Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp
Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, Prospect New Orleans
November 18, 2017- February 25, 2018
Artistic Director: Trevor Schonnmaker
Prospect New Orleans
"Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp," the fourth iteration of a citywide exhibition that opens November 16-19, 2017, finds inspiration in the lotus plant. This aquatic perennial takes root in the fetid but nutrient-rich mud of swamps so that its beautiful flower may rise above the murky water. The flower’s grace is inextricably connected to the noisome swamp, just as redemption exists in ruin and creativity in destruction. Viewed as a symbol of spiritual enlightenment in Buddhism and Hinduism, the lotus suggests the possibility of overcoming arduous challenges. It reminds us that, from the depths of difficulty and desolation, art brings the invisible to light.
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Prospect.4 (P.4) overlaps with the city of New Orleans’s tricentennial celebration—the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Nouvelle-Orléans by the French in 1718. Because of this serendipitous intersection, P.4 takes the city’s distinctive character as a point of departure to investigate global concerns. As with prior Prospects, it is committed to being an international exhibition, while also directing more of its focus southward, placing greater emphasis on art and artists who engage with the American South and the Global South, particularly those from North America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Africa and the European countries that colonized these regions.
Prospect.4 featured 73 artists and collectives at 17 sites across the city of New Orleans.
Prospect.3: Notes for Now
Curatorial Associate, Prospect New Orleans
2014 - 2015
Artistic Director: Franklin Sirmans
Prospect New Orleans
In Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer, the protagonist Binx Bolling is consumed by “the search” in the week leading up to his thirtieth birthday. Pointedly, the birthday falls on Ash Wednesday—the day after the most important holiday in New Orleans, Mardi Gras. Though Binx’s attendance at the carnival is peripheral, there’s much to be learned from his vantage point at the margins of the crowd. Bolling, a solitary moviegoer, lives his life on the margin, slowly creeping closer to the center as he embraces “the search.” He begins the book in the isolated suburbs of New Orleans, comfortably away, and apart from other people’s lives, but finds solace in the contested city by its end. The novel, set in a time of heightened social awareness in the first half of the decade’s movement for civil rights in America, delves into the depths of existentialism in a world where people were legally segregated from each other, making it impossible to celebrate the individual. “The peculiar institution” of slavery and immigration during the 18th century created a city that, even in 1961, was a complex social arrangement, one that remains palpable today. The third Prospect biennial (Prospect.3) invested in and explored ‘the search’ to find the self and the necessity of the other as part of that quest.
Prospect.3 featured 54 artists and collectives at 18 sites across the city of New Orleans.
A Perpetual Journey
Curator
March 14 - April 26, 2014
PARSE NOLA
“A Perpetual Journey” brings together nine artists whose work investigates the infinite ways of defining one’s identity. Challenging truths, fictions, and expectations about how one characterizes oneself, the works in this exhibition consider how gender, sexual orientation, education, occupation, and cultural identity position the individual within society. Through interactive installations, painting, sound, and video, the works included prompt a hypothetical cleansing of the past and allude to metaphorical platforms for actively searching for one’s standing in the present. The exhibition takes its title from Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself.” In the sense of Whitman’s poem—and specifically his words, “I tramp a perpetual journey”—the exhibition aims to be a site of many departure points through which the visitor might consider and experience the longing, inspiration, and potential liberation that may be faced in the ongoing search for self.
Participating artists include Lawrence Abu-Hamdan (London, England), Rachel Jones Deris (New Orleans, LA), Nicole Miller (Los Angeles, CA), Duane Pitre (New Orleans, LA),Ana Prvacki & Sam Durant (Los Angeles, CA), Lucy Raven & Alex Abramovich (Oakland, CA and Astoria, NY), and Elizabeth Shannon (New Orleans, LA).
The River Between Us
Assistant Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions, Longue Vue House and Gardens
September 26 - December 1, 2013
Longue Vue House and Gardens, New Orleans and Lauemier Sculpture Park, St. Louis
New Orleans and St. Louis have many issues in common and are physically linked by the mighty Mississippi River. In 2013, Longue Vue House and Gardens presented "The River Between Us," an indoor and outdoor art exhibition showcasing works that reflect how the lives of people in both communities have been intertwined with the river’s role in American history.
"The River Between Us" featured commissions by local, national, and international artists inspired by the two locations, and historical documents culled from local institutions. New Orleans and St. Louis’ links through trade, social, and cultural exchange date back to pre-historic Mississippi cultures and "The River Between Us" responds to the past as it impacts the future. Participating artists include Matts Leiderstam, Ken Lum, Mel Watkin, Bernard Williams, Courtney Egan & Helen Hill, Henry Lewis, Sarah Quintana & Kat Sotelo, and Alec Soth, among others.
Doug and Gene Meyer: The Longue Vue Installation
Assistant Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions, Longue Vue House and Gardens
February 1-March 31, 2013
Longue Vue House and Gardens
Longue Vue welcomed designers Doug and Gene Meyer for a spectacular installation throughout the house and gardens. The designers intervened in the classic New Orleans home, showcasing their rugs, furniture, home accessories and fashion designs. The Meyer brothers also designed and incorporated their outdoor fabrics on the patio furniture in the estate’s gardens. Simultaneous to their interventions in the existing home and gardens, they developed a new site-specific installation in the Whim House, as well as a retrospective exhibition of their work in the Changing Exhibition Gallery.
Ritual Forms: The Sculptures and Drawings of Clyde Connell
Assistant Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions, Longue Vue House and Gardens
October 19-December 21, 2012
Longue Vue House and Gardens
With a mystical view of nature and a deep connection to her home in northwest Louisiana, artist Clyde Connell created sculptures and wall reliefs that expressed her sympathy with the culture of African-Americans during the turn of the century and the pictographic works of “music heard on the bayous.” Connell became internationally known in the 1970s during an increased awareness of stylistic pluralism, feminism, and “regional artists.” She first exhibited works outside of Louisiana in 1974 at the Bauman Gallery in Los Angeles and made her New York debut at the Delahunty Gallery in 1980. Her work is included in the collections of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, Texas.