Citywide art exhibition examines life in New Orleans and beyond
18th January 2022 · 0 Comments
By Fritz Esker
Contributing Writer
The citywide art exhibition Prospect.5, “Yesterday we said tomorrow,” will be closing its run in New Orleans on January 23.
When the show began on October 23 of last year, it was after a year-long delay from the originally planned 2020 date (the show typically happens every three years). Prospect.5 Executive Director Nick Stillman said the organization had to furlough its entire staff for six months in 2020. Thankfully, they were able to bring everyone back.
Fifty-one artists are featured in Prospect.5, nine of whom are from New Orleans. The Susan Brennan Artistic Directors of Prospect.5, Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, selected the artists over a period of many months.
Stillman said Prospect.5’s theme is about reflecting on whether we are living in unprecedented times and, if there are precedents, what the precedents to the current moment might be. He said the theme was initially chosen as a response to the Donald Trump presidency, but the theme became even more relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world.
Stillman added that Prospect.5 always looks for new, fresh perspectives. They do not want to recycle other shows.
“New Orleans is an arts-savvy city that doesn’t want to see gestures repeated,” Stillman said. “We want to find artists who have not been recognized or given attention.”
Venues and satellite venues are spread across New Orleans and include places like the Contemporary Arts Center and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. But organizers believed an important part of Prospect.5 is that there are venues in many of New Orleans’ unique neighborhoods. Traveling the city to see the exhibitions is a part of the Prospect.5 experience.
“The title of this year’s Prospect.5 ‘Yesterday We Said Tomorrow’ really resonated with me, since my work is about engaging the past in the contemporary moment,” said Dawoud Bey, a Chicago-based artist whose exhibit, “In This Here Place,” is on display at The Historic New Orleans Collection in the French Quarter. Bey continued, “It’s been good to be included in such an engaging and dynamic citywide curatorial project in one of my favorite cities with this work.”
Bey’s exhibit consists of a series of landscape photography taken on and around plantations in Louisiana, showcasing the places and environments in which enslaved societies lived and worked.
Another show called “We Served” by New Orleans-based artist Malcolm Peacock would go to the house/apartment/hotel room of any participant who RSVP’d to it. Once a participant RSVP’d, an arrangement would be made for a time. A meal would be served during the performance. Peacock said the approximately-hour-long show was never the same. He said it was dependent on the interaction between artist and participant.
Peacock was inspired to create the show by his two years of experience working in the service industry in New Orleans. He also wanted to explore concepts of service and servitude as they relate to Blackness and individuality in America.
“The work deals really closely with our understandings of hospitality and hostility,” Peacock said. “I’m extremely interested in moments of rupture from normalcy.”
Uptown resident Matthew Warren participated in We Served, and spoke enthusiastically of the experience.
“It’s difficult to articulate the power that Malcolm held in the room – and also the vulnerability that was part of the exchange, both on his part and mine,” Warren said. “The work is not defined by one moment, but more by the sustained and almost palpable feelings that the artist conveys through the intimate and familiar notion of nourishing another through food.”
Warren said the total experience helped him reach new feelings of growth and understanding.
“After We Served, my soul felt nourished. Malcolm is creating space for dialogue and discovery in a way that is so different from conversation or a classroom – he is sharing his truth,” Warren said.
In addition to the main exhibition, Prospect also hosts the Prospect.5 Satellite Program to showcase local artists, collectives, galleries and other art producers contributing to New Orleans’ cultural ecosystem. The current program features seven projects, including exhibitions, installations, encounters and provocations in venues across the city. The projects, selected from a call for proposals, examine the city’s historic and contemporary issues.
One of the satellite shows is “Sugar,” curated by Denise Frazier and Renee Royale, at the Antenna Gallery on St. Claude Avenue. The works in “Sugar” focus on how humans interact with sugar as an idea, a substance, a source of addiction, a metaphor for privilege, and more.
Sugar consists of the work of many artists. One of the featured installations in “Sugar” is Shana M. griffin’s [sic] “Soil,” an installation of over 80 jars of soil, plant matter, found objects and photographs from the grounds of 29 current and former sugarcane plantations across nine parishes.
When griffin was collecting the soil, she said it provoked thoughts of the enslaved people who worked those plantations generations before. She also reflected on how Louisiana moved from the destructiveness of sugar plantations to the destructiveness of the petrochemical industry.
“The soil bore witness to the violence of harvesting and the cultivation of sugar,” griffin said.
Royale accompanied griffin on some of her soil-collecting journeys and was also moved by the experience.
“The soil is the bearer of untold stories,” Royale said.
“Sugar” features a wide variety of art forms, including Robin Levy’s “Up to My Ears,” a close-up portrait of the artist encased in 600 pounds of sugar. It’s a depiction of sugar’s addictive nature. James W. Goedert created “Stan Danley’s Stress Ball Stand,” featuring stress balls made of sugar. Photographer L. Kasimu Harris took life-sized sugarcane photographs as a way to immerse viewers in the sheer vastness of the sugarcane fields.
The virtual exhibit for “Sugar” can be viewed at www.antenna.works/sugar.
The other six projects in the Satellite exhibit are: Arts Council of New Orleans and Young Artists Movement with Carl Joe Williams (“Unity and Harmony”); David T. Baker & The Press Club of New Orleans (“Life Through the Lens”); Generic Solutions (“Face Value: The Illusions of Power and Money”); Lucky Art Fair (“Uptown Laundry”); Refocus (“The My New Orleans Photo Project”); and Sarrah Danziger (“Listen to New Orleans”).
Aside from being an exciting cultural event for local aficionados, Prospect.5 is a boon for the city’s economy as well. Stillman said a low estimate of Prospect.5’s economic impact on New Orleans would be approximately $10 million. Money is spent on local art workers, as well as in hotels and restaurants. Artists and patrons from around the world travel to see the show.
“Artists get a chance to meet each other and see New Orleans,” Stillman said. “It creates conversations that might not otherwise happen.”
More information about Prospect.5 exhibitions and events can be found online at www.prospect5.org.
This article originally published in the January 17, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
