The Seeds of Artists of Public Memory
Executive Director, Nick Stillman reflects on the influential works and moments at Prospect New Orleans that lead to creation of our newest initiative, the Artists of Public Memory Commission.
Executive Director, Nick Stillman. Photo: Jose Cotto
Officially, the seeds of Prospect’s Artists of Public Memory initiative started during preparations for the Prospect.5 exhibition. As we began receiving proposals from artists for P.5 projects in late 2018 and early 2019, it became clear that there was a through line: artists were thinking about the importance of monuments in public space. Several of these proposals would later be realized for the Prospect.5 exhibition, which opened in late 2021.
This thinking has been present in our work with artists since Prospect’s inception. Initially, Prospect was fundamentally a post-Katrina effort. Like a lot of American cities, New Orleans suffered from slow-burning decline throughout the second half of the 20th century: the mechanization of the port, inextricable segregation and the gutting of the tax base, the migration of banking and manufacturing jobs to newer Southern cities. In 2005, Katrina put all of New Orleans’ racism, long economic slump, endemic violence, and failure of public schooling and housing into the glaring global spotlight. In 2007, when Prospect formalized, the city was still hurricane-scarred and reeling from trauma and devastation.
Mark Bradford. Mithra, 2008. Installation view: Prospect.1 New Orleans. Mixed media; 16 x 70 feet. Photo: Nicole J. Caruth.
This was the context for Prospect.1, curated by Prospect’s founder Dan Cameron. Many of the seminal exhibition’s artworks were situated outside, partly as a means of making landscape inseparable from artwork and partly because there simply weren’t a vast amount of available climate-controlled interior locations in which to show art at the time. This context created some of the most iconic works in Prospect’s history. There are too many to detail here, but Mark Brandford’s Mithra and Wangechi Mutu’s Ms. Sarah’s House feel especially relevant to the work Prospect would be doing 15 years later in the Artists of Public Memory program. Bradford’s work was, famously, a 70-foot-long wooden boat – an Ark, really – situated in a field in the Lower Ninth Ward, ground zero for the levee breach and subsequent destruction. The structural component was a stack of shipping containers, evoking the nearby port. Then, the piece felt equally like a poetic symbol and practical object: a means of escape. Now, it feels increasingly like a bellwether for climate change’s horrific and blatantly obvious impacts. As recently as June of 2022, it was shown in the Los Angeles State Historic Park.
Mutu’s Ms. Sarah’s House took a very different approach to creating what could be considered a monument. While visiting Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick (who have realized one of the inaugural Artists of Public Memory commissions) in their Lower Ninth Ward L9 Center for the Arts, Mutu noticed a nearby plot of land with no house. The artists detailed how Ms. Sarah Lastie’s home had been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. A widow, Lastie was still working to find the funds to rebuild, and had already been swindled by opportunistic contractors, a common story in the post-Katrina landscape. Mutu’s beautiful and haunting project became a “drawing” on the property created with string lights in space, taking form as a structure in the plausible dimensions of a house and really only visible at night. Concurrently, Mutu sold a print to raise money for rebuilding. Ms. Sarah’s House became a temporary beacon of light in a neighborhood that still felt dark and empty and it literalized a poignant type of care that also provided a platform for this and other stories of criminal contractors and ineffective, willfully laborious government bureaucracy.
Tavares Strachan, You Belong Here, 2014, blocked out neon, 9.1 x 24.4 m, installation view, Prospect New Orleans’ triennial, Prospect.3, Mississippi River, New Orleans, USA
By the time of Prospect.3 in 2014-2015, conditions had changed substantially in the city; an influx of newcomers to New Orleans had arrived eager to be involved in the healing of the city while also driving up real estate prices and taking jobs. For P.3, Bahamian artist Taveres Strachan created an approximately 100-foot-long purple neon sign reading ‘You Belong Here’ that floated slowly in the Mississippi River on a barge, visible to anyone looking over the river toward the West Bank at night. Strachan’s enigmatic piece perfectly centered what it felt like to be in New Orleans at that moment, when ownership and belonging in an economically challenged city with very high nativity rates but also a gutted population base were (and still are) such contested topics.
Three-years later, New Orleans-based artist Michel Varisco installed the elegiac Turning on the newly completed Lafitte Greenway, an unwitting precursor to Prospect’s current collaboration with Friends of Lafitte Greenway on the Artists of Public Memory initiative. Commissioned in collaboration with Arts New Orleans and the city’s Percent for Art program, the work’s interactive cylinders, or prayer wheels, can be spun to emit a soft blue glow from stored solar energy. Etched onto the three cylinders is Mississippi River is iconography that respectively connotes a forested and plentiful past, the traumatic break of colonialism, and the extraction and ravages of the present. Varisco’s important work is a permanent installation and a complicating counter-memorial to the uncritical glorification of the river’s celebrated bends.
Michel Varisco, Turning, 2017, Installation view. Prospect.4.
Traditionally, artists don’t really get to make monuments. They may be the people who cast or carve or sculpt the object, but monuments are usually the product of municipal or corporate groupthink – or, more insidiously, well-funded groups seeking to cast a spell of domination over the populace. Then the plans are handed to artists for execution. With Artists of Public Memory, Prospect is hoping to do two things:
Honor the history of the organization, specifically its history of creating monuments and symbols in civic space that provoke culturally relevant dialogue that is unlikely to otherwise be manifested in our shared space
Let artists lead the process of rethinking our shared space
Let’s be honest: there are so many stories, histories, people, and narratives absent from New Orleans’ presentation of itself through public monuments. Cities owe it to their citizens to reflect its changing populace. Those in power or with money determine our civic symbology, and it’s more or less what you’d expect: several confederate monuments that have since been removed, a Joan of Arc, a monument to immigrants, some gods and goddesses, Andrew Jackson, some religious figures and war heroes (including a woman named Molly Marine), Louis Armstrong, and the like. There is also a highly undervalued monument to Hurricane Katrina and a moving monument to victims of AIDS by Mitchell Gaudet. There is nothing that recognizes the impact of Indigenous populations in New Orleans (although the earthen mound built by an Intertribal collective comprised of Ida Aronson, Dr. Tammy Greer, Jenna Mae, Ozone 504, Virginia Richard, and Monique Verdin for their Artists of Public Memory commission will address that), nor the contributions of Vietnamese or many Latinx immigrants, nor the fact that New Orleans was a hotbed for auctions of the enslaved that took place in many locations throughout the city. So there is work to be done, and perhaps this work will and must move beyond the monumental, beyond the permanent, to address these living histories. And we’re committed to doing that work, to expanding the form and content of stories told in public space, and to learning from and listening to artists rather than attempting to speak through them.