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 Her self-portraits challenge the conception of the historical document through an emphasis on her body as an archive and suggest the interconnectedness of ourselves and the larger world we inhabit.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
Katrina Andry
b. 1981, New Orleans
Lives in New Orleans
Venue
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Colonial Colorism Influences in the Black Community - Past and Present is a series of woodcut prints that addresses the issue of colorism and how it has shaped social life for Black people in New Orleans. With both humor and an unflinching eye, Andry creates allegorical images that explore the way Black people, particularly women, have applied various European beauty standards to themselves and to other members of their community. Each print focuses on a different subject and, through iconography such as flowers, pearls, and fine china, as well as visual motifs drawn from popular culture, like Disney animations, reveals the way class, social standing, and public appearance can be defined by these values. Andry’s investigation of this hierarchical system that privileges one’s ability to identify with whiteness speaks to the deeply intertwined nature of appearance and social violence.
About the artist
New Orleans native Katrina Andry received an MFA (2010) in Printmaking. In her work she confronts issues of race, gender, bias, and privilege, as well as stereotypical representations of Black Americans. Her candid depictions of these stereotypes provoke viewers to consider the unjust nature of clichés and social norms and how privilege arises from the perpetuation of these stereotypes. Art in Print described Andry as one of the top 50 fine-art printmakers working today (September 2012). Her solo and group exhibitions include Over There and Here Is Me and Me, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, The College of Charleston (2019); Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories, New Orleans Museum of Art (2018); and Perceptions of Otherness, The Hammonds House Museum, Atlanta (2017), among others.
Katrina Andry, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa
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.
Willie Birch
b. 1942, New Orleans
Lives in New Orleans
venue
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Inspired by his native city of New Orleans, Willie Birch creates large-scale works on paper in charcoal and paint that anchor his viewers to the specificity of place. Birch’s works center on spaces and everyday objects around the New Orleans neighborhood where he lives, such as his studio and backyard, neighboring houses, power lines, and a community flowerbed. He also depicts scenes of daily life, such as roofers working on a nearby home, or the sky seen from the window of an airplane.
Birch’s works have a careful attention to detail, highlighting patterns in the natural and built environment that give his works a sense of graphic depth and speak to fractal patterns and numerology that are connected to worldviews of the African diaspora. While many of the works are notably empty of people—in part a product of the period in which they were produced, marked as it was by the Covid-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders—they are nonetheless testaments to Black life in the city and to spaces of togetherness, individuality, ritual, celebration, domesticity, creativity, labor, and rest. While these works possess a sense of timelessness, as they depict enduring structures, some passed down among multiple generations, they are also anchored in very specific moments. In the image of Birch’s studio, we see a self-portrait in which the artist wears a protective face mask, and the drawing of the flowerbed—Memory Flowers for a Heart Broken America, January 6, 2021 (2021)—memorializes the trauma and sadness of the violent insurrection at the United States Capitol earlier this year.
About the artist
Willie Birch is a New Orleans native and one of Louisiana’s most significant living artists. He first came to prominence for his papier-maché sculptures that depicted African American men, women, and children engaged in common activities and rituals. In 1993, a John S. Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award brought him back to New Orleans, where he began producing the work he is best known for—large-scale, graphic drawings of African-American life ranging from the spectacular public gatherings—choreographed and impromptu—that define New Orleans’s cultural life to intimate individual portraits and images of the everyday. For Birch, his distinctive figurative style is founded “on deep knowledge of both the African roots of African-American culture, and the European painting tradition.” Beginning in 2000, Birch removed all color from his palette and has since then continued to explore and expand the possibilities of grisaille in bodies of work which, following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, have been focused on the urban and natural landscapes of New Orleans.
In 2006, Birch co-founded the Porch Seventh Ward Cultural Organization, that would have a deep impact on the youth of this historical neighborhood, and he also founded the Old Prieur Street Project and Community Garden in 2015, which has engaged local artists, youth groups, and community members in the preservation of the culture of one of the oldest African American neighborhoods in the city. Birch has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was named the USA James Baldwin Fellow in 2014. Birch’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the country and a retrospective of his work, Celebrating Freedom: The Art of Willie Birch, was organized by the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, in 20016 and travelled nationally.
Willie Birch, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photos: Jonathan Traviesa.
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
Beverly Buchanan
b. 1940, Fuquay, North Carolina
d. 2015, Ann Harbor, Michigan
venue
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM – 5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Beverly Buchanan’s small sculptures represent talismans of Southern rural Black life. Buchanan grew up in South Carolina; the daughter of a professor of agriculture, she regularly accompanied him on surveys of tenant farmers to document the rural dwellings and lifeways of the American South. These visits were foundational to Buchanan’s lifelong interest in African American vernacular practices of building and storytelling, as well as to her keen attunement to the relationships among site and history. This study materialized in her most prolific and acclaimed body of work, her shack sculptures.
Roughly assembled from humble materials like wood, cardboard, rusted metal, and painted foam core, these miniature houses are both imagined and drawn from real structures that served as domestic spaces for families and individuals. Though most of the original structures and communities do not survive, in their time, the buildings withstood the violent whims of the natural world, while their inhabitants endured the violent whims of other people in their region. Buchanan’s shacks commemorate places of return, reform, and resistance, and ask us to examine what safely, comfort, and home mean.
About the artist
Beverly Buchanan’s work centers on the character of the dwellings typical of the vernacular architecture of the South, of which she was a native, having been born and raised in the Carolinas. Originally intending to become a physician, Buchanan earned degrees in science and medical subjects. However, after earning dual master’s degrees in parasitology (1968) and public health (1969) from Columbia University, New York, she elected to pursue art rather than medical school. She was drawn to the underlying symbolism of strength and perseverance associated with the “shacks”and ruins that she painted and sculpted. For her, they were not the abject structures that others saw, but rather examples of persistence, presence, and survival. She used rudimentary materials, such as wood scraps, to create semi-abstract replicas of homes, schools, barns, and cabins. Buchanan was twice named a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow (1980, 1990) and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980). Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; and the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. In 2016 her work was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Beverly Buchanan–Ruins and Rituals.
Beverly Buchanan, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa
Cooking Sections
Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernàndez Pascual
Established in London, 2013
Live in London
venue
Seaworthy
630 Carondelet Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Performances
Friday–Saturday, 4 PM–6 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
about the project
Oyster Readings
Performance; concrete, steel, and tabby dining table and stools
Oyster Readings is a performance and installation that uses oysters to better understand the environment, ecology, history, and future of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. During the exhibition, visitors are invited for a reading of an oyster, tracing the lines of coastal inhabitation, subsidence, sedimentation, and life in this time of climate emergency.
Oysters have populated the waters of Louisiana for millennia, nourishing people living on its coasts. The presence of Native American oyster middens, or mounds of discarded shells, are a testament to the ancestral inhabitation of these lands and waters. Similar to tree rings, oyster shells record time and events. Every season an oyster grows a shell around its lip. As the shell grows, it encases the environmental conditions in which it lives. Oysters tell stories about hurricanes and droughts, the invention of dredgers, the expansion of Bulbancha/New Orleans, and the proliferation of its oyster bars. They also remember oil spills and gas leaks, sinking land, the shifting of the coastline, and, more recently, the effects of a global pandemic.
The artist duo created a dining table and stools following the local tradition of using discarded oyster shells as a construction material, gathering food waste from the city and replacing cement with shell lime. Visitors are welcome to stay and enjoy the special dish developed in collaboration with Seaworthy after their oyster readings to keep thinking about our common oyster futures.
This project takes place in Bulbancha, on the unceded territories of the Ishak, Biloxi, Caddo, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Houma, Natchez, Tunica, and others whose memories and ancestral rights may have been erased by the violence of settler colonialism.
To perform the Oyster Readings, Cooking Sections partnered with body poet, interdisciplinary artist, paris cyan cian, and artist, activist, and medicine woman, Isabelle Guzman.
oyster reading videos
P.5-Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings-Uptown T
Special thanks to Pascal's Manale Restaurant, pascalsmanale.com
P.5—Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings—Jeffery Darensbourg
P.5-Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings-Lindsay Allday Special thanks to Sidecar Patio & Oyster Bar, sidecarnola.com
P.5–Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings–Tasia Denapolis
To learn more about Pontchartrain Conservancy’s work, visit scienceforourcoast.org
P.5-Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings-Alex Kolker.
To learn more about LUMCON’s work, visit lumcon.edu
about the artists
The London-based duo Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, known as Cooking Sections, seamlessly blends installation, performance art, and food in their provocative works that address the topics of land use, consumption, climate, the environment, and labor. They look at how and what we will eat as our planet inevitably changes. Their seminal piece CLIMAVORE, an ongoing large-scale installation begun in 2015, explores the political and climatological implications of increasingly obsolete food production practices while challenging the viewer to consider future alternatives. Their work was featured in the Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018), the United States Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2014), and has been exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, among others.
about the OYSTER READERS
paris cyan cian is a movement architect working with and through various interdisciplinary forms of dance, drawing, film, photography, and sound. Rooted in New Orleans, cyan’s creative work crosses at the intersections of Black girlhood futurity, ecology, and ritual, centering re-memory and durational play through Black (queer) feminist methodologies. cyan is committed to embodied practices of cosmic love and worldmaking. paris cyan cian received her BFA/BA in Dance with a concentration in social justice, gender women’s studies from Hollins University (2018) and Masters of Fine Arts in Choreography at Roehampton University, London, U.K (2021).
Isabelle Guzman received her BFA in Theater with a concentration in women’s studies from the College of Charleston (1994). In 2006 she lived and apprenticed in the rainforest region of San Ignacio, Belize where she became initiated into a lineage of traditional Maya spiritual healing. Not long after, she entered The New Seminary in New York City and began her thesis on Santeria & Vodou, but after a personal interview with Priestess Miriam Chamani of the Voodoo Spiritual Temple on Rampart, moved to New Orleans permanently where she now resides. Her personal practice, Temple Blacksnake, is named in honor of the sacred medicine passed down from Don Elijio Panti, a Mayan healer and H’men and Dr Rosita Arvigo, his long time mentee.
Guzman became involved with Cooking Sections after hurricane Ida devastated the coastal fishing villages of Louisiana. She works closely with Indigenous families of the Pointe Aux Chenes Indian tribe and mutual aid groups such as Imagine Waterworks and Bvlbancha Collective. It is her aim to inspire awareness and dialogue around climate crisis, disaster capitalism, and the ongoing colonization of Native land.
Cooking Sections, CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones, 2016–present. Site specific installation, Isle of Skye, Scotland. Commissioned by ATLAS Arts, Isle of Skye, Scotland. Courtesy of the artists. Photo by Ruth Clark
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
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer
b. 1979, New York
Lives in Los Angeles
Venue
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM – 5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
The work of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer grapples with the subtle and horrific violence of white supremacy in the United States through history painting, of a past both real and imagined. The suite of paintings on view here are fantastical depictions of this reality envisioned across time. They range from the retelling of a New Testament story about demons to an image of military conquest, from revealing the intertwined nature of whiteness and Christianity to scenes of the end of the world. Notably, Don’t You See That I Am Burning was painted following the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. This wild, detailed painting references historical works as well as images drawn directly from news coverage of this event. In looking across centuries and into the future, Dupuy-Spencer asks us to contend with the legacies of terror and violence that birthed this nation, forged its ideology, and continue to shape our political and social lives.
In addition to large-scale, grandiose history paintings, Dupuy-Spencer also paints portraits, scenes of everyday life, and landscapes. The artist has family from New Orleans, and she spent time in the city during her formative years. Her intimate knowledge of the area is conveyed in the painting hung just outside this gallery, Lake Pontchartrain Causeway (2017), which captures this local landmark and the roiling skies that can lay low over the city, recasting the water and light that surrounds the bridge into a surreal setting.
About the artist
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer is an American painter, born in New York, and now residing in Los Angeles via New Orleans. Dupuy-Spencer’s paintings depict both mundane glimpses of life: intimate moments with a partner, meals shared with family, portraits of friends in informal settings, all captured with snapshot-like quality, as well as epic scenes of religious transformation and fantastical scenes of destruction. Her paintings possess enormous depth and life, transforming routine moments into compelling statements, and making palpable the terror and spectacle of violence. Many layers of storytelling leap from the canvas as viewers are brought into the ecstatic and critical lenses with which Dupuy-Spencer views her subjects, which include her family and ancestral ties to New Orleans. Her work often addresses entrenched American narratives and values, taking on––often from a personal standpoint––questions of religion, race, and privilege. Her work has appeared in major group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions at Marlborough Contemporary, New York and Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, and will have a 2020 solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin. Dupuy-Spencer received a BFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2007).
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa
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
Jennie C. Jones
b. 1968, Cincinnati
Lives in Hudson, New York
Venue
Ogden Museum Of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
High as the Listening Skies, 2021
Sound, 4 min., 45 sec.
The Edges of Heaven, Rest, 2021
Sound, 2 min., 58 sec.
For Prospect.5, Jennie C. Jones has created two sound works that play throughout the day and resound off the architecture of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Patrick F. Taylor Library. The first composition, High as the Listening Skies, features three choirs from Houston, Los Angeles, and Baltimore performing “A City Called Heaven.” The song was popularized by Mahalia Jackson, who was born in New Orleans in 1911 and is considered to be one of the most important gospel singers and Black liberation activists of her time. This song, while nondenominational, presents heaven as a Black utopia, and as something that is to be constantly strived for and sought after. The choirs are intentionally layered into an irregular harmony that strikes a moving balance of tenacity, repetition, joy, and chaos. The Edges of Heaven, the second piece, incorporates a tone associated with energetic healing to create a sound that evokes sensations that are both tender and somber. Jones layered the tone with samples from a composition by Alvin Singleton, a Black composer who is known for merging the worlds of jazz and symphony. In contrast to the exuberance of High as the Listening Skies, this track suggests an enduring calm.
With the sound emanating overhead, these pieces that remain beyond our grasp, centered on high and out of sight, evoking other worlds and spaces. They offer the transcendent possibilities of sound and music, creating a space for lingering pause and collective listening. These works invite reflection on Black histories and futures through a consideration of earthly and spiritual possibility.
Presented by the Ed Bradley Foundation.
about the artist
Jennie C. Jones sculpts, paints, and composes on the themes of African American history and jazz, in its broadest definition, within the frameworks of minimalism and abstraction. Her works represent sharp critiques of current political, cultural, and social conditions, such as her commentary on the lack of African American presence in the tradition of modernism. Jones’s works reveal the exchange between the physical properties of black sonic practices and the musical properties of visual abstraction. She has earned numerous accolades and awards, including the Robert Rauschenberg Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art (2016), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2013), and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Prize (2012). Jones’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Jones earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1991) and an MFA from Rutgers University, New Jersey (1996). Jones also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and 2020 faculty at Yale Norfolk School of Art, Connecticut.
Jennie C. Jones, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5 Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Video: Jonathan Traviesa
Tau Lewis
b. 1993, Toronto
Living in Toronto
Venue
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Tau Lewis focuses on the potential of birth and rebirth of objects and individuals. Created during the pandemic, utilizing reused and recycled fabrics, the works on view imagine life protected by environments infused with love and compassion.
Surrounded by hand-sewn garlands of flowering buds, her quilted sculpture, Delight—a seated, outreaching figure—is part of a series of soft sculptures that make up T.A.U.B.I.S., the Triumphant Alliance of Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls. Invented by Lewis, T.A.U.B.I.S. is the name of both an alternate realm and the beings who inhabit it. In T.A.U.B.I.S., each hand-dyed blossom represents a soul who has lived to the best of their ability—they communicate and collect intel and offer guidance and foresight, and sometimes song and dance. The figure in Delight is one of several non-gendered maternal forms that—through intuitive nurturing, wisdom, and connection to the terrain—supports all life.
On both sides of the gallery hang Lewis’s tapestries that are talismans imbued with powers of protection and healing. Each quilted tapestry features and is named after a Ghanaian Adinkra symbol—ancient symbols that encompass West African concepts and worldviews and appear throughout the African diaspora, visible for instance in the wrought-iron works of New Orleans. Lewis’s utilization of Adinkra symbols points to the persistent presence of African peoples and cultures. They are used—as in the blossoms that surround Delight—to encase and protect the symmetrical fetuses unfolding at the center of the work. These wall-based works investigate the cyclical nature of life and the potential to rest in the certainty (and uncertainty) of our continued existence.
Presented by the Blue Rider Group and the Deborah Buck Foundation.
about the artist
Tau Lewis is a self-taught multimedia artist who primarily works with textiles, carving, and assemblage of found objects. Her intention in her use of recycled and found materials is to invoke the necessity of such practices in various cultures and contexts. There is a therapeutic and cathartic element to her work in that it references past personal and collective traumas and acknowledges the restorative power of labor. She also often references her heritage and recounts real and imagined ancestral histories. In 2018 Lewis was awarded Frieze New York’s Frame Stand Prize for her solo presentation with Toronto’s Cooper Cole Gallery. Recent and upcoming solo and group exhibitions of Lewis’s work have been hosted by, among others, The Hammer, Los Angeles; Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Ontario; The Hepworth Wakefield, UK; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg; and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario. Lewis’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, Ottawa, and the Grinnell College Museum of Art, Iowa.
Tau Lewis, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa
Glenn Ligon
b. 1960, New York
Lives in New York
venue
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
For Prospect.5, Glenn Ligon has produced a series of seven neon sculptures that identify dates in 2017, 2020, and 2021 when eight confederate monuments were removed from public view in New Orleans. For decades, activists, citizens, and select politicians have fought for the removals of these monuments that opponents—who argue that the monuments represent testaments to US history—see as controversial. Those in favor of removing the monuments reject a presentation of US history that ultimately upholds white supremacy.
On April 24, 2017, the city removed an obelisk commemorating the Battle of Liberty Place. Erected in 1891, the obelisk honored an attempted insurrection by the Crescent City White League against the racially integrated Reconstruction Era Louisiana state government. On May 19, 2017, the city removed a statue of Robert E. Lee, arguably the most significant of these monuments. These two monuments were taken down by government order and removed discreetly. By contrast, monuments removed in summer 2020 were taken down in broad daylight by the people of New Orleans as part of nationwide protests against racial injustice. These monuments commemorated Charles Didier Dreux—the first confederate soldier killed in the Civil War—and John McDonogh, a merchant whose monument and legacy the city exploited to reinforce racial segregation and hierarchies in public schools.
This installation is sited near Tivoli Circle, where the Robert E. Lee monument once stood, and where an empty pedestal still looms as a continued reminder of the history and future possibilities for of this public space. Ligon’s painted neon works underscore the progress that has been made and invite us to reconsider the terms of monumentality by centering removal.
Presented by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and Hauser & Wirth.
about the artist
Glenn Ligon earned a BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. He works in several mediums, such as painting, printmaking, and neon. Ligon’s work is intertextual, drawing on writings from such diverse authors and figures as Richard Pryor, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, and Walt Whitman. His practice explores themes pertinent to the current and historical American experience, specifically the narratives and legacies of slavery, the civil rights movement, and the climate of antiblackness in the United States. Ligon’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern; London, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. He has twice exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2015 and 1997). Ligon has received numerous awards and accolades, such as the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Archives of American Art Medal (2017), International Association of Art Critics Award (2012), the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (2006), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship (2003) and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991, 1989, and 1982).
Glenn Ligon, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jonathan Traviesa
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
The Neighborhood Story Project
Founded in 2004, New Orleans
Based in New Orleans
venue
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
ABout the exhibition
In this space, you will meet a group of contemporary women healers who Spirit selected to share their journeys from or to New Orleans. We invite you to spend time with their songs, stories, scriptures, and meditations.
–Nana Sula Spirit
Nana Sula Spirit (Nana Okomfo Kokwe Ama Tawiah) is the founding priestess of the Temple of Light-Ilé de Coin-Coin in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Named after her maternal ancestor, Marie Thérèse Coin-Coin, who lived in the Cane River area of Louisiana in the mid-1700s, her shrine is dedicated to the elevation of all souls.
As a young woman growing up in New Jersey, Nana Sula was introduced to the Yoruba traditions. In early 1992, she began her studies at the Ga-Ewe Shrine of Impohema in Accra, Ghana. After moving to New Orleans, she continued to travel to Ghana and, in 2007, she received the crown of Mami Wata, the mother of all waters. Temple of Light is a continuation of this work, connecting people to the Divine Mother energy as well as to their own ancestors.
In 2018, Nana Sula collaborated with The Neighborhood Story Project to create a series of sacred talks with healers whose work is in alignment with the mission of the Temple of Light. We invite you to spend time here, and to leave your own petitions and offerings at our collective altar.
Listen to the women behind the project
Listen to Luisah Teish read her poem “Hoodoo Mama,” from her book, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals.
Listen to Luisah Teish tell a story about visiting Oshun’s River in Nigeria.
Listen to Barbara Trevigne talk about her research on Marie Laveau.
Listen to Nana Sula Spirit’s songs in honor of Mami Wata.
Listen to the songs Nana Anoa sings to Yemaya when she goes to the water.
Listen to the songs Nana Anoa sings to Yemaya when she goes to the water.
Listen to Baderinwa read the Psalm 23 and 91.
About the artist
Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes and Rachel Breunlin with Janet Sula Evans, Marie Carmel Loiseau, Nana Anoa Nantambu, Baderinwa Rolland, Luisah Teish, Barbara Trevigne, and Dolores Watson
Since their founding in 2004 The Neighborhood Story Project has used the art of collaborative ethnography to create a vast collection of community-based stories in south Louisiana and beyond. The organization, in partnership with the University of New Orleans, creates portraits of the region by working with their collaborators to move the contours, planes, and angles of a place out onto a cultural canvas. They layer creative nonfiction and in-depth interviews, artifacts, folk and fine art, photographs, and music, among other materials, to craft an immersive space for learning and examination. For many years, The Neighborhood Story Project has turned their books into exhibitions and programs where their audiences are not only observers, but participants, who are able to connect with the lives and narratives presented, and can come away with a sense of how life histories are seated in wider social and cultural contexts. The Neighborhood Story Project often revives and preserves histories which may have been overlooked by mainstream media, and of places that are otherwise at risk of disappearing. Their ethnographies form the basis for art, publications, and performances, creating a new historical record of a place.