The New York Review of Books - USA (2022-05-12)

26 The New York Review

Tomorrow Is Today

Carolina A. Miranda

Prospect.5:

Yesterday we said tomorrow

an exhibition in various locations in

New Orleans, October 23, 2021–

January 23, 2022.

Catalog of the exhibition edited by

Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi.

Rizzoli Electa, 271 pp., $60.00

On the afternoon in 1884 that New Or-

leans erected its principal monument

to Robert E. Lee, the heavens let loose

a deluge. It was February 22— George

Washington’s birthday— and thousands

had gathered at a circle on the edge of

downtown. A band played the “Grand

March” from Rienzi, an early opera by

Richard Wagner about a valiant bat-

tle hopelessly lost. Milling among the

various New Orleans civic leaders was

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard,

the former Confederate general (from

neighboring St. Bernard Parish) who

kicked off the Civil War by attacking

Fort Sumter, helped popularize the use

of the Confederate battle flag, and, fol-

lowing his defeat, did his part to but-

tress the cult of the lost cause. Also in

attendance were two of Lee’s daugh-

ters, Mary and Mildred; Lee had died

of a stroke fourteen years before.

The torrent sent the crowd run-

ning but didn’t dampen the spirits of

the event’s organizers. According to

an account published in The Times-

Democrat the following day, they sim-

ply repaired to a nearby artillery hall.

The paper printed in full the planned

speech by Charles E. Fenner, a local

judge who served as the president of

the R. E. Lee Monumental Associ-

ation, the organization that saw the

monument to completion. The speech

was spectacularly obsequious, hailing

Lee as endowed with “exceptional gifts

of physical beauty” and as a “chivalric

chieftain of the lost cause.”

Like the oratory, the monument to

Lee was hyperbolic—in this case, in

scale. It was composed of a towering

sixteen- foot bronze atop a sixty- foot

Doric column of Tennessee marble on

a base of Georgia granite— all of which

emerged from an earthen berm at the

heart of a well- trafficked roundabout.

It showed the general in his Confeder-

ate service uniform, arms crossed, as

though “overlooking the field of bat-

tle,” according to a newspaper report of

the era. The statue, one of the earliest

and most prominent of the Jim Crow–

era Confederate monuments, stood in

this place for 133 years.

In 2015, after the mass murder of

nine Black parishioners by a white su-

premacist in Charleston, South Caro-

lina, and much public debate about the

purpose of Confederate monuments,

the New Orleans City Council voted

six to one to remove four monuments,

including the one to Lee and a statue

of Beauregard that stood at the en-

trance to City Park. Lee didn’t actu-

ally come down for another year and

a half— after protests, lawsuits, threats

of violence, and actual violence. (The

contractor who had been hired to re-

move the monuments woke up one

morning to find that his sports car had

been incinerated.) On May 19, 2017, the

general’s bronze likeness was finally

plucked off by a crane, then carted to

a warehouse. “The Civil War is over,”

said then mayor Mitch Landrieu on the

occasion; “the Confederacy lost and we

are better for it.”

Left behind at the roundabout were

the granite base and the sixty- foot col-

umn. Lee remains, however, as a ghost.

Though the circle has been stripped

of all reference to him, it has yet to be

officially renamed. “Lee Circle,” there-

fore, still appears as a destination on

Google Maps.

Late in January, a new monument ma-

terialized at the roundabout— one that

is as much a monument to the removal

of monuments as it is to the histories

that Confederate monuments attempt

to obscure. Sentinel (Mami Wata), by

the New York artist Simone Leigh, is

the final public art installation from

“ Prospect.5: Ye sterday we sa id tomor-

row,” the fifth edition of New Orleans’s

citywide art triennial, which has been

held at semi- regular intervals since

2008. (Originally scheduled for the fall
      of 2020, the show finally opened— in
      stages— last October and concluded
      in January, though Leigh’s monument
      will remain on view until late July.)
      Sentinel is a twelve- foot bronze in-
      spired by the anthropomorphic qual-
      ities of Zulu ceremonial spoons, in
      which an elongated representation
      of the human body serves as handle,
      while the circular head functions as
      ladle. It is the body as a literal vessel,
      something Leigh— who is representing
      the US at the 59th Venice Biennale this

spring— has long explored in her work.

In the case of New Orleans, her fig-

ure is a highly stylized representation

of Mami Wata, a female water deity

with deep roots in African lore who

also appears among the cultures of the

Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of

South America under various guises,

including Yemanja in Brazil, Lasirèn in

Haiti, and Oshun in Cuba. (Beyoncé,

in her video for “Hold Up,” from 2016,

pays visual tribute to Oshun by dress-

ing in the deity’s customary yellow and

emerging from a building amid a gush

of water.)

Mami Wata invokes water’s life-

giving qualities and its calamitous pow-

ers, themes resonant in New Orleans, a

city shaped by African and Caribbean

migrations and spiritual practices and

by the bodies of water that surround

it. Water has given the city its shape

and rained destruction upon it, in ways

both natural and man- made. Some of

Prospect.5’s programs, indeed, were

delayed as a result of the widespread

damage caused by Hurricane Ida, a

deadly Category 4 storm that tore

through the region in August 2021.

As the New Orleans essayist and cu-

rator Kristina Kay Robinson writes in

the show’s catalog, “Nothing happens

here without consideration, deference,

and, ultimately, submission to what the

water may bring.”

Lee Circle had until the 1880s been

known as Tivoli Circle, in honor of the

centuries- old gardens in Italy. Before

that, it had been a cypress swamp, a co-

lonial plantation site, and an open plot

that once housed a circus. During the

Civil War, the circle served as a camp-

ground for Union troops. After Hur-

ricane Katrina, the area, which stood

on higher ground and therefore wasn’t

flooded, became an informal day labor

site where workers— many of Latin

American origin— could gather to find

jobs in the reconstruction efforts.

Over the years, countless local per-

sonalities have been pitched as possible

replacements for Lee at Lee Circle, in-

cluding the civil rights leader Avery Al-

exander; the Creole chef Leah Chase;

the musicians Fats Domino, Louis

Armstrong, and Ellis Marsalis (father

of Wynton); as well as Tom Benson, the

late owner of the New Orleans Saints.

In 2019 a sci- fi- inspired Mardi Gras

crew created a replica monument with

a Wookiee from Star Wars occupying

Lee’s place. Last year a city commis-

sion issued a recommendation to re-

name the roundabout Egalité Circle,

inspired by eighteenth- century liber-

ation movements in Haiti and France,

but that appellation has yet to be made

official by the city council. In the mean-

time, some (including the organizers of

Prospect) have simply taken to calling

it Tivoli Circle once again.

Interestingly, Leigh’s Mami Wata

doesn’t stand atop the column that held

Lee aloft. Instead, its sinuous feminine

form resides on the earth— “at the level

of the people,” as Nick Stillman, the ex-

ecutive director of Prospect, told Doug

MacCash of The Times- Picayune/New

Orleans Advocate upon its installation.

The empty column remains as a tribute

to the act of removal and to the activists

who worked for years to make that pos-

sible. It also stands as a marker of the

ongoing debates about how we remem-

ber history in the United States.

The name “Prospect.5: Ye sterday we

said tomorrow” was inspired by a 2010

album by the New Orleans trumpeter

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Ye s -

terday You Said Tomorrow, a recording

whose pointed track titles—“K.K.P.D.,”

“Angola, LA & the 13th Amend-

ment”—refer to police brutality and

the carceral state. With its promise of a

moment that never arrives, the phrase

is an apt description of our pandemic

stasis and the pledges of equality that

succumb to the politics of not- the- right-

time. In the triennial, it took on a barbed

quality. Tomorrow has landed, this show

seemed to tell us, and it is today.

This came to vivid life in an in-

stallation around the corner from

Leigh’s Mami Wata, inside a restored

Romanesque- style library from the

nineteenth century that functions as

an ancillary space for the Ogden Mu-

seum of Southern Art. To access the

library, viewers must enter through the

Ogden’s main door up the block, then

double back through a long, ground-

level tunnel before ascending into

the library up a flight of spiral stairs.

That’s because the museum and the

library buildings do not border each

other; standing between them is the

Confederate Memorial Hall Museum,

a wholly separate institution. The his-

toric hall, where Confederate president

Jefferson Davis’s body once lay in state,

Installation view of Elliott Hundley’s The Balcony (2020 –2021) at ‘Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow,’ New Orleans

Alex Marks /Prospect New Orleans /

Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, New Orleans

Miranda 26 28 .indd 26 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 41 PM