Prospect New Orleans is a citywide contemporary art triennial and the only exhibition of its kind in the US with a decade-long history. Every three years, we bring new art to an old city by inviting artists from all over the world to create projects in a wide variety of venues spread throughout New Orleans. Each iteration of Prospect is organized by a leading voice in the curatorial field. For residents and visitors alike, Prospect is an invitation to experience the city through the eyes of artists.

This presentation at the Newcomb Art Museum brings together an intergenerational group of artists whose labor-intensive practices attest to the ways that the devotional and the secular converge. The tactility, materiality, and unabashed beauty of these works is a resolute statement of presence and insists on the value of making and creation. Each artist engages in a form of intricate world building that reflects the spiritual, the personal, and the social.

The landscapes and scenes on view allow us to imagine ourselves within these invented spaces, while drawing our attention to the fragility of the natural world and our social and civic lives. Each work contends with a notion of time––memorials and stories against forgetting, an otherworldly plane that is infinite, and nature’s cycles of growth, death, and rebirth. The works reveal a relationship to memory that resists the suppression of complex histories and conjures the imaginative possibilities of other places and narratives. These artists offer moments of escape and mark our deep connection to the world around us, suggesting other ways we might inhabit and shape it.

Presented by the Wagner Foundation.