May 12, 2022 27now functions as a museum of Confed-
erate artifacts. (As the Southern Pov-
erty Law Center noted in a report on
Confederate symbols released in early
February, while many monuments have
come down, more than two thousand
memorials remain in place across the
US— not counting shrines such as Me-
morial Hall.)
The journey underneath Memorial
Hall made the Prospect.5 installation
within the library even more mean-
ingful. There, six neon signs bearing
six calendar dates between 2017 and
2020 were hung in the arched reading
room— a work by Glenn Ligon that
marked the days on which Confeder-
ate monuments were removed from
sites around New Orleans, including
Tivoli Circle. The installation, writes
Prospect.5 co- curator Naima J. Keith
in the exhibition catalog, “celebrates
the era when New Orleans dared to re-
define its past, condemning long- tired
tropes celebrating allegiances and ser-
vices to the Confederacy.”
Accompanying Ligon’s work was a
stirring sound loop by Jennie C. Jones
that explored the idea of the crescendo
in Black musical traditions. One por-
tion of it featured three choirs perform-
ing “A City Called Heaven,” a soaring
spiritual popularized by Mahalia Jack-
son. Another was more abstract and
melancholy, sampling a fragment of a
composition for viola by Alvin Single-
ton and fusing it with chimes and elec-
tronic tones. Spatially, these made for
an installation in which past and future
chafed against each other in an uneasy
present— an incisive use of architec-
ture and the histories embedded within
it. Spiritually, the ascendant audiomade it feel as if that history was being
exorcised— though the circular nature
of the sonic loops, along with the cir-
cular layout of the room, indicated a
process that remains ongoing.Prospect.5 was organized by Keith
and Diana Nawi, who served as artistic
directors, in collaboration with associ-
ate curator Grace Deveney and curato-
rial associate Lucia Olubunmi Momoh.
In addition to museums and galleries,
the triennial featured installations in
plazas, parks, a lakeside airport, and
a dour urban island tucked into an
on- ramp of Interstate 10. That last site
featured Nari Ward’s Battle Ground
Beacon, a portable police floodlight,
which instead of projecting light emit-
ted a rousing, eleven- minute sound
piece once an hour.
Beacon blared Buddhist chants by
Tina Turner punctuated by fragments
of speeches and spoken- word pieces
on race and justice by James Baldwin,
Martin Luther King Jr., and the poet
Amanda Gorman. It felt like a call to
prayer and to resistance— “nourishment
for soul, for meaning, for purpose,” as
Cornel West says in one clip. The audio
is hypnotic (and worth finding on the
Prospect.5 website) and the location
poignant: in historically Black Tremé,
at a site where the neighborhood has
been sundered by an elevated freeway.
On the weekday afternoon I visited,
the only other observers were the com-
muting cars that circled the on- ramp on
their way to somewhere else.
This was a tighter Prospect than in
some years past, featuring fifty- one
artist projects (versus the seventy- threeof the previous iteration, held in 2017).
The show, as has been typical since its
inception in 2008, was international
in scope, but this edition was firmly
rooted in New Orleans. From there, it
radiated outward to the rest of the US,
the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe,
the specific locales to which the city
has been bound by, as Nawi describes
in her catalog essay, the “threads of ex-
change and influence.”
Those threads were visible through-
out the exhibition. At the Historic New
Orleans Collection, a museum housed in
a series of historic homes in the French
Quarter, the scholar and curator Josh
Kun highlighted the curious musical in-
fluence of the Eighth Cavalry Mexican
Military Band. With an exhibition of
sheet music, photographs, and record-
ings, as well as occasional live events, he
brought to life the music of a band that
dazzled New Orleans in the late nine-
teenth century with waltzes, polkas, and
danzones. (You know their work: they
helped popularize a Mexican composi-
tion titled “Sobre las olas”— “Over the
Waves”— an undulating waltz that be-
came the de facto ditty of trapeze acts.)
One neighborhood over, at the Con-
temporary Arts Center in the Ware-
house Arts District, an engrossing
two- channel video installation by Be-
atriz Santiago Muñoz, Cuervo and
Low- Polygon Poem (2021), brought
the Caribbean into view. Shot in Haiti
and the artist’s native Puerto Rico, this
meditative film captures fragments
of two countries connected to New
Orleans by history, by the sea, by the
wrath of storms and the interventions
(or lack thereof) of the US federal
government. Images of fantastic seacreatures and animations of oceanic
trenches were intercut with shots of
mundane objects, ethnographic obser-
vations, and scenes of surreal entropy—
like a horse scratching its rump on an
old car. Which country each frame
originated in can be hard to tell. As this
puzzling montage unfolds, the voices
of several unseen narrators ruminate
on the nature of reality, memory, and
time. “There is a genre of epic poetry in
Sanskrit,” says a man’s voice in Haitian
Creole at both the beginning and end
of the video, “which tells two tales at
the same time in the same text.”
In its structure, Santiago Muñoz’s
video evokes this form, telling one
tale through audio and an often unre-
lated one through video. Ultimately,
it’s a poetic examination of the parallel
spaces occupied by Haiti and Puerto
Rico, two nations that inhabit neigh-
boring islands in the same geographic
space yet remain disconnected in lan-
guage, cultural practice, and critical in-
frastructure. There are no direct flights
between San Juan and Port- au- Prince;
travel between the two nations gener-
ally requires at least one stop in the
mainland US.Ultimately, Prospect.5 always brought
the viewer back to New Orleans— with
encounters that were both deliberate
and serendipitous. At the New Orleans
African American Museum, for exam-
ple, works from Prospect.5 casually
intermingled with an unrelated exhi-
bition organized by Kristina Kay Rob-
inson that explored real and imagined
Black spaces. That show contained a
sensational piece by Langston AllstonReal Photo Postcards:
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MFA Publications is the imprint of the Museum of Fine Arts, BostonMiranda 26 28 .indd 27 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 41 PM