.Lash left New Orleans for Louisville, Kentucky’s Speed Art Museum, which was then opening a new wing for contemporary art. While there, she collaborated with Trevor Schoonmaker on the group show “Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art.” That show examining mythologies of the South included work by Patterson, who taught and worked at the University of Kentucky in Lexington for 12 years.Both Patterson and Lash served on Schoonmaker’s curatorial advisory council when he directed Prospect.4, “The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp.”
‘Trade Canoe for Recollection’ by Andrea Carlson at CAC
Photo by Maddie Spinner / Gambit
Prospect.6 is Patterson’s first foray into curatorial work. Her practice has focused on tapestries, drawing, mixed-media work and more. She presented a series of large-scale works at Newcomb Art Museum in Prospect.3. Her exhibition “…while the dew is still on the roses…” opened at the Perez Art Museum Miami, and then went to the Speed Museum and Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art, where Schoonmaker is the curator.More recently Patterson had a major show at the New York Botanical Garden and was included in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art. This summer, she spent six weeks in a residency at New Orleans’ satellite campus of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, though that residency had been delayed by issues with the pandemic. In early October, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, previously known as MacArthur “Genius Grants.”They started working on Prospect.6 in Kingston. As they began generating their lists of artists to consider, they talked about New Orleans. The Prospect.6 title uses the words harbinger and home. In harbinger, Lash turned to the etymology of the word. Its contemporary meaning suggests foreboding and warning, but the root comes from harbor, and the notion of a safe space.Home also is complicated. Patterson wanted to meet in Kingston for them to consider how to view New Orleans.“I felt one couldn’t be objective looking at a place inside that place,” Patterson says. “We have to step outside a place to look at the place.”They also started the planning process as the world was easing out of the pandemic, which also focused their look at New Orleans.“We had a world without community gatherings, without festivals, without joy,” Lash says. “New Orleans has always been a lesson in why those things are important as far as having a vibrant life. Covid gave everybody a taste of what life would be like without these things.“New Orleans has known things that the rest of the world is learning. The fact that it consistently carves a space for joy, even during times of duress, is something the world had to learn during Covid,” Lash continues. “Ebony and I have talked about New Orleans as a gift, the New Orleans that has lessons for other places. Prospect is shining a light on the gifts New Orleans has to offer.”
How to See Prospect.6
Expo Dates
Nov. 2-Feb. 2, 2025 Expo information Visitor Center: Merchant House, 1150 Magazine St., open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun. Prospect6.org Admission Most of Prospect.6 is free to the public. Some venues charge regular admission. Prospect.6 Venues 5523 St. Claude Ave. Algiers Point Alone Time Gallery The Batture CAC Ford Motor Plant, Arabi Harmony Circle The Historic New Orleans Collection Lemann Park & Playground (628 N. Claiborne Ave.) Merchant House (1150 Magazine St.) NOCCA and Press Street Railroad Yards New Orleans African American Museum New Orleans Museum of Art Newcomb Art Museum Ogden Museum Peristyle, City Park Sweet Lorraine’s Jazz Club UNO St. Claude Gallery Xavier University Art Gallery & Art Village