Founded in 2008 by Dan Cameron, Prospect New Orleans is the largest biennial of international contemporary art in the United States. Conceived in the tradition of the great international biennials, such as the Venice Biennale and the Bienal de São Paulo, Prospect New Orleans showcases new artistic practices from around the world and contributes to the revitalization of New Orleans by spurring tourism and bringing international attention to the city's vibrant visual arts community. In its inaugural year, Prospect.1 New Orleans featured 81 artists who exhibited at 24 venues throughout the city, occupying a combined 200,000 square feet of space spread widely over miles of the city’s eclectic and historic neighborhoods. From November 2008 through January 2009, Prospect.1 attracted 42,000 individual visitors (88,000 admissions), generating over $23 million in economic activity.
Due in large part to the current economic conditions and decreases in funding for the arts nationally, U.S. Biennial elected to postpone Prospect.2 by one year. Prospect.2 is now scheduled to open to the public on October 22, 2011, and will be on view until January 29, 2012. Prospect New Orleans will remain active in the New Orleans community during the next year with a series of programs, exhibitions, and other art-related events mounted in cooperation with local institutions and organizations and focused on local artists.
Prospect New Orleans is organized under the auspices of U.S. Biennial, Inc., a nonprofit organization based in New York with offices in New Orleans. U.S. Biennial, Inc., was launched in January 2007, and its first project was Prospect.1. Read more about Dan Cameron, the founder and curator, below.
THE VISION
Prospect New Orleans was founded on the principle that the art of our time can play a significant role in the revitalization of an important U.S. city. As it evolves from a first-time biennial in Prospect.1 to a local tradition with each subsequent Prospect New Orleans, the biennial remains committed to building a contemporary art tourism infrastructure upon a signature event that galvanizes local art creation and entrepreneurial activity, while attracting tens of thousands of art lovers to New Orleans every-other-year.
By assigning social progress and aesthetic criteria nearly equal weight in the making of Prospect.1, the fundamentally educational message that was implicit in that first biennial will receive a similar degree of attention in Prospect.2. This focus continues to be developed as part of the direct, ongoing collaboration with the residents, neighborhoods, and institutions of New Orleans.
In the words of Cameron, "New Orleans has long been an urban wonderland where creative spirits by the thousands came from elsewhere to live and work, and from that starting point, it is becoming transformed into a place where art lovers from around the world can indulge in the city's natural and cultural beauty, while enjoying some of the most exciting new art being made today. We are working to make Prospect New Orleans a model example of how art can promote social justice and be a catalyst for the revitalization of a historic American city."
The STAFF of Prospect New Orleans and U.S. Biennial, Inc., a 501(c)3 not for profit organization founded in 2007.
Dan Cameron, Director
Beth Allen, Director of Development
Ashley Chavis, Development Associate
Keith Johnson, Deputy Director for Exhibitions
Ylva Rouse, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs
ABOUT DAN CAMERON
Dan Cameron is founder of the not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization U.S. Biennial, Inc., and artistic director of Prospect New Orleans, the international biennial of contemporary art produced by U.S. Biennial, which launched in November 2008. Since 2007, Cameron has also served as director of visual arts for the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), New Orleans, which served as the principal venue for Prospect.1. At the CAC, Cameron has presented solo projects by such artists as Luis Cruz Azaceta, Tony Feher, and Peter Saul, as well as the group exhibitions "Something from Nothing," "Make-It-Right," "Previously on Piety," and "Hot Up Here."
Cameron was senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York from 1995 to 2006, where his exhibitions included survey and new-work exhibitions of Eugenio Dittborn, Carroll Dunham, Teresita Fernandez, William Kentridge, Cildo Meireles, Los Carpinteros, Nalini Malani, Christian Marclay, Paul McCarthy, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Marcel Odenbach, Pierre et Gilles, Faith Ringgold, Doris Salcedo, Carolee Schneemann, Francesco Vezzoli, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, and Xu Bing, among others. While at the New Museum, he also organized the group exhibitions "East Village USA" and "Living Inside the Grid."
In 2003, Cameron served as artistic director for the 8th Istanbul Biennial, entitled "Poetic Justice," and in 2006, he co-organized the 10th Taipei Biennial, "Dirty Yoga." In 2006, he was the curator of "New York, Interrupted" at pkm Gallery Beijing, the first independent exhibition of recent American art in China. In 2008, as guest curator for the Orange County Museum of Art, he presented a five-decade retrospective of American painter Peter Saul. Cameron currently serves as senior curator for Next Wave Visual Art at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), where he has organized an annual exhibition of emerging Brooklyn-based artists since 2002. He is also a member of the graduate faculty of School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where he teaches an MFA symposium each spring.
Some of Cameron's better-known early exhibitions include "Extended Sensibilities" (1982, New Museum); "Art and its Double" (1986—87, Fundación "la Caixa," Barcelona and Madrid); "What is Contemporary Art?" (1989, Rooseum, Malmö); "The Savage Garden" (1991, Fundación 'la Caixa,' Madrid); and "Cocido y Crudo" (1994, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid). Besides organizing major exhibitions in cities like Moscow, Mexico City, Valencia, Vienna, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, and Los Angeles, he is a frequently published writer on contemporary art, with hundreds of museum catalogs, essays, book texts, and magazine articles to his credit. His most recent publications include critical essays for Alexandre Arrechea: "Todo Algo Nada" (2009, Centro de Arte, Caja de Burgos, Spain); Nick Cave: "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" (2009, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco); and Skylar Fein: "Youth Manifesto" (2009, New Orleans Museum of Art).