[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey guys, we're in New Orleans today
where it is strangely very cold.
And we're outside of the McKenna Museum of African American Art.
And this is a venue that's part of Prospect.3, this art
exhibition curated by Franklin Sirmans that
happens every three years.
Inside here is work by Carrie Mae Weems
and we're going to go check it out,
and then we're going to go explore
other venues that are part of Prospect.3 throughout the city.
It
Once inside I was immediately reminded
of how much I enjoy seeing art in places that are not
cold white galleries or former industrial loft type places.
Sure, it's nice sometimes but this restored antebellum home
is warm, has a palpable history, and is a fitting setting
for Carrie Mae Weems' work.
Like her Louisiana project where she photographed herself
in front of Civil War era architecture
to explore her and our relationship
to the history of slavery.
There was also her amazing video installation, "Lincoln, Lonnie,
and Me-- A Story in Five Parts."
She used an old optical illusion trick called Pepper's ghost
to project 3D looking figures onto a stage.
You're going to have to trust me that it works really,
really well.
And the progression of characters
you experience of different times, classes, races,
and gender both haunt you and ask
you to consider your own place in the story.
So one of the best things about Prospect
is that it takes you to parts of the city you probably wouldn't
have otherwise visited.
I could easily go to New Orleans and only eat fancy donuts
and drink myself into a coma, maybe stop at a museum or two.
But now I've seen this incredible work,
plus I got to experience the McKenna Museum
and their collection.
Ditto for the next place we went,
Longue Vue House and Gardens, which
is the former estate of some very
well-to-do and philanthropic New Orleanians.
Most of the place was functioning
as it normally does, hosting home and garden tours.
But there were also a few Prospect installations here.
A super strong video work by Camille Henrot,
"Grosse Fatigue," which begins and ends
with a desktop computer screen and shows
us an overwhelming and entrancing sequence
of images and video, much filmed at the Smithsonian Museum.
I marveled the whole time about how peculiar
we humans are, what we decide to preserve,
make note of, historicize, categorize,
and how we explain and process images and information
from the past and from today.
These thoughts were also on my mind
as I went on to see a display of works in the gate house
by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.
Here we were in this stately home,
carefully preserved and maintained
by its keepers and the community,
while we're also given the chance
to learn about Ban's practice of making disaster relief
shelters and inexpensive housing out of recycled materials,
including documentation of the post-Katrina house
he made in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
It's a small, quiet installation,
but for me it made sense in this setting
and made me ask what is successful architecture
and whose homes are important.
We visited several other Prospect sites,
including a Basquiat exhibition at the Ogden Museum.
A delightfully unexpected display
by Kerry James Marshall in the windows
of the Ashe Cultural Arts Center,
an installation of works at the New Orleans Museum of Art
that we couldn't photograph, a really nice installation
of works at the Newcomb Art Gallery
that I tried to photograph but got in trouble with a guard
and had to delete, as well as the largest exhibition
of the show at the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans.
In all of these locations you could read the intro text
for the show written by its artistic director Franklin
Sirmans, who gave it the title "Notes for Now."
He talks about Walker Percy's 1961 novel
"The Moviegoer," which is set in New Orleans
and the narrator's personal search
on the eve of his 30th birthday.
Sirmans says, "the third Prospect biennial
is invested in and will explore the search
to find the self and the necessity of the other
as part of that quest."
Sure it's art speaky but I found this a really compelling
framework for the show.
Sirmans ends the text with questions
pulled from Percy's novel.
Where do we come from?
What are we?
Where are we going?
And these are what I kept asking myself
as I traveled around the city seeing the show.
Lots of press who came opening weekend
complained about how disjointed the show was,
how difficult some of the venues were to find,
how many locals weren't even aware that it was happening.
But those people broke the cardinal rule
of enjoying an art show and that's don't
go during the opening.
Sure, you miss special performances,
but you get to see the show on its own terms
without laboring under the delusion
that the whole city should bow down and be
grateful for your presence.
I do think that for Prospect to keep
happening it will eventually need
to be embraced by its own city.
But I can see the point of locals
who don't pay attention to it.
New Orleans is a spectacular cultural phenomenon
without this show.
It has copious places worth visiting without it
and it has a healthy community of artists
making good and relevant work.
But I think Prospect is an invaluable resource
for the city and those who visit it to bring other voices here
every few years who raise important questions,
questions that make me appreciate
the complexity of this gnarly and frustrating but beautiful
city.
I didn't get to see the whole show, not even close.
But I still spent an enriching day
exploring the fantastically complicated city
of New Orleans.
I miss the kind of keynote work for P.3
that was Tavares Strachman's "You Belong Here,"
a large neon sign that read exactly that,
strapped to a barge floating down the Mississippi River.
I'm not sure if the message was directed
at the city's residents or the art tourists who
came from elsewhere to see it, but the ambiguity is strategic.
Who belongs in this place?
Do you?
Do I?
Do the people who live there?
Which ones?
These are good questions to ask wherever you live.
And I hope the next Prospect asks entirely new ones
and takes me to entirely new parts of the city.