Laura Aguilar
b. 1959, San Gabriel, California
d. 2018, Los Angeles
Venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11–5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
The selection of works on view by Laura Aguilar features some of her best-known images, self-portraits that use landscape to explore her relationship to Mexican and American history and culture, her sexual identity, and the hybrid spaces in between.
In the series Nature Self-Portraits, Aguilar is pictured in compositions in which her body mirrors geological formations, portraying herself as part of nature, vulnerable to its rigid terrains and their histories. Exposed in this way, Aguilar negotiated among her identities, using her body to converse with and overwrite topography. Her self-portraits challenge the conception of the historical document through an emphasis on her body as an archive and suggest the interconnectedness of ourselves and the larger world we inhabit. For her Stillness series, Aguilar placed herself in a reverent relationship to nature; though still a part of nature, she embodied a humble yet autonomous presence in the larger natural world. In these images, Aguilar’s body references but ultimately eschews the aesthetics and values of the long history of the female nude in art. In using her body as her main subject and revealing it in the contours of different contexts, Aguilar brought forward her identity in her works amid the difficult narratives of settler colonialism and silenced histories.
About the artist
Laura Aguilar spent most of her prolific career examining her identity as a Chicana lesbian artist. After studying photography at East Los Angeles College, her production in her early career was characterized by portraits of diverse communities in the Los Angeles area and self-portraits, which are representations of herself as a complex individual: Chicana, lesbian, and struggling with learning disabilities and depression. Later she would incorporate nude self-portraits and nude portraits of other women into her work, challenging contemporary depictions of beauty and highlighting the intimacy between the female form and nature. Her photographs first expose the visibility of these underrepresented and marginalized women, then celebrate them. Aguilar died at age 58, when recognition of her work was gaining momentum. Since her passing, she has joined the ranks of other iconic female photographers. Among her many notable exhibitions are her participation in the 45th Venice Biennale (1993), The Huntington Library Art Collections (2008), The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, (2010) and her solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell at The Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2017–18).
Laura Aguilar, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photos 1 and 2: Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee; Photos 3 and 4: Alex Marks
Keni Anwar
b. 1993, Mobile, Alabama
Lives in New Orleans
Venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, Closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
The multimedia installation untitled (i am) is a culmination of their practice over the past four years that explores infinite possibilities within the individual. In it, they offer themselves up for examination and present an investigation of love, desire, and acceptance.
Centering healing, reflection, and ritual, the project’s centerpiece is a short film in which the artist enacts this journey of self-discovery and transformation. The images of self in silhouette, present but not entirely visible, and of the glowing dawn landscape of the city and surrounding natural environment, locate the artist's work and life within the broader world we inhabit, itself a site of constant transformation and rebirth. Alongside the film, the artist has produced two self-portraits and an altar that features excerpts of texts from a book they are working on as part of this project. These components emphasize the work’s spiritual core, one untethered from the strictures of organized religion and rigid frameworks of identity, creating space for those who exist in between.
About the artist
Born in Alabama and raised in New Orleans, Keni Anwar’s work responds to their experience as a queer Black person in the American South. They is a writer, visual artist, and musician who studied public relations and graphic design at Loyola University, New Orleans. Anwar draws inspiration from the Nile and Mississippi Rivers, the color blue, and ancestral veneration in their exploration of past trauma and the pursuit of individual exploration and freedom. Their Southern Baptist heritage is often the lens through which they explore race, gender, and sexual identity in what are mainly self-portraits in various mediums that incorporate words, imagery, and sound. Anwar’s work invites others to examine their own worlds and origins as a path to self-liberation.
Keni Anwar, untitled (i am), 2021. Multimedia installation, dimensions variable. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Felipe Baeza
b. 1987, Guanajuanto, Mexico
Lives in New Haven Connecticut and New York
Venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, Closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Using collage and décollage, processes that involve adding and removing materials, as well as printmaking techniques, Felipe Baeza’s multimedia works on paper explore the adaptive, resilient nature of the body in peril. Celebrating the beauty of the fugitive figure, El eco de una ruptura fugitive (The echo of a fugitive rupture, 2020) features compositions populated by fragmented, dismantled body parts that sprout vegetation from their severed limbs. The figure’s dismemberment signifies the trauma of past violence and separation. These sites of rupture and mourning, however, also represent fertile soil for growth from which new, fortified life blooms. Informed by his own experience with displacement and immigration, Baeza’s focus on physical transformation and regeneration works to affirm the histories of marginalized and persecuted peoples.
In conversation with Laura Aguilar’s photographs featured on the adjacent wall, Baeza’s works visualize imagined bodies inhabited by and transmogrifying into nature, while Aguilar utilized her own body to inhabit and pay homage to the natural world. Both pull inspiration from the body’s connection to the environment to speak to histories within queer Latinx communities. Baeza merges the corporeal and the botanical in a fantastical fashion to allude to alternative futures born from, and not limited by, past trauma.
About the artist
Felipe Baeza is a painter and printmaker whose work, primarily focused on the intersection of fugitive bodies with natural environments, seeks to situate the individual within the social and historical context of cultural practices. Baeza’s Mexican heritage informs his work through metaphor, allowing him to transform memories and history and transport viewers through past experiences, both real and imagined. His recent exhibitions include Through the Flesh to Elsewhere, the Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2020); NXTHVN: First Year Fellows, Tilton Gallery, New York (2019–20); and Felipe Baeza, Maureen Paley, London (2018). He earned a BFA from Cooper Union, New York (2009), and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (2018).
Felipe Baeza, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Kevin Beasley
b. 1985, Lynchburg, Virginia
Lives in New York
Venues
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, Closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
1741 Forstall Street
1741 Forstall Street, New Orleans, LA 70117
neighborhoods
Downtown / Central Business District (CBD)
About the Project
Kevin Beasley’s work is featured in two Prospect.5 venues, the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) and at property in New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward. Each location holds related parts of an expansive project centered on the purchase of a plot of land in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, an important site for Black life and culture in the city. The project is an outgrowth of time spent on the ground in the city and an extension of the artist’s interest in land stewardship and landscape.
Each of the five drawings on view at the CAC depicts property in the Lower Ninth Ward. They are detailed, handmade translations of photographs the artist took that document these sites. The casual snapshot quality of the images stands in contrast to the intricate, carefully attentive drawings. They are, like the landscapes they show, both quotidian and profound. They simultaneously show us common places and reflect the greater meaning of land ownership and all it can signify for a person––a space of potential, investment, and community. Like many works on view here, the drawings reveal how the physical act of making something is also a way of learning and knowing.
About the artist
Kevin Beasley received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit (2007), and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2012). Spanning sculpture, photography, sound and performance, the core of Beasley’s practice rests in the synthesis of objects and materials steeped in personal and generational memory. In gathering clothing, objects, sounds, and studio happenings, Beasley generates a material history—one that is altered, molded, cast, and rebuilt. The artist draws from sculptural tradition through a lens of his own physicality, allowing found materials of personal and cultural significance to regenerate, existing simultaneously as they were and as they will become. His work has been exhibited in recent years at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018–2019); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2018); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016–17); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2016); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); and MoMA PS1, New York (2015). He has held residences at the Studio Museum in Harlem; Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva Island, Florida; Delfina Foundation, London; and A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa.
Kevin Beasley, 2021–22. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee.
Phoebe Boswell
b. 1982, Nairobi
Lives in London
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Do We Muse On The Sky Or Remember The Sea, 2021
Multimedia installation, with sound
Courtesy of the artist
Phoebe Boswell’s multimedia installation is an exploration of the present realities and imagined futures of Black life and death in relation to the sea. Inspired by scholar Christina Sharpe’s pivotal text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being and what writer Rinaldo Walcott terms the “Black aquatic,” Boswell investigates bodies of water as archives of Black histories—histories of trade, trafficking, forced migrations, fugitivity, subjugation, and refusal—while suggesting the possibility of a different future. A black horizon was painted across the rounded walls of the gallery, recalling the swell and recession of what could be the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Mississippi River, the Venetian Lagoon, the Mediterranean, or the English Channel. Boswell’s drawings, made directly on the wall, reference archival images as well as her own photographs of individuals she has encountered abroad and in New Orleans.
Accompanying the drawings is an audio piece composed of voices, bass, and saxophone, created in collaboration with renowned jazz saxophonist and composer J. D. Allen. Boswell features the voices of writers, scholars, and artists—including Sharpe, Walcott, and Saidiya Hartman, among others, each responding to the prompts: “What is freedom?” and “What does freedom mean to you?” as well as scholar Keguro Macharia’s stirring provocation, “How will you practice freedom today?” While the imagery references the ocean as a vessel of Black lives and histories, the audio components exist seemingly above the horizon, creating a sky full of promising voices from our present. This encompassing, meditative installation encourages visitors to imagine Black futures and Black freedom with water as a site for a gathering of portraits, voices, and stories from across the African diaspora.
About the artist
Kenyan-born multimedia artist and filmmaker Phoebe Boswell grew up in the Arabian Gulf and London, where she studied at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art. Boswell’s production includes charcoal and pastel drawings of enormous proportions that recount on a grand scale the griefs, traumas, journeys and triumphs of her subjects in a manner that recalls the allegorical epics of medieval tapestries. She explores themes of migration and belonging in the visual recounting of her own history and the stories of her subjects, which often take on a mythic quality. Her work is infused with digital media, such as animation, film, interactivity, and audio, elements that she uses to represent feminine and marginalized subjects. Boswell has won several awards and accolades, including the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2017 and the 2020 Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. EXPO Chicago hosted her solo presentation She Summons an Army, and Sapar Contemporary, New York, hosted Phoebe Boswell: Take Me to the Lighthouse (both 2018). Her work was shown at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015). Her collaborative film Dear Mr Shakespeare was selected for the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, in 2017.
Phoebe Boswell, Do We Muse On The Sky Or Remember The Sea, 2021. Multimedia installation, with sound, dimensions variable. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Mark Bradford
b. 1961, Los Angeles
Lives in Los Angeles
Venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Wednesday–Monday, 11 AM – 5 PM
Tuesday, Closed
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
ABout the artist
Crates of Mallus, 2020–21
Mixed media
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Lifelong Angeleno Mark Bradford earned a BFA and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is best known for his textural, multimedia abstract paintings, although his practice also encompasses video and print. Bradford seeks to reveal the hidden layers of the world around us with collections of scavenged and found objects turned into large-scale collages and installations. He gleans the evidence of invisible and marginalized people (such as migrant communities), of appropriated spaces, and of underground economies and translates their stories into tangible physical forms. His practice includes using paper as paint, texture, and dimension. Bradford also incorporates such items as billboards, handbills, signs, advertising, and rope in his works. His materials are reflective of the places where these items were scavenged: advertisements for food and housing assistance, legal services, and debt relief. The finished pieces subtly mirror the lives and places of the objects’ former owners. Bradford has also become an advocate for accessibility to the arts in disadvantaged communities. He has formed several collaborations with organizations and institutions in the Los Angeles area to encourage engagement with the arts and to give access to educational and social resources to benefit the communities he includes in his practice. Bradford’s work has won him wide recognition and several accolades. Mark Bradford. Tomorrow Is Another Day was featured in the United States Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennial (2017) and at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2018–19). Other recent exhibitions include Mark Bradford: Los Angeles, Long Museum, Shanghai (2019); Mark Bradford Pickett’s Charge, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2017–20); and Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015).
Mark Bradford, Crates of Mallus, 2021. Multi media installation, dimensions variable. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Jamal Cyrus
b. 1973, Houston
Lives in Houston
Venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, Closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Jamal Cyrus’s artistic practice focuses on the cultural and political histories of the Black diaspora, mapping threads that move across and through different generations and global geographies. His work is suffused with references to radical politics, vernacular traditions, and especially music—exemplified by the three-part sculpture on view made from percussive instruments, Batterie of the West Wind (For Nina and Mariam) (2021). The French word batterie is used in Haiti to refer to drum “families”—groupings of high, medium, and low tones. This sculpture’s three parts thus symbolize two parents and one child. Cyrus also draws from the social and political histories of drumming, such as drum circles, which, associated with Black rebellion, were outlawed in many parts of the American South, leading to the creation of the drum set in New Orleans, an instrument that united the drum family under one musician. In bringing these fantastical musical instruments into conversation with one another, Batterie of the West Wind (For Nina and Mariam) speaks to histories of rupture and reconnection.
In recent years, Cyrus has created abstract textile works that combine strips of glued denim culled from blue jeans, reflecting his abiding fascination with the cultural histories embedded in objects and materials. These works foreground the significance of this textile and of indigo in Black American history. The varied hues and textures of the sheared denim pieces in River Bends to Gulf (Double time) (2021) give the impression of a vast, rippling body of water. This work embeds numerical references to passages from the Book of Exodus that tell of the Jewish people’s escape from slavery in Egypt, stories that resonated with the plight of enslaved Black people. The circular shape of Inner Necessity of Outer Time (Run Mary Run) (2021) resembles a kind of mandala, drawing its form from a music or dance chart, while its spinning blackness suggests the surface of a record and the expansiveness of space itself. Both tapestry works have a diagrammatic quality that suggests an embodied vision for the complexity and unknowability of the universe and history.
ABout the Artist
Houston native Jamal Cyrus received a BFA from the University of Houston (2004) and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2008). He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 2005. As a visual artist, his work is primarily concerned with the political potential of African American popular cultural production and its containment through governmental and corporate forces. Cyrus uses unexpected and evocative artifacts and references in his storytelling. As he discovers the legacy of African Americans through his own work, he regards his pieces as self-educational, a collective making-up-for-lost-time after having endured forms of historical erasure while growing up in the Southern U.S. Cyrus has won several awards, including the David Driskell Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and he was an artist-in-residence at Artpace San Antonio. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2013); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2012); and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2011).
Jamal Cyrus, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photos: Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee
Karon Davis
b. 1977, Reno, Nevada
Lives in Los Angeles
Venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, Closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
about the artist
Karon Davis grew up in New York, attended Spelman College, Atlanta, and film school at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is the cofounder of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. Her background in dance, film, and theater informs her approach to representing the human body and physical relationships through figurative sculpture. She sculpts in plaster, a medium that conveys a sense of the temporary, of having captured a fleeting, singular moment in time. Like Egyptian mummies and archeological remains, Davis’s work conveys a historical record through the body. Her sculptures are deeply personal, often an expression of her past traumas and grief. Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, has hosted her exhibitions Karon Davis: Muddy Water (2018) and Karon Davis: Pain Management (2016). Her work was also featured in Rock My Soul, Victoria Miro Gallery, London (2019). Her work is held in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Rubell Museum, Miami; and Brooklyn Museum, among others.
Karon Davis, Mary, from the series Pain Management, 2016. Plaster, wire, paper, plastic pipe, and glass eyes, 44 x 33 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches. Installation view: Prospect.5 Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
ektor garcia
b. 1985, Red Bluff, California
Lives in Mexico, New York, and elsewhere
Venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
ektor garcia works across a variety of handcraft techniques to produce visceral sculptural installations that index their making and, indirectly, the artist’s life and travels. For Prospect.5 garcia presents a body of crochet sculptures he made in New Orleans and Mexico City over the last year. The artist creates metal knots utilizing a textile practice that has been passed down to him through his matriarchal line. The ephemerality of the fabrics referenced in his work and the kind of generational knowledge that shapes this project––and our lives more broadly––is challenged by the permanent nature of the artist’s materials, which include bronze, copper, and aluminum.
The artist has repeatedly used the image of butterflies in his crochet works. Frequently traveling between the United States and Mexico, he celebrates the beauty of butterflies as delicate migratory creatures. Mariposa, the Spanish word for butterfly, is also a derogatory term for queer men in Mexico. Embracing this symbol and this term, garcia acts in defiance against the homophobia he has experienced in both countries. He centers instead the transformative nature of the butterfly. As garcia constantly works while traveling, his practice represents an evolving embodiment of his life, informed by conditions, circumstances, and decisions that are continually unfolding.
About the artist
ektor garcia’s practice utilizes craftwork connected to his own biography and cultural inheritance, including queer culture and traditional Mexican craft. Individual works and installations make use of deeply varied textures, techniques, and materials side-by-side, such as lace, weaving, and crochet, as well as ceramics and metalwork. His pieces can be at once sensual, evoking the human body, as well as reference architectural and natural forms. Conceptually speaking, his work subtly conveys historical and biographical narratives counterposed with brutal political commentary on those same subjects. His pieces often give the impression of a collection of family heirlooms or exhumed artifacts, suggesting an embedded past and future in each object. His work has been exhibited in solo shows at the SculptureCenter, New York (2019), and Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019), and in group exhibitions at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen, Colorado (2019); LAXART, Los Angeles (2018); and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2017). garcia earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2014) and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, New York (2016).
ektor garcia, ppportales mariposas, 2021. Lost-wax cast aluminum and bronze, crochet copper wire, dimensions variable. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Sky Hopinka
b. 1984, Ferndale, Washington
Lives in New York
Venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM – 5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
The Island Weights, 2021
Two-channel color HD video, with sound, 10 min.
Courtesy the artist
Sky Hopinka’s two-channel film is a cycle centered on the narrative of the Island Weights—one of the Ho-Chunk creation stories about four individual water spirits sent to the cardinal points of the Earth to keep it from spinning out chaotically. Originating in what is now Wisconsin, the Ho-Chunk nation—which translates to “People of the Big Voice”—spans from Red Banks to Trempealeau and across the pines and the waterways from Minneapolis to Milwaukee. Broken into five parts—wijirawaséwe (the Island Weights), yoiréreginarere (the west one), rek’úhuhíra (the south one), hą́boguominàgara (the eastern one), siniwagúreginągere (the north one)—the film accompanies an individual narrating their journey along these boundaries of Ho-Chunk homelands in search of the worn and weary Weights. Images take viewers from the churning waters of the Mississippi River into serene forests, over still lakes, through vast shopping malls, along earthen effigy mounds, and the platformed remnants of Cahokian society. The narrator is attempting not simply to meet the Weights, but to restore the tired beings who have kept this world in place.
About the artist
Sky Hopinka is a multimedia artist whose preferred medium of video installation focuses on the historical narrative of native peoples and uses language as a tool to examine identity, culture, and the influence of colonialism particularly on the native populations of northern Wisconsin, Southern California, and the Pacific Northwest. Hopinka’s installations are organized in such a way that viewers have a sense of moving through locations in Hopinka’s footsteps, emphasizing the significance of land and landscape to history and one’s cultural identity. Hopinka’s work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017). He has screened films at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; New York Film Festival; Crossroads Film Festival, Jackson, Mississippi; and Filmfest DC, Washington, DC. Hopinka earned a BA from Portland State University, Oregon, and an MFA in film, video, animation, and new genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Sky Hopinka, The Island Weights, 2021. Two-channel color HD video, with sound, 10 minutes. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Dave McKenzie
b. 1977, Kingston, Jamaica
Lives in New York
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Wednesday–Monday, 11 AM – 5 PM
Tuesday, closed
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the program
After taking part in Prospect.1 in 2008, Dave McKenzie has been invited back to New Orleans along with four other returning artists to create work for this edition of the triennial. For his original project, McKenzie made a commitment to revisit the city annually for ten years in a piece aptly titled I’ll Be Back. The work operated as a kind of verbal contract, one to be taken on faith with this place, as the artist created no documentation of his visits and, like many of his works, it has become a piece of quotidian mythology. The decade-long project encompassing McKenzie’s yearly sojourns to New Orleans overlapped with the passing of his father, Wilfred, in 2010. His current project elaborates on mortality and mourning in the form of a funerary memorial devoted to Wilfred. Titled 831-195-G Hope—the location of his father’s niche at Hope Mausoleum in New Orleans—the work reveals how this city unexpectedly serves as a site of interment for McKenzie’s grief around his father’s death.
His ode appears in two sites: the museum gallery and Hope Mausoleum. Three documentary photographs in handmade frames are included here, serving as an index for this project. They depict a bracelet that once belonged to his father, the handmade box the artist placed the bracelet in, and the site where this object was interred. Ultimately, McKenzie has created a burial location that features a memento of his father that, without his father’s remains, functions as a cenotaph, an empty tomb or monument to someone buried elsewhere. While the bodily absence of Wilfred and his biographical disconnection from New Orleans underscore the arbitrariness of the entombment, and perhaps of our rituals around death more generally, the project’s role in blurring the line between McKenzie’s artistic and familial commitments offers a poetic and open logic around memory, grief, and place. As a cenotaph, 831-195-G Hope unfolds new possibilities of recollection across public-private and personal-professional divides.
about the artist
In his videos, sculptures, performances, and installations, Dave McKenzie explores how public space and the private self are simultaneously alienated, connected, and restricted. At the heart of McKenzie’s diverse practice lies a poetic quest for interaction that lays bare the complications of social rules and obligations with which we navigate personal relationships. Dave McKenzie received a BFA in printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (2000) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. McKenzie’s recent solo exhibitions include Speeches, Speeches, Speeches, Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin; An Intermission, University Art Museum, State University of New York, Albany; Where the Good Lord Split You, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Dave McKenzie, Aspen Art Museum; Screen Doors on Submarines, REDCAT, Los Angeles; and Momentum 8: Dave McKenzie, ICA Boston. McKenzie’s work has been included in several biennials and notable group exhibitions including: Soft Power, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the 2014 Whitney Biennial; Etched in Collective History, at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas; and Prospect.1, New Orleans.
Dave McKenzie, 831-195-G Hope, 2021. Photographs in artist-made frames, 19 ½ x 14 ½ x 1 ½ inches. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Hương Ngô
b. 1979, Hong Kong
Lives in Chicago
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
about the project
Hương Ngô’s installation explores translations across cultural contexts and across objects, beings, and ideas. She uses archival imagery and printed media to draw together the histories of French colonial practices around agriculture, labor, economy, and environment in Vietnam and Louisiana. In both colonial encounters, the French attempted––and failed––to import their form of silk trade. As Ngô details in her newsprint takeaway, the Vietnamese had a thriving silk industry that the French disrupted with the unsuccessful introduction of their own silkworms and different technologies, and the establishment of the silk industry in Louisiana likewise failed, overtaken by cotton. While reproductions of archival materials displayed in the handcrafted case show images of colonial farming in Vietnam, the artist has framed and preserved images of branches taken from mulberry trees in New Orleans, an invasive reminder of the presence of French colonialism.
Ngô is keenly aware of how these histories reverberate in the present—in the populations of Vietnamese, Native, and Black people who have passed through and remain in Louisiana and in the altered landscape that we inhabit today. The hectograph-print posters hanging from the rafters declare in Louisiana Creole, Kouri-Vini, and Vietnamese: “We are still here.” These low-tech, highly accessible prints created using a water solution reference the Communist anti-colonial movement that employed this medium to swiftly disseminate sensitive information. In New Orleans, hectography takes on added layers of meaning because the printmaking process relies on the use of water, a force that has brought commerce and life to the port city while harboring potential violence. The newsprint takeaway that accompanies this installation, along with the other forms of print material, details the artist’s own interventions into these histories, weaving together seemingly disparate narratives to reveal and fill crucial gaps in the archives.
ABout the artist
Hương Ngô’s history growing up as a refugee in the American South informs her lines of inquiry on colonialism and migration in her interdisciplinary, conceptual practice. Through multivalent interrogations of language, she mobilizes personal and collective histories to make visible larger structures of power and subjectivities of often marginalized populations, such as early twentieth-century Vietnamese revolutionary women. Ngô searches archives for the artifacts and texts that inform her work, translating these items from historical objects into art. Ngô received a grant from the Fulbright Scholar Program in Vietnam in 2016. Among other galleries and institutions, her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the New Museum, New York. She earned a BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2001), an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), and was a studio fellow at the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2012. She is currently Assistant Professor in Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Hương Ngô, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Eric-Paul Riege
b. 1994, Gallup, New Mexico
Lives in Gallup, New Mexico
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Eric-Paul Riege’s massive textile installation titled + (pronounced like the Navajo/Diné lower-case “t”) resulted from a collaboration with the materials at play. Riege responded to the wool, cotton, and polyester materials he used, employing them to their fullest potential to create a sacred structure that calls in his ancestors. The artist remarked of the making of this piece that such a labor-intensive process is guided by his hands knowing what to do before his mind does, revealing the way in which making is a form of learning. The artist animates his art as he creates it, giving it charge through his labor and his bodily and personal connections to it. Seeing the work as constantly evolving, he also activates it in the gallery space—four cloaks placed on the backs of eight-legged sheep will be donned by the artist at the close of the exhibition, allowing him to become enveloped in the fibrous materials and invigorated by the piece and the spirits called to it.
A mixture of natural and synthetic materials, the plush, eight-legged sheep—each kept within eight vertically hung soft “stalls”—look out from the center, suggesting their interaction with visitors. They pay homage to the animals from which their materials are taken as well as to the spider, which, in Navajo/Diné mythology, is the original weaver of this planet and teacher of this sacred tradition. The structure forms a cross, referencing the four cardinal directions, a means of diagramming and making tangible history, self, and world. At the center hangs an enlarged, soft pendant earring. Meant to be worn by the gods, the pendant also honors jewelers and craftspeople as memory makers and culture bearers. Combining the playful and the spiritual, the physical and the non-material, this structure embodies the artist’s worldview informed by and in reverence for his Navajo/Diné heritage and the natural world within a lineage of textile and craft practitioners.
about the artist
Working across media, with an emphasis on woven sculpture, wearable art, and durational performance, Eric-Paul Riege and his work celebrates hózhó, the worldview fostered by Diné, or Navajo, and its bearing on everyday experience. It is a philosophy encompassing beauty, balance, goodness, and harmony in all things physical, mental, and spiritual. His practice narrates his personal history and the rituals and traditional stories of his ancestors, while paying homage to generations of weavers in his family. Riege’s work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019), and at the 2018 SITElines Biennial, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He earned a BFA in Studio Art and Ecology from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 2017.
Eric-Paul Riege, +, 2021. Mixed fibers, dimensions variable. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
about the project
Cuervo and Low-Polygon Poem, 2021
Two-channel color HD video with sound; 26 mins.
Courtesy the artist
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s video is an interrogation of place, the Caribbean specifically, as well as the medium of film itself. Projecting onto both a traditional screen and a sheer curtain, Santiago Muñoz’s video combines footage from her native Puerto Rico and a 2020 trip to Haiti to visualize links between these places and New Orleans, which is often referred to as “the northernmost Caribbean city.” The film moves swiftly between documentation, interviews, scientific and computer-generated footage, and ethereal imagery, juxtaposing the everyday with the otherworldly while pointing to the ecological and cultural similarities and divergences among these places. Translation emerges as a mode of differentiation: in Puerto Rico, flour and salt suggest bread, but in Haiti they suggest veves—religious symbols used in various Voodoo practices.
The video is at times obscured by a darkness that comes after nightfall in regions that have experienced widespread power outages, like those that followed Hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico—familiar to those who experienced Hurricane Ida in 2021 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans. Santiago Muñoz also interrogates the medium of film by the other sense central to film: hearing. What does the taste of salt sound like? Is it possible to translate from one sense to another? Is translation between languages (or places, spaces, perspectives) even truly possible, or is it always merely an approximation?
about the artist
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist who works primarily with film and video, whether as single-channel works or moving image installations. She approaches each work as a structured improvisation involving the film's materials and grounded in the phenomenological world and history of her subject, whether it is a person, a movement, or a place. Her present work is concerned with a visual poetics of the Caribbean, the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonialism, and wreckage in all its forms. Recent solo exhibitions include Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: Field Station at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (2019); Nuevos Materiales at Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2018); Rodarán cabezas at Espacio Odeón in Bogotá, Colombia; and A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at Pérez Art Museum Miami (2016). Her work has also been shown in the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017), New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York; and El Museo del Barrio, New York; among others.
Beatriz Santiago-Muñoz, Cuervo and Low-Polygon Poem, 2021 (stills). Two-channel color HD video with sound, 26 minutes. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Kiki Smith
b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany
Lives in New York
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Kiki Smith is drawn to the vast and spectacular complexities of the cosmos. Her recent prints and sculptures have increasingly conveyed her fascination with the spiritual and physical forces of the natural world, and the ever-shifting role of humans within it. The large-scale Sungrazer sculptures hung on the wall, for instance, give form to the sparkling brilliance and motion of stars, rendering comets in bronze with multicolored patinas. The nearby small sculptures in silver, bronze, and aluminum also imagine celestial forms, some in more literal, observational ways, while others seem to be imbued with imaginative, folkloric qualities.
Smith has been similarly preoccupied with meteorological phenomena: Force III is part of a new series of cyanotype prints that depict the whirling movement of hurricane patterns. Set against bright-blue backdrops, the delicate patterns create constellations of their own, at once revealing the stirring beauty and tremendous force of nature.
about the artist
Kiki Smith is a German-American artist who studied for a time at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut before moving to New York, where she has been based for forty years. Her early work treats such subjects as the AIDS epidemic and gender. More recently, she has turned her attention toward the relationship of the human condition to nature, specifically feminine subjects. Her practice includes the use of tattoo, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, and photography to create figural representations that explore themes of mortality, sexuality, and the human body and bodily fluids. Smith has been featured three times in the Whitney Biennial, New York, and five times in the Venice Biennale. Among other venues, her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her print work is found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Smith has received numerous awards and honors for her work, such as the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2016) and the US Department of State’s Medal of Arts (2012). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kiki Smith, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Carlos Villa
b. 1936, San Francisco
d. 2013, San Francisco
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
This presentation of Carlos Villa’s work is representative of the artist’s longstanding explorations of multicultural identity—a sense of self grounded within a diverse community and the natural world. Villa explored his own roots as a Filipino American growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eventually expanded his interests outward to Oceanic, Latino, African, and Asian heritages. His coats and layered canvases—composed of painted psychedelic patterns overlaid with feathers and blood—merge abstraction with cross-cultural references. Old Masters (1979), a canvas that incorporates acrylic paint, feathers, and blood, and utilizes motifs drawn from Native American, Pacific Islander, and Latinx societies, brings communities into conversation with one another, while the title places the artist’s practice within both Western art historical and Pan-Asian cultural lineages. Meanwhile, the bodily fluids that grace the canvas—be it from the artist, an animal, a friend, or a stranger—work to center our lived, embodied experience. Similarly, the artist’s recurrent use of feathers and bones speaks to the sacred influences of nature on regional and personal identity formation. Villa’s work decenters whiteness, focusing on a breadth of cultural influences in a manner that is reverential to the land, ancestors, and our mutual existence.
about the artist
Carlos Villa was a multimedia and performance artist who explored the meaning of cultural diversity and multicultural issues in the arts through work in a variety of materials, including oil and acrylic paints, aluminum, steel, bronze, wood, feathers, blood, mirrors, fiber, and found objects. Villa’s performances, which he called “actions,” were an exploration of his Filipino heritage, and were woven with Asian, Oceanic, and African cultures to create a visual anthropology to represent his personal background and an expanded the definition of “multicultural” in the arts. Villa received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Mills College, Oakland, California. He served on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute for many years and was an influential presence in the Bay Area through his work and teaching. Villa was the recipient of many awards and grants, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Carlos Villa, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks
Cosmo Whyte
b. 1982, St. Andrew Parish, Jamaica
Lives in Tallahassee
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Cosmo Whyte’s work is driven by his approach to archival materials. The images that appear in his drawings and on the hand-painted beaded curtain on view here are pulled from historical photographs documenting Black people immersed in acts of nation building, pageantry, and celebration in places such as New York City, London, Toronto, and Kingston, Jamaica. Whyte recasts these events as political demonstrations and acts of defiance. The works examine the constraints imposed on Black life and illuminate vital histories of Black collectivity and resistance across the diaspora.
Whyte inscribes his drawings with markings that home in on or obscure certain aspects of the images, as if to invite viewers to interrogate history more attentively. These gestures and abrasions denote erasures in the historical record or gaps in cultural memory. With its loose gold leaf lines that twist around figures and passages of empty, blurred, or veiled imagery, the large-scale three-part work Sketches of Character exemplifies this impulse.
The Interlocutor, the beaded curtain work at the gallery’s entryway, shows an image of a Black man performing the limbo onstage before a mostly white audience. The work alludes to the ways that the cultural contributions of Black performers are often celebrated while Black people are regarded as second-class citizens. As viewers pass through the curtain they partake in the performance and are met on the other side of the curtain by the presence of a Black audience. This installation, taken as a whole, critiques and reflects the complex dynamics at play in performance and the consumption of spectacle.
The artist expresses special thanks to the Florida State University Master Craftsman Studio, the Harpo Foundation, Alex Adkinson, Josh Nierodzinski, and Nataša Prljević. Image rights acquired from Getty Images.
about the artist
Cosmo Whyte explores the history of migration through a variety of mediums, including drawing, performance, and sculpture. His process begins with his memories of the ways identity is shaped by paths of migration. His work weaves his personal narrative with a larger consideration of colonization of the Caribbean, as well as the contemporary social and political circumstances of the region, with a particular focus on Jamaica. Whyte has exhibited his works in the United States, Jamaica, Norway, England, France, and South Africa. He has been the recipient of the Art Matters Award (2019), The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019), the Working Artist Award (2018), The Drawing Center's Open Sessions Fellowship (2018), Artadia Award (2016) and the Edge Award (2010). Recent exhibitions include Beneath Its Tongue, the Fish Rolls the Hook to Sharpen Its Cadence, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta (2019); Get Up Stand Up The Summerset House, London, UK (2019); Intermittent Rivers, 13th Havana Biennial Matanzas, Cuba (2019), the Jamaica Biennial (2017) and the Atlanta Biennial, Atlanta Contemporary (2016). Whyte earned a BFA from Bennington College, Vermont, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently a professor at Florida State University.
Cosmo Whyte, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks