28 The New York Reviewthat impressed with its scale: a black-
and- white painting on a wall- sized
white tarp titled Second Line Sunday
that depicts an ebullient Mardi Gras
celebration under a portion of elevated
highway. The scene is framed by a
handwritten text that reads like a fu-
sion of poetry, essay, and diary:New Orleans, Louisiana. Time
moves differently. People make
themselves bigger by being beauti-
ful. In beads & masks & paint &
on horses & in fast cars & far from
fear & far from peace sometimes
too...Dialogues like this— among artists,
and between artists and the city—
materialized throughout Prospect.5. At
the Ogden Museum, intimately scaled
sculptures of shotgun- style houses and
the shacks of tenant farmers by the late
Beverly Buchanan sat within view of
large- scale drawings of quiet New Or-
leans street scenes by Willie Birch, rep-
resenting visions of vernacular African
American architecture. In another gal-
lery at the Ogden, the Neighborhood
Story Project, a nonprofit organization
devoted to recording the histories of
South Louisiana, presented a series of
installations that examined regional
spiritual practices that have historically
been shepherded by Black women. (It
included a splendid altar to Mami
Wata.)
Across the street at the Contempo-
rary Arts Center, the upper gallery
seemed to respond to these spiritual
themes with a beguiling collection of
pieces by contemporary artists that sat
at the intersection of spirit and land-scape. Particularly potent were a se-
ries of works by the late Carlos Villa,
a Filipino American artist from San
Francisco who braided together Asian,
Oceanic, and indigenous artistic tra-
ditions in large- scale canvases with
meditative patterns of looping forms.
These often functioned as backdrops
to arrangements of objects: feathers,
body prints, and details that were, in
some cases, rendered in blood. Sus-
pended from the gallery’s ceiling was
Villa’s 1977 sculpture First Coat, a
ceremonial- style cloak made from can-
vas and feathers that was measured to
his body. Its presence seemed to trans-
form the gallery into a site of religious
ritual.
Prospect.5’s historical, environmen-
tal, and spiritual themes came together
in a small, tightly curated grouping of
work at the Newcomb Art Museum of
Tulane University. In larger- than- life
charcoal drawings, the New Orleans
native Ron Bechet blew up details of
southern Louisiana flora— shrubs, but-
tress root systems, dangling lianas—
and, through stark shadows and
texture, made of them a natural world
filled with such vigor that it awed as
much as it alarmed.
On view in the adjacent galleries were
several of Barbara Chase- Riboud’s
“stele” sculptures, works she conceived
to reimagine the formal language of
monuments. Chase- Riboud, a novelist,
poet, and artist who was born in Phil-
adelphia and now resides in France,
made the first of these back in 1969 to
honor Malcolm X, though she has since
expanded the series to make reference
to other subjects. Slightly larger than
human scale but purely abstract, theyare generally composed of a tangle of
geometric shapes cast in bronze from
which fall resplendent “skirts” crafted
from silk rope and skeins of silk thread.
The artist has described them as draw-
ing on universal forms that occur in
every civilization: as she said during
a talk at the Philadelphia Museum of
Art in 2013, “They occur in Peru, they
occur in China, they occur in Ireland,
they occur in Greece.” At the entrance
to the exhibition stood the stele Mao’s
Organ (2007), a billowing combination
of glimmering polished bronze and
crimson red silk that commanded the
room with extravagant authority.
While Chase- Riboud’s work re-
flected on the ways in which history
is evoked, Los Angeles–based artist
Elliott Hundley focused on the ways
it can be a chimera— via an astonish-
ing forty- foot multimedia collage titled
The Balcony, after a 1956 satire by Jean
Genet. Genet’s play is set in a brothel
where customers pay to role- play pow-
erful men, roles they end up inhabiting
for real when a revolution interrupts
their reverie and they continue their act
before a restive crowd.
Hundley’s sprawling reimagination
of those sordid scenes spans ten con-
joined panels jammed with thousands of
small images that have been clipped out
of books, magazines, and photographs
and impressively arranged by theme
and hue. These included depictions of
ancient and modern art, geometric pat-
terns, architectural diagrams, bodies
in various states of dress and motion,
objects of desire like jewelry and fancy
cars, contested monuments, symbols of
protest, and sundry athletes, entertain-
ers, warriors, and politicians, including
Ronald Reagan— as shown in a black-
and- white reproduction of Thin Lips
(1984 –1985), Jean- Michel Basquiat and
Andy Warhol’s painting that depicts the
president as a bogeyman of Western
capitalism, with various economic terms
(“outlays,” “deficit”) stenciled over his
face. In its entirety, Hundley’s collage
reads like a staggering portrait of our
fractured United States, one in which
illusion and reality are hopelessly, dan-
gerously conflated.It is impossible to write about
Prospect.5 without considering the
reason for its existence: Katrina. Pros-
pect New Orleans was born of a desire
to draw visitors to the city and thereby
help it recover economically after the
storm. It was a lofty goal that, in ret-
rospect, was rather fraught— especially
for an art world tangled up in struggles
over gentrification in urban neighbor-
hoods and the sources of its patron-
age. Seventeen years after the storm
and fourteen years after the first Pros-
pect, New Orleans is a whiter city. Vast
swaths of the Lower Ninth Ward, the
site of many Prospect installations over
the years, remain empty— the promise
of high culture’s deliverance largely
unfulfilled. As Naima Keith writes in
a sharp, clear- eyed essay in the catalog,
“In a city desperately in need of basic
resources and rebuilding, proposing art
as a tool of healing and justice seemed
simultaneously hopeful and optimisti-
cally naïve.”
It’s a question that at least one art-
ist in the triennial tackled directly. The
New York–based sculptor and perfor-
mance artist Kevin Beasley took his
Prospect.5 commission funds— along
with some of his own money— and ac-quired an empty lot in the Ninth Ward
that he transformed into a commu-
nity garden equipped with electrical
outlets and a Wi- Fi hot spot. A set of
concrete steps, once someone’s stoop,
now functions as an impromptu bench.
The property sits amid the vestiges of
other attempts to revitalize the neigh-
borhood, including the houses built by
Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation.
A report published by an urban geog-
rapher from the University of Illinois
in late January revealed that only six
of the original 109 homes— all of which
are less than fifteen years old— “remain
in reasonably good shape.” Two have
been demolished because of mold
problems as others lie empty, and Pitt’s
foundation is now mired in lawsuits.
Beasley is all too aware of the ways in
which his own project could fail. He
told The New York Times’s Siddhartha
Mitter in January, “As we’re breaking
ground on my project, the carcasses of
everything else are still there.”
One artist and one triennial can’t
make up for decades of disinvestment
and disenfranchisement, of course.
But perhaps what they can do is create
moments of meaningful engagement.
Dave McKenzie is a conceptual artist
who was born in Jamaica and now lives
in New York. He was one of a small
group of artists who participated in the
first Prospect New Orleans in 2008 and
were invited back for Prospect.5. (The
others are Mark Bradford, Wangechi
Mutu, Nari Ward, and Willie Birch.)
For that first edition of the show,
McKenzie pitched an action that, at
the time, sounded like a performative
prank: his piece, titled I’ll Be Back,
would consist of visiting New Orleans
once a year for the following decade.
The artist kept his word, traveling to
the city every year, including the year
in which he lost his father, who died in
November 2010. “I always went at the
end of the year,” he told me by phone
from New York.We were staying at my mother’s
house, and I had to tell her, I know
you’re not feeling well and you’re
grieving, but we’re going to leave
you alone.... I’m going to New
Orleans. No one is waiting for me.
There are no consequences for not
going.That commitment, he added, is “the
crux of the piece.... Not only did I say
I was going to go, but if things are dif-
ficult, I’m still going to go.” McKenzie
said his journeys to the city were largely
unremarkable. He didn’t stage per-
formances or pursue some obsessive
checklist. In 2009, he took his father.
For his Prospect.5 project, McKen-
zie bought a niche at Hope Mausoleum
in New Orleans, where he will bury a
bracelet his father once wore. (Because
of Covid he has yet to inter the object,
but three black- and- white photographs
that were on view at the Contemporary
Arts Center recorded the mausoleum
and the bracelet.) He says it is a way of
joining his memories of his father with
those of New Orleans: “This place that
I wanted to go back to was also a place
I would go back to and remember him.”
This rather private gesture will do
nothing to change life in the city. But
it is emblematic of what Prospect.5 was
able to achieve in its most thoughtful
corners. It was about getting to know
New Orleans and, over time, forming a
bond. QNANCY MILFORD
1938–2022
Celebrated Biographer of Zelda Fitzgerald &
Edna St. Vincent MillayInaugural Director of the
Leon Levy Center for Biography, 2008The Leon Levy Center for Biography,
CUNY Graduate CenterMiranda 26 28 .indd 28 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 41 PM