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Biennial rising: Prospect.1 New Orleans and the post-disaster arts movement

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BIENNIAL RISING:
PROSPECT.1 NEW ORLEANS AND THE POST-DISASTER ARTS MOVEMENT

by

Sue Bell Yank

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC, ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2009

Copyright 2009 Sue Bell Yank

ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

I am deeply grateful to all who have aided me in my research for this project, especially
the wonderful artists, arts organizers, planners, and curators in New Orleans who took
time out of their busy lives to speak with me. Special thanks to Andy Antippas, John
Barnes, Jr., Carole Bebelle, Ron Bechet, Kyle Bravo, Tony Campbell, Stephen Collier,
Keith Calhoun, Dan Etheridge, Sylvester Francis, Susan Gisleson, Amy Koritz, Jenny
LeBlanc, Ronald Lewis, Mat Schwarzman, Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, Claire Tancons,
and M.K. Wegmann, all of whom are doing extraordinary work in difficult
circumstances. I am also indebted to those who have maintained a deep investment in
New Orleans and supported my study of their work, including Mark Bradford, Mel Chin,
Rick Lowe and Amanda Wiles. Thanks to my team of friendly critics in Los Angeles who
have kept me in check and on track, especially Rhea Anastas, Joshua Decter, Lauri
Firstenberg, Cesar Garcia, and my utterly supportive husband Mike Yank. Finally, this
research could not have been completed without the incredible intellectual generosity of
Jess Garz – a partner in the pursuit of rigorous critique for the most loving of reasons, and
a rediscovered friend.

Sue Bell Yank
March 2009

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures v
Abstract vii
Introduction 1

Chapter One 8
The New Orleans Imaginary 8
Enter Prospect.1 New Orleans 12
Interview Methodology 15
Arts Funding in New Orleans 17
Julia Street and Cultural Domination in the Arts 24
Mardi Gras Indians and Oppositional Culture 28
The post-Katrina Arts Movement 32
St. Claude Arts District 37
Motivations for an Alternative Arts Movement 40
Beyond the Biennial: The Pedagogical Socially-based Arts Movement 45

Chapter Two 51
The Inception of Prospect.1 51
The Changing Biennial Model 67
The Prospect.1 Agenda 70
The International Horizon 74
The Biennial as an Institution 76
A One-Man Show 80

Chapter Three 87
The Critical Response 87
A Spatial History of New Orleans 95
The Tourist Narrative 99
Racial Politics in post-Katrina New Orleans 103

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS (CONTINUED).

Chapter Four 109
The Prospect.1 Map 109
The Spatial Codification of Prospect.1 121
The Lower Ninth Ward 123
The St. Claude Arts District 130
Success is New Orleans 133

Conclusion 135

Bibliography 140

Appendix A: Network Figures 145

Appendix B: Interview Questions 148

v
LIST OF FIGURES.

Figure 1. Bar on St. Charles Avenue. 7

Figure 2. A flood-damaged house in the Seventh Ward. 11
Figure 3. The Contemporary Arts Center in downtown New Orleans 19
Figure 4. Julia Street during the annual “White Linen Night.” 25
Figure 5. Mardi Gras Indian suits at the Backstreet Cultural Museum. 31
Figure 6. Universal Furniture Warehouse 34
Figure 7. Stephen Collier, Mississippi Shit Stripe, 2005. 43
Figure 8. Mel Chin, Safehouse, 2008. 49
Figure 9. Lee Bul, After Bruno Taut (Beware the Sweetness of Things), 2007. 57
Figure 10. Shawne Major, Bud Sport, 2008. 59
Figure 11. Sanford Biggers. Strange Fruit. 2007. 61
Figure 12. Battleground Baptist Church in the Lower Ninth Ward. 65
Figure 13. Nari Ward, Diamond Gym, 2008. 65
Figure 14. L9 Arts Center. 92
Figure 15. Map of New Orleans, showing Wards, early 1870s. 96
Figure 16. Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, a shop in the French Quarter. 101
Figure 17. Detail of Prospect.1 Map showing sites and artists. 114

vi
LIST OF FIGURES (CONTINUED).

Figure 18. Detail of Prospect.1 map, showing districts outlined in red. 122
Figure 19. Mark Bradford, Mithra, 2008. 127
Figure 20. Peter Nadin, The First Mark, 2008. 131
Figure 21. Network map of relationships. 145
Figure 22. Network map of resources . 146
Figure 23. Network map of Prospect.1 designations. 147

vii
ABSTRACT.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August of 2005, centuries-old
hierarchies were overturned, spatial boundaries rendered unrecognizable, and artists on
multiple fronts coalesced into communities with a similarity of purpose: to produce
experimental contemporary art in New Orleans linked to a global rather than regional
dialogue, and to test the role of art as a force in building community and engaging in
pedagogy in a post-disaster context. This urgent need to connect artistic activity to a
greater social rebuilding process, along with the compacted changes to the redefined and
renegotiated arts sector in New Orleans, led me to focus on the massive game-changing
inception of the first international United States biennial exhibition, Prospect.1 New
Orleans. Through on-the-ground interviews and site visits, I investigate Prospect.1 from
inception to reception, analyze it against existing biennial structures, and unpack the
complexities of its relationship with the burgeoning post-disaster arts movement.

1
INTRODUCTION.

As New Orleans slowly began to rebuild in the three years following Hurricane
Katrina, a variety of small collectives opened new contemporary art spaces in refurbished
buildings all over the city. Aided by the breakdown of rigid social and spatial hierarchies
existing prior to the storm, these spaces often collaborated with the influx of academics
and thinkers deployed to study the city’s nascent recovery. Many developed new
missions dedicated to exploring art’s potential in addressing social problems revealed by
the storm and subsequent rebuilding process. This urgent need to connect artistic activity
to a greater social rebuilding process along with the compacted changes to the redefined
and renegotiated arts sector in New Orleans form the basis of my study, and led me to
focus on the massive game-changing inception of the first international United States
biennial exhibition, Prospect.1 New Orleans.
This biennial was initiated at a moment when basic infrastructure in the city had
barely returned, and the displacement of its citizens remained a highly problematic and
unresolved situation. Entering into a complicated context of widespread institutional
distrust, a population in flux, and the breakdown of urban spatial understanding,
Prospect.1 prompted questions among artists and arts organizers about the propriety of a
large-scale contemporary art exhibition in a city ridden with sites of trauma. With a
focused motive – to bring tourism dollars back into New Orleans – and a citywide scope,
Prospect.1 threaded itself through the post-storm arts network, binding disparate entities
into an institutional fabric that simultaneously catalyzed rapid growth for some and
2
ossified the dynamic processes of others. Rather than posing critical questions about the
fascinating and confusing role of art in a post-disaster context, reflecting upon its own
efficacy and proposed impact, Prospect.1 favored flat, simple, and bold rhetoric that
cleaved to a tourist-centered vision of New Orleans as a city on the cusp of greatness.
As such, this study was designed to record and interrogate the dynamics of this
particular moment, but ultimately the results were unexpected. Assuming Prospect.1
would be criticized and pulled apart at the seams by the fiercely grassroots arts sector in
New Orleans, instead I found overwhelming gratitude and an almost euphoric energy.
Similarly, anticipating only a few isolated organizations innovatively combining arts and
rebuilding, I discovered a constellation of incredibly varied practices collaboratively
bound together in a tight-knit but growing network. In fact, my first-hand interviews
revealed that this network had the underpinnings of a true arts movement, made possible
by the social and spatial disruptions wrought by Katrina. Previous hierarchies had been
overturned, spatial boundaries rendered unrecognizable, and artists on multiple fronts
coalesced into communities with a similarity of purpose: to produce experimental
contemporary art in New Orleans linked to a global dialogue, and to test the role of art as
a force in building community and engaging in pedagogy in a post-disaster context.
Prospect.1 entered as a player almost simultaneous to this cohesion of purpose,
and it is difficult to pick apart whether the local arts scene began to define itself in
anticipation of the coming biennial, or the biennial itself categorized and institutionalized
the dynamic processes occurring around it. These cross-influences aroused my interest in
the sociological reach of art, how the conditions of possibility necessary for the making
3
of critical art affect a wider context. How does a codifying arts institution like Prospect.1,
wielding unprecedented strength and influence, undercut or support these conditions?
What initiatives become parts of the legitimated network, oppositional to the network, or
left aside in some other category – and how are these categories determined by structures
of power and knowledge? What comprises success for a biennial or any other art
initiative in a post-disaster context?
To address these questions, I structured my study through questions of space,
sociology and art history, attempting to map out this period in the contemporary arts
development of New Orleans through interviews and site visits. This was necessary not
only because of the lack of scholarly material available, but also because of the
phenomenon of unmeasured, polarized rhetoric since Katrina. I wanted to take a more
nuanced and empirical approach to these events, so first-hand research and a wide
selection of potentially contrasting interviews comprised my entrée into this subject. I
supplemented this primary research with an art historical analysis of the various practices
I encountered, contextualizing the dynamics of Prospect.1 within alternative art
movements as well as other international biennials in post-traumatic contexts.
The arts organizations connected with these arts movements like The Porch, Good
Children Gallery, and L9 Arts Center are largely grassroots in nature, funded by post-
storm grants, and rely heavily on collaboration and network to sustain themselves, much
in keeping with other alternative arts movements of previous decades in cities around the
United States. Prospect.1, which developed in parallel to these initiatives, represents an
ambitious, top-down, privately funded institution conceived aesthetically and
4
organizationally by one figure – curator Dan Cameron. By virtue of its scale and the
international audience it promised, Prospect.1 had both a catalytic and codifying effect on
the existing arts network. As an aesthetic and conceptual endeavor, it hinged on the
simplistic mission of increasing cultural tourism and injecting a stimulus into the city’s
economy, and much of its structure was based on recycled biennial structures and artists
designed to draw an international art audience. This post-critical
1
framework represents a
missed opportunity to generate critical discourse about the changing conditions for
artistic production in this environment, the role of art in a recovery context, and the broad
socio-spatial reinscriptions that will determine the still-uncertain future of New Orleans.
Chapter one focuses on my interviews, using Julie Ault’s work on the alternative
arts movement in New York in the 1960s and 1970s as a lens through which to view the
network of varied arts initiatives that coalesced after the storm and paralleled the
inception of Prospect.1. Contemporary art in the city before Katrina is contextualized as a
tourist-centered, regionally built commercial system with very little official support for a
widespread but extremely limited grassroots sector (including the Mardi Gras Indians and
other cultural practices) in order to delineate the new conditions of possibility arising
from the post-Katrina landscape. By examining the tight network of new collective
spaces along geographic liminalities between established neighborhoods, the common
agendas of these organizations can be defined and contrasted with the mission of
Prospect.1.

1
The term “post-critical” is used in this context to reference to how the economic imperative of Prospect.1
was promoted to the detriment of a cohesive curatorial or aesthetic agenda based on larger socio-spatial or
art historical inquiries.
5
Chapter two interrogates the curatorial conceit, catalogue, press, and art of the
Biennial, contextualizing it among past examples. The writings of curators Ivo Mesquita
and Carlos Basualdo help delineate the economic motivations behind many such large-
scale arts exhibitions as well as distill some criteria for their success. Within this chapter
the institutional structures of various biennials including the Venice Biennale, the Bienal
de São Paolo, and the Johannesburg Biennale are broken down and analyzed, and I note
that unlike these, the institutional power of Prospect.1 power is consolidated in one man,
curator Dan Cameron. In investigating the problematics, limitations, and possibilities for
this particular institutional structure, Prospect.1’s rhetoric, organization, and influence as
it relates to the existing arts infrastructure in New Orleans can be rigorously examined.
The third chapter focuses on examining the local and national critical response to
the Biennial, as well as identifying pressing issues that remain unacknowledged and
questioning such omissions. After analyzing these problematic distortions against the
tourist narrative, I utilize Henri Lefebvre’s theories on the production of space to examine
the spatial politics of New Orleans both historically and after Katrina. By unpacking the
layers of historicism and tourism that envelop New Orleans, a contextual ground for
Prospect.1’s goal to revitalize the economy through tourism can be laid.
Chapter four examines Prospect.1’s direct effect on the local arts sector, focusing
on its inclusion and codification of many New Orleans art practices through the
production of its all-important map, and noting the initiatives that remained peripheral or
unrepresented by the biennial institution. Prospect.1 catalyzed infrastructure for arts
organizations, particularly in the Lower Ninth Ward and the St. Claude Arts District, and
6
I note the reciprocal effect local artists and arts leaders had on the siting of biennial
artwork. Finally, these narratives and influences are synthesized into a commentary on
Prospect.1’s socio-spatial influence on the city and the post-Katrina arts movement.
As Frieze magazine writer Steven Stern calls it, Prospect.1 was the “anecdotal
biennial,” and an interview-based study certainly lends itself to the disjointed telling of
stories at the expense of theoretical critique. Yet my research brought to bear the fact that
New Orleans is a place that challenges theory, for it is a city conditioned to rely on
network rather than institution, the oral rather than the written. Here I have tried to
balance the realities of art in New Orleans with a respect for its bearing on current art
discourses, and weave a critical narrative examining the role of art in a post-traumatic
context without drowning in devastating imagery and a romanticized past.

7

Figure 1. Bar on St. Charles Avenue. The juxtaposition of old and new architecture in
New Orleans.

Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, July 1, 2008.

8
CHAPTER ONE.

The New Orleans Imaginary

New Orleans is at once a city of seduction and contradiction – a place where
complex layers of the imaginary and the real, the historical and the present, the mythical
and the phenomenological combine in an irresistible attractiveness. The temptation to
wax poetical about the city’s elegant built environment, stately old-world mansions and
quaint Caribbean shotgun houses dripping with the limpid decay of the ever-encroaching
swampland, is difficult to resist. The aesthetic allure and cultural wealth of this city rests
in the touristic imaginary driven by sensual pleasure and excess: fried delicacies, spice,
and chicory; bright feathers and jazz and the purple fleur-de-lis; the shadow of vampires
and voodoo; the tombs of the dead. But the terrifying shifts wrought by Hurricanes
Katrina and then Rita in August of 2005, rendering the city an unrecognizable, devastated
social and physical landscape, presents a sobering reality that pierces through the
stagnant layers of myth that shroud New Orleans. Government officials and the media
have portrayed the storm as an isolated disaster of epic proportions and the persistent
failures of the recovery process a product of extant and unusual circumstances.
2
This
viewpoint obscures Katrina’s relationship to an iterative narrative of disaster and
vulnerability in New Orleans. The years after the storm have revealed that infrastructural

2
Knabb, Rhome, and Brown of the National Hurricane Center describe Hurricane Katrina as “the costliest
and one of the five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States.” They go on to say, “Considering
the scope of its impacts, Katrina was one of the most devastating natural disasters in United States history.”
Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown, “Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina:
23-30 August 2005,” (PDF) National Hurricane Center, December 20, 2005 updated August 10, 2006,
www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL122005_Katrina.pdf.
9
neglect tied to spatial politics, institutionalized racism, broad socio-economic disparity,
and corruption are deeply rooted in a tumultuous history.
New Orleans remains a powerful allegory – not in a religious sense, as a moral
flood-tale of excess being washed away by an act of God – but as a story of urban spatial
politics, post-disaster opportunism, social resilience and corrosion in the present day
United States. Its locational, social, and cultural extremes, laid bare by disaster, magnify
the problematics of a post-capital world in which racism is spatialized and
institutionalized, the socio-economic divide grows alarmingly as a result of increasingly
deregulated free-market fundamentalism, and notions of the public good and private
freedoms become interweaved and confused.
3

Yet New Orleans is also a city of intense cultural activity, the site of multiple and
varied arts endeavors that include not only a highly commercial gallery system, but also
small neighborhood-based initiatives that emphasize art’s social use-value over its
exchange-value.
4
Though the performative nature of carnival-based artistic traditions
place second lines and Mardi Gras Indian culture paradoxically at the center of the city’s
tourism-driven economy, they proceed from a fiercely grassroots tradition often
oppositional to the “competitive consumer citizenship” sociologist George Lipsitz

3
Author Naomi Klein highlights several examples in post-Katrina New Orleans of the free-market
fundamentalist agendas of Milton Friedman being enacted with “military speed and precision” before the
levees had been repaired or electricity grid brought back online. This included the privatization of the
school system and destruction of undamaged public housing, which she calls “orchestrated raids on the
public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events.” For more, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007), 3-9.

4
Through my interviews and primary research, I encountered organizations like The Porch, Home New
Orleans, YA-YA (Young Aspirations/Young Artists), The Colton School by the Creative Alliance of New
Orleans, and countless other initiatives that value pedagogy and community-building through art.
10
describes as America’s current dominant cultural hegemony.
5
By definition, hegemonies
are predicated on exclusion but they can also be altered or circumnavigated by the
reactive mobilization of the excluded, and this perpetual conflict gives birth to the
contradictory nature of New Orleans.
Katrina delivered a massive blow to the hierarchical social structures in New
Orleans, and caused even the wealthiest generational landowners to question the viability
of a city built on a swamp. The representations of the storm in the media, dominated by
images of Lower Ninth Ward residents awaiting long-delayed rescue on their rooftops
and scenes of the besieged Superdome, ripped a gash in the carefully constructed tourist
facade of the city. Rather than seen as an exceptional place of cultural vibrancy and
relative racial harmony, a narrative unabashedly promoted by the city, New Orleans was
exposed as harboring deeply problematic inequities and divisions along race and class
lines. Faced with these demons, the returning population sought ways to approach the
uncertain future, and for many included exploring new possibilities for the role of the arts
in promoting social cohesion and revitalization.

5
Lipsitz defines “competitive consumer citizenship” as social warrant of increased privatization and self-
interest that “asks people to place their identities as accumulators and consumers above their
responsibilities as workers and citizens.” He proposes that this social warrant “creates a speculative
economy, severs the relationship between work and reward, plunders public resources for private gain, and
promotes economic insecurity and social antagonisms.” For more, see George Lipsitz, “Learning from New
Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship,” Cultural
Anthropology 21, Aug. (2006): 451-467.
11

Figure 2. A flood-damaged house in the Seventh Ward.

Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, July 2, 2008.

12

Enter Prospect.1 New Orleans
Prospect.1 New Orleans, billed as the first and largest international United States
Biennial, first entered this complex territory after it was announced to the public in June
of 2007 at the 52
nd
Venice Biennale. In the year and a half before its opening on
November 1, 2008, founder and curator Dan Cameron invited over eighty international
artists to participate in a large-scale exhibition that would eventually inhabit twenty-six
sites across the city of New Orleans. Though Cameron is not a New Orleans native and
spent a decade as chief curator at the New Museum in New York City, he is a self-
described “longtime fan” of New Orleans and took a job as the Director of Visual Arts at
the city’s Contemporary Art Museum shortly before he announced Prospect.1.
6
The
boldly stated primary goal of the biennial was to attract wealthy art lovers to the city, a
“new class of tourists” that would pour dollars into the struggling tourism industry and
thus “revitalize New Orleans.”
7
To this end, Cameron carefully selected well-known
international artists who would draw viewers, and his main curatorial requirement was
that each artist visit the city at least once before the opening. Working with the artists and
local residents to select sites across the city, Cameron concentrated much of the show’s
artwork in cultural institutions and warehouse spaces in the Central Business District, but
also sited installations in historical sites in the Garden District, community centers and

6
Doug MacCash, “Dan Cameron wants to put New Orleans in the big picture,” The Times-Picayune,
December 9, 2007. http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2007/12/dan_cameron_wants_to_put_new_o.html.

7
“Why a Biennial for New Orleans?” Prospect.1 New Orleans, U.S. Biennial, Inc.,
http://www.prospectneworleans.org.
13
empty lots in the Ninth Ward, and large repurposed educational and retail facilities in the
St. Claude Arts District.
Yet the biennial was neither the first outside arts initiative to enter the city in the
aftermath of Katrina, nor will it be the last. Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot production in
the Lower Ninth Ward is often cited as a precedent to this kind of activity. Yet Waiting
for Godot differed from Prospect.1 at its core as a singular work of art in the form of a
play, realized by an artist and confined to a certain spatial sector (namely two sites in the
Lower Ninth Ward) over two performances. Cameron’s vision for Prospect.1, on the
other hand, dispersed the work of over eighty international artists throughout New
Orleans over a sustained period of three months. This structure necessitated the
cooperation, support, and dedication of potentially antithetical branches of the existing
arts ecology. Moreover, it threatened to break down and recast previous hierarchical
understandings between the commercial, community-based, alternative, and carnival-
based groups. Cameron’s prioritized model for the biennial, though deceptively simple on
the surface, manifested in a complicated set of relationships with an existing cultural
sphere – a multivalent sector dealing with its own reinscription in a drastically shifting
landscape.
The points of intersection that occurred as the biennial began to penetrate
informal social networks and inject itself into sites and practices across the city offer
moments of tension or drastic catalysis that illuminate potentialities for the role of arts in
a rebuilding city. Yet at the same time, these connections reveal the validating effects of
large-scale exhibitions on developing arts scenes that respond to real contextual
14
conditions, as well as the beneficial or negative repercussions of a dramatic shift in scale
or profile for small arts spaces.
In order to capture a picture of the reciprocities, hierarchies, and codifications
amplified or introduced as a result of the negotiations between the biennial and an extant
arts scene, I needed to formulate an understanding of the cultural landscape both before
and after the storm, and how the storm shifted the values, resources, and generative
processes of these systems. I quickly realized as I embarked on this study, however, that
New Orleans is an extraordinarily difficult place to analyze from a distance. Historical
categorizations and the tourist narrative tend to skew understanding of the actual
resources available, the real people involved, the relationships formed, and the politics
behind any particular sector. Not much scholarship exists on the visual arts landscape in
New Orleans at all, referred to as a “red-headed stepchild” by local artist and critic
Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart,
8
most likely because it is considered supplemental to the
thriving music and performance disciplines. Yet unique practices abound: some centuries
old and rooted in particular neighborhoods; others highly commercial, catering to a
regional tourist population; others alternative and edgy, piecing together new models for
displaying art and engaging in social dialogue. However, because many of the non-
commercial initiatives embrace a level of informality stemming both from a lack of
ample resources to archive and staff such projects, but also from a cultural privileging of
the grassroots and small-scale, researching them is complicated. Prospect.1, by virtue of
its size, institutionalization, and bold rhetoric, will most certainly codify this visual arts

8
Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, interview with author, June 30, 2008.
15
landscape in an unprecedented new way, perhaps providing the critical dialogue
desperately needed, or possibly only simplifying and ossifying the complexities around it.
Though many interviewees cautioned that it is too early to tell what the impact or
sustainable changes this exhibition will leave behind, the signs of a shift are garishly
obvious. New arts infrastructure is popping up all over, both informational and physical,
and the tentative arts activities initially prompted by Katrina react to the biennial catalyst
in both oppositional and positivist ways.
Interview Methodology
Already these dynamic processes are being sorted through, rated, and categorized.
To qualitatively measure Prospect.1’s impact on the arts community in New Orleans, one
must have captured a glimpse of how the arts landscape worked before the biennial, but
the scarcity of documentation or scholarship on various pre- and post-Katrina initiatives
necessitated an on-the-ground approach. Though my hours of interviews are but a slice of
the complexity of these emergent and ensconced local art worlds, I was able to speak to
some key people representing important nodes in the post-Katrina art world – at least
enough to be able to begin diagramming some of the values, resources, and motivations
behind quite varied initiatives (see Appendix A). A representation of these fiscal, social,
and spatial relationships reflects my understanding at this particular moment in time. I
was also fortunate enough to conduct two rounds of site research at opportune times –
once in July 2008, when Biennial information was still only coming out in dribs and
drabs, still just a prospect on the horizon; and once in November 2008, when the realities
of the fully opened exhibition were sinking in after the fervor of opening weekend had
16
died down. The shift in emotional response over this three-month period forms the basis
of my analysis of Prospect.1’s interface with multiple local art communities.
Though my roster of interviewees was by no means exhaustive and constrained by
time and scheduling, I was able to formulate a partial picture of the closely-knit networks
and spatial relationships at play in the city’s various art movements. The art communities
in New Orleans are fairly informal by design and based on tightly knit networks. Word-
of-mouth and recommendations were the best ways I found to plug into the network, and
preliminary introductions quickly led to others. Following a semi-structured interview
methodology,
9
I focused on resources, infrastructure, and the role of art in the Katrina
recovery process in the first round. By November, I had narrowed my thesis topic to
Prospect.1 and how its relationship to a burgeoning alternative arts sector reflected the
larger anxieties and restructurings in a post-disaster environment.
Through these interviews, similarities emerged that helped define the perceived
power structures and underlying values of the various arts organizations in post-Katrina
New Orleans. They proceed from historical social divisions, methods of resource
distribution, spatial idiosyncrasies, and cultural norms existing prior to the storm, yet
many were shifted by post-disaster realities. The methodologies and hierarchies that once
categorized the visual arts in New Orleans are deeply in flux, challenged first by a
grassroots movement towards collectivity, Do-It-Yourself galleries, and pedagogically

9
A semi-structured interview focuses on a group of general topics rather than particular questions, eliciting
responses in a more fluid and conversational manner without leading the interviewee. I used this model
more heavily in my first research trip in the summer of 2008 to allow for a wider variety of responses, but
once I had narrowed my focus in November of 2008, I posed four more specific questions in order to
compare answers more readily (see Appendix B).
17
oriented arts initiatives after Katrina with similarities to the alternative arts movement in
New York in the sixties and seventies; then again by the top-down injection of global art
world priorities and international exposure through Prospect.1. By analyzing what was
said (and left unsaid) by key figures in the broader New Orleans visual arts ecology
during these paradigmatic shifts, I will sketch out the dynamics as they coalesce in
several defining features. This is not to simplify the interwoven networks, influences, and
motivations of these practices, nor to painstakingly archive all of their complexities, but
rather to provide a cross-section of specific resonant similarities so as to better
understand the reinforcements and reshapings inflected by the Biennial.
Arts Funding in New Orleans
Arts funding from the City of New Orleans was virtually nonexistent for decades
before Katrina, confining viable art spaces to the commercial sector or a few large
institutions. Though this absence has been exacerbated since the storm, with scarce
resources funneled towards housing and rebuilding, national and international attention
brought on by the disaster has led to a bubble of arts philanthropy. Though this grant
money is available, it is frequently bottlenecked due to the lack of legal status of many
post-storm initiatives, and the city’s few non-profits are strained beyond their limits as
fiscal receivers for dozens of organizations. M.K. Wegmann is the President and CEO of
one such non-profit called the National Performance Network (NPN), a large regranting
organization headquartered in New Orleans. NPN normally partners with organizations
of many different scales, supporting performance-based resident artists within a fixed fee
structure. The biggest of the three New Orleans organizations affiliated with NPN is the
18
Contemporary Arts Center (CAC; see Figure 3); along with the mid-size Ashé Cultural
Center and the small theater company Junebug Productions. Since Katrina, however,
NPN has become a key node in the network of arts organizations and new initiatives in
the city, branching beyond its mission statement to fiscally sponsor and infrastructurally
support a variety of smaller entities with no legal status, such as Transforma Projects
10
,
KK Projects
11
, and the Home, New Orleans initiatives
12
. Many of these affiliated
organizations lost their office spaces in the storm (including NPN itself) or never had any
to begin with, and now share the same hallway on the second floor of the CAC.

10
Transforma Projects is an umbrella organization formed by arts organizer Jessica Cusick, and artists Sam
Durant and Rick Lowe after Katrina to provide support to interdisciplinary projects focused on rebuilding
in the city. Their three initial projects were Home, New Orleans, Homer Plessy Day (a public art
performance, installation, and celebration in conjunction with area high schools and Otis Public Practice
MFA students under Suzanne Lacy), and Mel Chin’s Paydirt/Fundred Dollar Bill project. They also
apportion small grants to local artists.

11
KK Projects is a gallery and series of dilapidated houses in the Seventh Ward/St. Roch neighborhood
transformed into installation spaces by art and fashion impresario Kirsha Kaeschele. At first criticized for
aestheticizing disaster, KK Projects is gaining a reputation for bold, large-scale installations, and is now the
site of Mel Chin’s Safehouse, which complements his Paydirt project.

12
Home, New Orleans is a long-running pedagogically-oriented arts initiative that oversaw the production
of arts-based rebuilding projects in several neighborhoods, including the Ninth Ward, Seventh Ward,
Lakeview, and Central City. The Porch Neighborhood Center was part of this project. Home, New Orleans
is a wide-reaching university-community initiative organized by Amy Koritz of Tulane University, John
Barnes of Dillard University, Ron Bechet of Xavier University of Louisiana, and Jan Cohen-Cruz of New
York University among others.
19

Figure 3. The Contemporary Arts Center in downtown New Orleans.
Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, June 30, 2008.

20

Because of her organization’s role as an ad hoc incubator and intermediary
partner, M.K. Wegmann has a deep understanding of the networks and resources at play
in the city. In many ways, NPN has stepped in where the city has failed to provide
resources and space to smaller arts and cultural organizations, but Wegmann explains that
this was a problem long before the hurricane hit. By following the trail of city money
earmarked for the arts, the priorities and values regarding art in the city becomes clear. I
asked her how things have changed since the storm, and she answered at first with what
has remained the same:
Well, there are some things that haven’t changed a lot, unfortunately. New
Orleans has never had a real [sic] strong arts infrastructure and in terms of the
amount of money that’s available to organizations, we are very, very small. The
Arts Council of New Orleans, pre-Katrina and currently, has never had more than
about $300,000 to re-grant to everybody, the Symphony on down to the $600,000
organization. So that has meant that there’s virtually no bell-curve here. Usually
in a city you find that you have a core of large-budget organizations and you have
a lot of small organizations, but the predominant number of organizations are
mid-sized organizations, with budgets from anywhere from 2 to $300,000 up to a
million or so, which is the size of organization where you can afford to pay
professional staff and have an ongoing program, and have the expectation that the
organization is sustainable, and we have almost no organizations in that middle
ground. And so that’s just sort of significant. We’ve got our big guys, you know,
but I think the largest organization is the museum [New Orleans Museum of Art],
and it’s actually a city agency and its budget is only around $10 million. I think
our orchestra is only about a $7 million orchestra. And orchestras in other places
are in the hundreds of millions of dollars for their annual budget. And so it’s just a
real [sic] stark picture of anybody’s ability to survive. So, where infrastructure
didn’t exist before Katrina, it really doesn’t exist now either … they said New
Orleans should concentrate on three industries: the port, tourism, and arts and
culture. And it still hasn’t manifested in any kind of comprehensive expectation or
plan that’s going to say we’re going to see what it takes to build this industry up
and you know, make it viable. Because basically our political leadership doesn’t
get it.
13

13
M.K. Wegmann, interview with the author, June 30, 2008.
21

This reality contrasts strongly with New Orleans’s reputation as a cultural capital or
regional art center in tourism literature – in fact, so few arts organizations receive any
kind of funding from the city that most of this sector exists in “the long tail” of a
lopsided, cursory bell curve; they are grassroots organizations funded out-of-pocket by
individuals and run out of private homes. Even in a comparable city like San Antonio,
where the arts are as significant to the city as a tourist destination as they are in New
Orleans, Wegmann mentions a hotel and motel bed tax that funds arts and cultural
initiatives to the point where a mid-size organization might receive twenty percent of its
operating budget from the city council. Compared to that, the $300,000 per year available
in New Orleans to grant to all arts organizations seems dismal indeed.
14

The state of Louisiana, however, has begun to recognize the potential in a thriving
cultural economy since Katrina, but some local organizers like Amy Koritz, a former
English professor at Tulane University, believe that the priorities are misplaced. Koritz is
a key organizational figure in Home, New Orleans and the Living Cultures Project, an
organization dedicated to the support of Mardi Gras Indian and second line practices. She
highlighted the arts and culture agenda of the Lieutenant Governor, Mitchell Landrieu,
but questions how the funds are being directed.
Well, the Lieutenant Governor’s office has placed some emphasis on the arts, but
they’re really interested in bringing more film crews into the city and increasing
tourism, and bringing more visitors to the city whenever they can. So they’re
interested clearly and explicitly in the arts as an economic draw. They’re not
opposed, they understand the relationship between that function of the arts and the

14
M.K. Wegmann, interview with author, June 30, 2008.

22
brass bands and the parading traditions and all of that stuff, although they haven’t
figured out how to support those folks very well. They’re interested in national
image and numbers.
15

Koritz paints a dismal picture of the kind of state support local arts initiatives receive, and
later in the interview she dismisses Prospect.1 as “the Lieutenant Governor’s agenda,”
implying its distance from the cultural practices more deserving of municipal resources.
Prospect.1, however, is almost entirely privately funded, with the state of Louisiana
contributing a mere eight percent.
16
Koritz’s willingness to dismiss the project as lacking
substance because of its perceived alignment with a state agenda betrays a deep
frustration with the political leadership among local arts organizations, and exemplifies
how the city’s returning population was primed to distrust and question a large-scale
initiative like Prospect.1. By investigating Prospect.1’s funding sources, however, a sense
of the interests in that endeavor can be juxtaposed with the funding infrastructures in the
local cultural landscape.
After Dan Cameron announced his idea in 2007, he set up U.S. Biennial, Inc., a
501(c)(3) public charity based in New York with an international board of directors. Most
of the donations used to underwrite the 2.9 million dollar cost of Prospect.1, however,
came from a network of individual philanthropists rather than foundations. Founding
benefactor Toby Devan Lewis, an art collector, philanthropist, and curator in New York
City, contributed the initial seed money for the project – she also happened to be a friend

15
Amy Koritz, interview with author, July 1, 2008.

16
Claire Tancons, interview with author, November 16, 2008. Claire Tancons is the Associate Curator of
Visual Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, and was also an Associate Curator of
Prospect.1 New Orleans.

23
and collaborator of Cameron’s. Together they co-wrote ArtWorks: The Progressive
Collection,
17
and Lewis has long been a benefactor of the New Museum, Cameron’s
former employer. In addition to Lewis and other individual donors, several funding
groups are also credited with supporting Prospect.1: among them the Prospect.1
Kingfishers Leadership Committee and the Prospect.1 Big Shots Gallery Circle. The
agendas and compositions of these private groups, however, remain obscure. In fact, the
public foundations that funded the exhibition are fewer than might be expected, including
among them the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Eugenie and Joseph
Jones Family Foundation, and the O’Grady Foundation. In the acknowledgements section
of the Prospect.1 exhibition catalogue, Cameron describes the biennial’s organizational
“scaffolding” and funding mechanisms as “the least cumbersome, and perhaps most
effective, means of producing the exhibit.”
18
After all, Prospect.1 was developed as a
massively scaled exhibition in a very short time frame, to take place in a city in the midst
of financial and existential crisis. Only the support of an elite network of wealthy (largely
New York-based) individual benefactors with prior connections to Cameron as a curator
made such a feat feasible. However, this very structure is questionable in a context of
shaken values and social hierarchies in New Orleans, especially considering that much of
the local arts sector is predicated on opposition to a controlling elite.

17
Dan Cameron, Toby Devan Lewis, Peter B. Lewis, and Mark Schwartz, Artworks: The Progressive
Collection (New York: D.A.P./The Progressive Collection, 2007).

18
Dan Cameron, “Acknowledgements,” in Prospect.1 New Orleans exhibition catalogue, ed. Lucy Flint
(New York: PictureBox, Inc., 2008), 7-8.
24

Julia Street and Cultural Domination in the Arts
Within the visual arts especially, a culture of domination and elitism privileges art
practices that cater to tourists and categorizes them in a way that feeds into the narrative
of the Old South. This commercial sector has been located for over thirty years in the
Central Business District (or alternatively, the Warehouse Arts District), though few of
the galleries along the 600 block of Julia Street are located in warehouses. Rather, the
most regionally prestigious galleries inhabit a row of nineteenth-century townhouses
known as the Thirteen Sisters, and have proclaimed themselves “The Soho of the South”
(see Figure 4). Several have been acknowledged as the primary tastemakers in so-called
“high art” in the city, including the LeMieux Gallery, The Arthur Roger Gallery, and
Galerie Simone Stern.
19
But this power, consolidated so effectively in a particular spatial
and social sphere and beholden to the tourist dollar, has created a specific regional arts
establishment divorced from a larger contemporary art dialogue and imbued with its own
rigid boundaries of inclusion.

19
“Julia Street,” Nola Fun Guide, http://www.nolafunguide.com/organization.php?id=1597.

25

Figure 4. Julia Street during the annual “White Linen Night.”
Photograph by Sharon Keating, reproduced with permission.

Source: “White Linen Night Photos,” Go New Orleans,
http://goneworleans.about.com/od/nightlife/ss/Whitelinennight.htm.

26

Biennial artist John Barnes, Jr., a New Orleans resident and Dillard University Professor
who is represented by the LeMieux Gallery, described some of his experiences with Julia
Street galleries, and how his work has been categorized.
JB: Personally, I’ve always had a pretty good working relationship with a lot of
the art establishment locally. They know who I am. Sometimes they would say
“hello,” sometimes they wouldn’t. But I was never considered part of the core
group. And was very much marginalized. So even if you do a show, and you get a
good review, it’s a review that is positive, but it’s mischaracterizing at the same
time. “This work is great, it’s strong, it’s dynamic … a great folk art show.”
SBY: Oh, wow.
JB: You know, that type of thing. Folk art? I have an MFA, how can I be a folk
artist? You know what I mean? That’s an oxymoron. But like I said, strange
definitions happen, of contemporary art that was really like craft. All the glass
blowing, and all the casting, dealing with just decorative items that didn’t really
speak to the human spirit, that definitely wasn’t the art of now. Just because
they’re part of the hierarchy, the news media viewed them as the darling [sic],
they heard that contemporary’s better. So okay, they’re contemporary. So they
just sort of crowned them, artificially crowned them.
20

Barnes implicates museums, critics, and galleries in racial marginalization and false
labeling, accusing this establishment of being completely ignorant of current artistic
trends and promoting certain artists based on a historical and tourist-driven culture of
exclusion. He describes the curatorial choices of David S. Rubin, the Director of Visual
Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center prior to Dan Cameron, and their resonance with
Deep South elitism as opposed to the relative racial and ethnic diversity of an
international biennial:
What we’re used to in this city is a whole bunch of shows that are almost
exclusively white. Then for the very short month of February he [David S. Rubin]
looks for a show like “Hair Stories,” which was a popular African American show
that had its birthplace in Scottsdale, Arizona. And that’s his answer to the black

20
John Barnes Jr., interview with author, November 14, 2008.
27
question. So it’s a very non-progressive mindset. So for New Orleans to have this
much representation of people of other nationalities and races kind of all
presented together is a first. It’s never happened. Ever. That type of openness is
culturally abhorrent in this environment. It’s like, a fear of open competition. I’ve
always looked at it that way. The upper crust are afraid of putting their kids out
there, to compete against everybody else, you know. So they make a hierarchical
chain. That type of old line of thought is really prevalent in the Deep South. I
mean, really, really prevalent.
21

The persistent historical hierarchies evident in the arts sector of New Orleans also feed
into the tourism industry, which segments art into tourist-friendly chunks that break down
along racial lines. These often include a modernist high-art paradigm (which Barnes
characterizes as “big iron sculptures”), plein air painting and other Impressionist-inspired
landscapes, African or folk art (including art that deals with traditionally black cultural
practices in New Orleans like jazz and second lines), or the decorative arts (pottery and
glass-blowing). Spatial hierarchies also exist clearly within the arts establishment of New
Orleans – the most successful galleries have space in the French Quarter, or just down the
way on Julia Street. Even the few city museums are cited plantation-style on acres of land
removed from the grittier neighborhoods. All but the most progressive of commercial
galleries repeatedly support these paradigms, simply because the most revenue comes
from tourists rather than collectors.
Yet why so little contemporary art that responds to a global dialogue, even in
museums? This could be due to the type of tourists New Orleans attracts and what they
expect from the city’s self-identification, or perhaps it is because of a lack of exposure to
the international art world that would attract cutting-edge artists, critics, and curators –

21
John Barnes Jr., interview with author, November 14, 2008.
28
which goes back to a drastic lack of support and resources from the city. Barnes believes
that this lack speaks to an entrenched power structure actively defining art’s role in the
city in order to tamp down competition and maintain certain terms of art production.
Strategic marginalization in art institutions is not unique to New Orleans, persisting
throughout the country, but the oppositional reaction of an alternative sector never gained
the force of a movement as it did in other cities.
Mardi Gras Indians and Oppositional Culture
Though the official conditions for art making set by the Julia Street galleries,
museums, and complicit art critics seemed ineradicable and determined by an urban
regime of wealthy elite, these terms were consistently questioned by a vibrant grassroots
tradition for years before the storm. The New Orleans carnival-based traditions like the
Mardi Gras Indians, Krewes, and brass band second line parades have deep roots in the
city’s African-American communities. They feature strongly in the tourism narrative as
living history, a current marker of New Orleans’ unique ethnic and cultural blend, but
have always remained somewhat outside of dominant historical and art-historical
narratives. Claire Tancons describes how the anthropological discourse surrounding
carnival practices often relegates them to a “folk art” categorization:
What may account for the overlooking of Carnival in art-historical discourse and
curatorial practice is that it is a ritual and festival as well as an art form. As ritual
and festival, it is the natural object of folklore and anthropology, disciplines that
have fraught relationships with art and art history. As an art form, it has yet to
find its historians, critics, and curators.
22

22
Claire Tancons, “The Greatest Free Show on Earth: Carnival from Trinidad to Brazil, Capetown to New
Orleans,” in Prospect.1 New Orleans [exhibition catalogue], ed. Lucy Flint (New York: PictureBox, Inc.,
2008), 54.

29

Yet in many ways, the historical roots of New Orleans carnival practices imbue them
with “elements of inversion, subversion, and other strategies for challenging power and
disrupting authority.”
23
Growing from tight-knit Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs organized
around small neighborhood parcels, the practices provided a social safety net and
collective power within an oppressed and dominated group, providing alternative
pathways to success entirely separate from establishment values. For example, a highly
respected black community leader in New Orleans may be a Big Chief in a Mardi Gras
Indian tribe with both the time and money to hand-bead a richly appointed new suit every
year, costing him up to $3,000 and countless hours. Ronald Lewis, a Mardi Gras King in
2008 and proprietor of the House of Dance and Feathers in New Orleans, laughingly
equated this status to a young black man in an urban center owning a souped-up new car
with enormous rims.
24

In New Orleans, a recently desegregated city, these tight alternative social
networks and vibrant carnival practices are fiercely protected and break down rigidly
along racial and spatial lines, maintaining many of the old divisions. In fact, Mardi Gras
was not forcibly desegregated until 1991, when white “old-line” Krewes were forced to
either open up their ranks or withdraw from parading (some did, and hold their own
exclusive balls in lieu), but even today the mostly white Mardi Gras Krewes parade in the

23
Tancons, 54.

24
Ronald Lewis, interview with author, July 7, 2008.

30
French Quarter atop floats while the mostly black Mardi Gras Indian tribes celebrate in
the back streets of neighborhoods that might as well be on the other side of the country.
25

Though Krewe members generally see themselves as artists, Mardi Gras Indians
may or may not.
26
In many ways this plays into the strength of the culture’s oppositional
identity – it is a category in and of itself, and traditional artistic validations from the
dominant culture are ostensibly neither needed nor welcomed. This strength, however,
can also be considered a weakness when considering that these practices struggle to
survive amid staggering conditions of poverty and a continued lack of institutional
recognition and support. The extraordinary tightness and insularity of such communities
provides an indispensable support structure for residents, but also sets up an intimidating
insider-outsider dynamic that leaves non-participants in a transient, tourist-like mode of
spectatorship. This mode of viewing makes it even easier for the establishment to
marginalize and misrepresent such practices, instrumentalizing them within the
“Creolized, gumbo-like” narrative of cultural hybridity and uniqueness.
And what of artists like John Barnes? Before the storm, they had few alternatives
besides racialized, tourist-centered institutions to make and show contemporary art, in
neighborhoods far away from their own. The bounded territories for art making before
Katrina allowed little space for experimentation, boundary crossing, risk-taking, or social
inclusion, even though the narrative of New Orleans seemingly embodies all of these
traits.

25
Tancons, 55.

26
Tancons, 57.
31

Figure 5. Mardi Gras Indian suits at the Backstreet Cultural Museum.
Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, July 1, 2008.

Permission to reproduce this image was
not obtained in time for publication.
32
The Post-Katrina Arts Movement
Along with its physical and social devastation, Hurricane Katrina marked an
enormous shift in the conditions of possibility for art making in New Orleans by
weakening these boundaries and empowering a burgeoning alternative arts sector to
develop into a fully-fledged movement. Katrina acted as a heightening agent, shifting
conditions and values to a state where they coalesced and gained momentum, forcing
artists to reevaluate the exposed power structures of the city and their own place within
them. With Prospect.1’s development alongside this movement, promising (or
threatening, depending on the point of view) to connect the city to a larger global
contemporary arts dialogue, the previous boundaries of inclusion were suddenly called
into question. These conditions resonate with those set forth by Julie Ault in her
discussion of the alternative arts movement in New York from 1965 to 1985, but are also
deeply marked by the post-trauma environment. Ault maps out the convergence of spatio-
temporal factors that led to the New York movement, conditions that can be generally
applied to post-Katrina New Orleans:
A convergence of socioeconomic factors fostered cultural production in New
York City. These factors included an abundance (some would say an
overabundance) of artists; a culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse urban
population in flux; the political context of various civil rights and liberation
struggles; the availability of affordable residential spaces and rents; a plethora of
neglected or underutilized urban sites; and the city’s status as a powerful art
center.
27

27
Julie Ault, “For the Record,” in Alternative Art New York: 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 6.

33
There is no doubt that after Katrina, the historically diverse (though segmented)
population of New Orleans was in flux both spatially and economically. The destruction
of the Desire Housing Projects, the heavily white neighborhood of Lakeview and the
mostly black neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward caused traditional spatial
boundaries to temporarily break down. The population was scattered in diaspora for
months, and returned to ruined residential areas as an influx of YURPS (Young Urban
Rebuilding Professionals),
28
ambitious developers, and Mexican immigrants moved in to
the city with little regard for previous spatial limitations. Though these boundaries have
fairly quickly reconstituted themselves (or perhaps they never really went away), they are
more frequently contested, and liminal spaces have opened up like St. Claude Avenue,
which divides the impoverished African-American neighborhoods of St. Roch and the
Seventh Ward and the middle-class white neighborhood of Marigny/Bywater.
The suddenly availability of resources like space and money also has contributed
to an alternative arts movement in New Orleans. For example, the largely abandoned
commercial strip along St. Claude Avenue became a prime location for new artist spaces.
In many cases, undamaged buildings were left vacant, and artists were often the first to
take the initiative to claim them as studios, workspaces, and galleries. These initiatives
finally had an audience as well – the storm initially provoked curiosity and a desire to
promote the perceived cultural dynamism of the city on a national level, and afterwards

28
Although I have not yet encountered this term in print, I was introduced to it by several of my
interviewees independently.
34
the advent of Prospect.1 seemed to ensure that a critical, international audience of
viewers would maintain a vested interest in the city.

Figure 6. Universal Furniture Warehouse. A former retail building on St. Claude Avenue
that has been converted to exhibition space and also houses the local police station.

Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, November 14, 2008.

35
This national attention along with a sense of collective urgency, an exposure of
institutional failure, and heightening of distrust were all motivating factors brought on by
the storm. Unearthed by the re-evaluation and reflection that comes after a traumatic
experience, these components are so interconnected that together they constitute the
power of a movement. Dan Etheridge, an architectural history professor at Tulane
University and a founding member of The Porch in the Seventh Ward, sums up this
convergence:
I think the storm, like any disaster in anyone’s life, made people consider what’s
most important to them, and what defines them, and what they can and can’t live
without, and all of these kinds of things. Then layer on top of that the fact that it
played out on the national and international scene. And whether it’s Dan Cameron
or hosts of other people … the stuff that we’re immersed in every day, they saw
as amazing and rich. All of that, from a creativity point of view [sic]. And so I
think the combination of the new people coming in, with locals feeling like they
weren’t going to take it for granted any more, laid the groundwork for people
wanting to put a lot of work into it, and package things in new ways, and try new
things. I mean, the Porch is an example of that, where Willie [Birch] and Ron
[Bechet], I think, had been talking about this for years. But they did it after that.
And it got as far as it did partly because people with money, in this case, who
would’ve been a much harder sell, have come down and recognized what’s here
and supported it.
29

This spirit of such motivation is hard-fought, and comprises more than the sum of its
parts. In Karyn Ball’s introduction to trauma theory,
30
she quotes Kirby Farrell’s
description of trauma’s contagiousness, which leads him “to see post-traumatic

29
Dan Etheridge, interview with author, November 14, 2008.

30
The term “trauma theory” refers to a field of study inflected by both sociological and psychological
theory begun in the 1960s and 1970s that came out of studies on Holocaust victims, Vietnam veterans,
abused children, and disaster survivors. Trauma theory focuses on the long-term social legacy of violence
and psychological trauma. For more, see by Karyn Ball, “Introduction: Trauma and Its Institutional
Destinies,” Cultural Critique 46 (Autumn 2000).

36
experience as a sort of critical interface between people: a space in which patterns of
supremely important, often dangerous symbols and emotions may reinforce one another,
gaining momentum, confirmation, and force when particular social conditions and
historical pressures intersect.”
31
Though Farrell seems to be referring to instances of
social upheaval and unrest by the use of the word “dangerous,” this notion of increasing
momentum resonates with Julie Ault’s definition of a “movement” in her book on the
alternative art movement in New York City. She asks:
What constitutes a movement? What distinguishes it from activities and events
that, although related, function discretely? A movement implies shared concerns
and overlapping agendas; it conjures up social configurations as well as
communication and degrees of collaboration between individuals – one thing
leading to another, migration of ideas and models, generative social processes.
One feature of a movement is interdependency of individuals, groups,
organizations, and venues. Another is the interconnectedness of principles,
agendas, and practices.
32

These “generative social processes” and tight, co-dependent networks were certainly an
aspect of New Orleans culture prior to Katrina. Yet the shrinking of the population,
destruction of traditional spatial relationships, and influx of outside attention brought on
by the storm contributed to a solidarity that might not otherwise have occurred.
These networks, however, cannot be lumped together under one set of
motivations, therefore describing all of the post-Katrina arts initiatives as “alternative” is
reductive. Julie Ault describes the word alternative as “useful as a general term because it
declares historical and critical relations between the structures thus classified and the

31
Kirby Farrell quoted by Karyn Ball, 19.

32
Ault, 4.

37
then-existing institutions and practices.”
33
The term itself, she acknowledges, is
problematic not only because it inscribes a hierarchical understanding, but also because it
implies a reactionary agenda. The post-disaster arts activities in New Orleans address a
variety of concerns – some were started to provide a space for experimentation and the
display of new contemporary art forms; some were simply vehicles for artists not
embraced by the establishment; some reacted to broader pedagogical and recovery needs
of certain neighborhoods, pushing the boundaries of art’s relationship to life. Yet the term
“alternative” clarifies the relationship between a subset of new spaces and the
establishment, including the oppositional reaction implied by their inceptions. This sub-
movement, centered on the St. Claude thoroughfare, can indeed be thought of as an
alternative arts movement reacting to the power concentrated in the Julia Street galleries,
but it comprises only one arm of a two-pronged movement. The other arm, a constellation
of related organizations dealing with pedagogy and rebuilding, seeks to redefine art’s role
in disaster and recovery. Rather than artist-run galleries, these are more complex
initiatives combining partnerships with universities, schools, and individual artists that
may be place-based or nomadic by design.
St. Claude Arts District
Little over a year after Katrina hit, a group of art students and recent graduates convened
every Tuesday evening for nine months at a free public class held by Paul Chan during
the run of his research and planning for his Waiting for Godot production in the Lower

33
Ault, 4.
38
Ninth Ward. Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart describes the catalyst this class and the
approaching Biennial provided for artists in the city:
That’s how a lot of these people really met each other and started talking. Artists
are always I guess generally a bit isolated into themselves [sic] because of the
nature of the practice of being in the studio. But Paul Chan had a class in New
Orleans that was part of our MFA seminar class, but it was open to the
community. So we had students from Tulane, Loyola, and just working artists in
the community come down. And it was a real wonderful way of getting us all
together. And on the last day of his class, we all said, “we don’t really want this to
end,” we’d been like meeting and talking every Tuesday night, we would really
like to keep moving forward and keep talking about having a show for the
Biennial, so that’s kind of how it all started. And it was interesting to see how
taking one artist with a name, coming down here, that drew people to hear him
speak – but then we ended up with something, I think, a lot more sustainable in
the end.
34

“St. Claude Arts District” was a term first coined by artists Jeffrey and Andrea Holmes of
L’Art Noir, one of the first art spaces to move to the St. Claude Corridor in April of 2005,
just months before Katrina hit. L’Art Noir is a self-described “low-brow” art gallery,
aligning with the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Man Ray, and Frida Kahlo.
35

Soon after L’Art Noir opened, Barrister’s Gallery, a long-time mainstay in the
French Quarter run by Andy Antippas specializing in eclectic and “visionary” art, moved
to St. Claude Avenue via Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. Barrister’s also brought with it
a reputation for being one of the few spaces that would show emerging artists working
outside the regional mainstream. Antippas’ presence on St. Claude made the space

34
Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, interview with author, June 30, 2008.

35
Jeffery Holmes, “About the Gallery,” L’Art Noir New Orleans: New Orleans Premiere Lowbrow Art
Gallery, http://www.lartnoirneworleans.com/.

39
attractive to a generation of younger artists and added a sense of legitimacy to the locale
as a new center for art.
36

A group of eleven such artists, many of whom had their first shows at Barrister’s,
were spurred by the post-storm activity surrounding Waiting for Godot, the
announcement of Prospect.1, and a sudden influx of individual artist funding to open
their own space on St. Claude in February of 2008. Called Good Children Gallery (after
the original St. Claude Avenue moniker, Goodchildren), the small space features rotating
group and solo shows curated by or featuring the gallery’s eleven members.
37

Barely a month later in March of 2008, Antenna Gallery, part of the artist-run
literary and visual arts non-profit Press Street (started just before Katrina in the summer
of 2005), opened in the abutting neighborhood of Bywater. With a dynamic and eclectic
mix of artistic or performative collaborations, book launches, community draw-a-thons,
art events, and slickly curated group and solo shows, Antenna became an important
staging ground for partnerships and creative fundraising efforts within their community –
not only for other art spaces, but also for struggling local businesses and individual
cultural practitioners.
38

Just before Prospect.1 opened to the public in November 2008, the twelve-person
artist collective The Front opened a space across the street from Good Children. Several

36
Andy Antippas, interview with author, November 14, 2008.

37
Tony Campbell and Stephen Collier, interview with the author, November 14, 2008. Additional
information collected from the gallery’s website, http://www.goodchildrengallery.com.

38
Susan Gisleson, interview with the author, November 16, 2008. Addition information collected from the
gallery’s website, http://www.antennagallery.org.
40
members of The Front Collective (including Kyle Bravo and Jenny LeBlanc of Hot Iron
Press and Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart) connected during Paul Chan’s course at the
University of New Orleans prior to Waiting for Godot, and operate on a similar rotating
basis of member shows. Other spaces like the controversial KK Projects (simultaneously
criticized for aestheticizing disaster and lauded for producing truly edgy site-specific
installations), XO Gallery, and Sidearm Gallery round out the growing roster of spaces
known as the St. Claude Arts District.
39
Though some of these spaces are specifically
non-profit (like Antenna Gallery) or commercial (like Barrister’s), most have no legal
standing. Good Children Gallery, KK Projects, and The Front Collective are all
struggling to decide how they should incorporate for increased sustainability.
Motivations for an Alternative Arts Movement
Oppositionality is perhaps too polarizing a description for the motivations behind
this upsurge of arts organizations – at first, many artists within these collectives seemed
content to commit to simply to being in the city. As Jenny LeBlanc admits:
I feel like just to be here is important, to be like another warm body to be counted
is like [sic], New Orleans is important. People live here. We’re alive. We are
people. Just to be here, I feel like that’s a lot, a lot of work. And the artwork is
almost like a way of just sort of like dealing with the craziness of day-to-day life,
of being here all the time.
40

39
For a complete list of organizations, collectives and spaces considered part of the St. Claude Arts
District, see http://www.scadnola.com.

40
Jenny LeBlanc and Kyle Bravo, interview with author, July 7, 2008. Jenny LeBlanc and Kyle Bravo are
a husband and wife artist team that collectively run Hot Iron Press, a small art printing press. They each
have their own artistic practices as well, and are members of the Front Collective with Natalie Sciortino-
Rinehart. They bought and renovated the Front Gallery that opened in October 2008.

41
Keith Calhoun of L9 Art Center echoed this sentiment, but in the context of maintaining
presence in the face of “carpetbaggers” coming in to the city:
You have some elitism in these art venues, but I just think the local artists got to
[sic] find a way we can just run with the tides and keep our presence, so
sustaining ourselves in our community right now is the key.
41

Yet in some ways, this attitude implies passivity, and undercuts the challenges these
spaces are posing to the established art structures prior to the storm. L9 is a gallery in a
neighborhood essentially isolated from the traditional sites of mainstream visual arts in
the city, but through a combination of successful marketing through Prospect.1, catching
the interest of international big-name artists like Mark Bradford, and the uncanny ability
of Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick to plug in to networks all over the city, L9
has become a stepping-stone for emerging artists in the Lower Ninth Ward community to
launch their careers (bypassing the mainstream New Orleans tourist-based market
entirely). LeBlanc has similar hopes for the just-opened Front Gallery, which her artist
collective was still renovating at the time of our interview: she laments the lack of an
ecology for contemporary art, its placelessness within the city, and seeks to provide an
alternative node for the viewing, showing, and critical analysis of contemporary art:
If you’re in Philly or DC or in Richmond or whatever, you can just like take a day
trip and go see a bunch of really good stuff. And I feel like because New Orleans,
I don’t know if it’s because of the tourist thing because everyone just has it in
their mind that that’s like the way to go, it just seems like the art here is like
super, super commercial, and the galleries have to be able to sell work to survive.
And so they only will show work that they think that they can sell. And, you
know, if the public isn’t educated in such a way that they’re seeing contemporary
art, they’re not going to consume contemporary art. And so that therefore dictates

41
Keith Calhoun, interview with author, November 15, 2008. Keith Calhoun runs L9 Arts Center with his
wife and fellow photographer Chandra McCormick. L9 was supported by seed money from artist Mark
Bradford, and became an official Biennial site in the Lower Ninth Ward.
42
the kind of work that gets shown. And then it’s like the circle. You know, the
artists aren’t going to make more contemporary work because they know they
can’t sell it. So we just, we want a space that’s open to more experimental stuff
because we’re not depending on sales or commissions to stay afloat. And I think
that that’s what’s developing a lot lately. Since the storm, I guess people are just,
they want a chance to get their stuff out there and be seen, so they’re just taking
the matters into their own hands, and a lot of co-ops have popped up.
42

This kind of disgust with the commodification of art, caught here within a vicious cycle
of tourist spectatorship, resonates with Ault’s description of the alternative arts
movement of the 1970s and 1980s in New York City:
The traditional methodologies and institutional structures of the art world have
been fundamentally challenged in recent decades. During the 1970s and early
1980s, many artist-initiated alternative spaces and group structures were
established as constructive responses to the explicit and implied limitations of this
commerce-oriented world. Critical efforts to theorize representation as a contested
arena and to create venues for self-representation and distribution were generated
by and accommodated in these sites.
43

Stephen Collier of Good Children Gallery terms this upsurge in collective spaces a
“cultural renaissance,” and he cites international attention as key in helping these smaller
spaces gain exposure without the aid of the former arts establishment. Reciprocally, the
experience of being in diaspora after the storm exposed the local artists to a larger world
of resources that they were able to leverage after returning to the city.
I think before the storm people didn’t have the knowledge on how to like get
things together. A lot of them moved out of town for a little bit, got involved with
things and then they came back, and so they used resources they made outside the
city, they brought it in, made these connections outside the city, you know trying
to bring it in and sort of it’s getting interwoven.
44

42
Jenny LeBlanc and Kyle Bravo, interview with author, July 7, 2008.

43
Ault, 3.

44
Stephen Collier and Tony Campbell, interview with author, November 14, 2008.
43

Figure 7. Stephen Collier, Mississippi Shit Stripe, 2005. Installation of Mississippi mud at
the height of the Katrina water line in New York City.

Photograph courtesy of Stephen Collier. Reproduced with permission.

44
The coalescence of overlapping agendas, values, and motivations of the spaces along St.
Claude Avenue points overwhelmingly towards a burgeoning alternative arts movement.
Prospect.1 undoubtedly set a time limit for the rapid construction of some of these spaces,
but nearly all of them were coalescing prior to the biennial’s announcement. Although the
biennial promised an international audience and a new standard for contemporary art, it
could not provide enough physical, conceptual, or organizational space to display these
non-biennial artists; therefore, securing a space of one’s own by November of 2008
became of utmost importance to many young practitioners in the city.
Though this artificial deadline and the viewers it implied solidified the shared
agenda of the reactionary alternative movement along this corridor, the sustainability of
these spaces is still in question. Kyle Bravo and Jenny LeBlanc own the Front Gallery
building, but they are both concerned about the “funding bubble bursting,” and admit that
most of their expenses are out-of-pocket.
45
The Good Children Gallery collective is
considering becoming a non-profit organization to sustain themselves through grants,
46

and Antenna Gallery holds constant fundraisers just to keep the doors open. Even
organizations that have received funding from outside foundations and patrons fear that
international interest will slow to a trickle once Prospect.1 closes the doors on its
inaugural show, and many are simply trying to survive until Prospect.2 rolls around.

45
Jenny LeBlanc and Kyle Bravo, interview with author, July 7, 2008.

46
Steven Collier and Tony Campbell, interview with author, November 14, 2008.
45
Beyond the Biennial: The Pedagogical Socially-based Arts Movement
Alongside the St. Claude alternative arts movement, a separate set of spatially
dispersed but socially interwoven organizations has formed a movement committed to
expanding art’s role in pedagogy, social support, and community development. These
innovative project models often began as collaborations between outside academics or
artists and local organizers, and provide an array of alternatives to the uneven corporate
development, slap-dash temporary charity projects, and official mishandlings of social
services in the wake of the storm. Although the boundary between these organizations
and the St. Claude Arts District is porous and important exceptions abound,
47
this
socially-based movement is motivated by broader issues than the display of
contemporary art.
Like Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot class at the University of New Orleans, a key
convening seemed to have generated the foundational networks for many of these
emergent initiatives. “Reinhabiting NOLA” was a conference sponsored by Tulane
University and organized by Dan Etheridge and others in which they flew in a large
group of community leaders to brainstorm about the future of the city in November of
2005. The published volume was meant to aid the city in planning the rebuilding process,
but a more tangible impact came out of the conversations and meetings held during those
two days. Dan Etheridge recalls the resolutions that came out of that convening.

47
For example, the Colton School, a temporary project in an unused high school on St. Claude Avenue run
by the Creative Alliance of New Orleans, has opened its space to over 70 organizations in exchange for
community service hours with local schools. As an incubator, it functions both as an alternative arts space
and a platform for new arts-based pedagogical models.
46
That was where I met Ronald Lewis, and that was where Ronald Lewis stood up
and said, “I want to rebuild the House of Dance and Feathers. Culture is gonna
[sic] rebuild my neighborhood.” And Ronald credits that event—he got people
flown in from out of town for that event, the architects and planners and stuff,
showed up at his house on his invitation, and helped him get his house that
weekend. So he claims that that’s where that started. Willie Birch and Ron Bechet
came to that conference and that’s where Willie stood up and announced his
concept. That was really his and Ron’s concept, which evolved into the Porch.
And when he stood up and said, something that he had been thinking about for
years, he kind of stood up and said, “I’m going to do this, who’s on board?” So a
lot of these things kind of emerged at that event.
48

The Porch Seventh Ward Neighborhood Center, one of the organizations that grew out of
the Reinhabiting NOLA conference, is a neighborhood-specific organization focusing on
the role of arts as alternative pedagogy. Reacting not only to the abject poverty rampant
in the Seventh Ward both before and especially after Katrina, the Porch also sought to fill
the void left by the dysfunctional New Orleans school system. Running a summer camp,
mobile theater program, community garden, and other programs, the Porch is widely
cited as one of the most thoughtful and sustainable efforts of its kind.
49
Now functioning
according to its own developed mission, the Porch originated under the umbrella
organization Home, New Orleans, a collaborative arts/community/university initiative
connected with the service learning course “Rebuilding Community Through the Arts”
offered to Xavier, Dillard, and Tulane University students. Home, New Orleans injected a
variety of smaller projects into neighborhoods all over the city, from more permanent
organizations like the Porch to temporary theater projects and after school arts programs.

48
Dan Etheridge, interview with author, November 14, 2008.

49
Dan Etheridge, interview with author, November 14, 2008. Additional information from Ron Bechet,
interview with author, July 1, 2008.
47
To add yet another layer of complex collaboration, Home, New Orleans was one
of three pilot projects of the organization Transforma, a collective of artists and creative
professionals (namely Los Angeles-based artist Sam Durant, arts organizer Jessica
Cusick, and Houston-based artist and the Director of Project Row Houses, Rick Lowe)
dedicated to supporting arts endeavors that intersect with issues of social justice and
recovery. Transforma’s other pilot projects include the Plessy Park initiative, pedagogical
events and installations activating the long-contested site of Homer Plessy’s arrest in
1892 for violating segregation laws; and Mel Chin’s Operation Paydirt, an ambitious
project requiring scientific, engineering, and eventual congressional support to remove
the high lead content from the soil of New Orleans. In addition to providing seed money
and infrastructural support to these projects, Transforma has recently transitioned into a
small-scale regranting entity and producer of critical scholarship on arts initiatives that
propose to impact recovery or community. The organization has begun archiving projects
of all scales on its website, and in browsing through them it becomes clear that the related
organizations described above comprise only a small percentage of the models active in
the city today.
50
Much of the continuing support for such projects, however, revolves
around a few key people – Ron Bechet of Xavier University; the Transforma collective
and their partnering organization, the National Performance Network; Dan Etheridge and
Tulane City Center; and artist Willie Birch among others.

50
Jess Garz, interview with author, November 13, 2008. Additional information collected from the
organization’s website, http://www.transformaprojects.org.
48
Among the artists and organizers engaged in these practices, opinions about
Prospect.1 have been mixed. Some felt disconnected from the activity swirling around the
exhibition, unsure of how they could interface or even the efficacy of doing so, but
several (including M.K. Wegmann of the National Performance Network, Ron Bechet,
and Dan Etheridge) voiced their approval. Their attitude seemed to be that anything that
would stimulate the economy of the city and bring people to visit was ultimately
beneficial.
51
Others kept their distance, suspicious of the tourist spectatorship the biennial
so baldly promoted. Some had contradictory reactions; for example, artist Mel Chin
expressed that he wanted to “stay away” from the biennial,
52
but produced a highly
visible installation at KK Projects (a house with an enormous round vault door called
Safehouse; see Figure 8) to coincide with the Biennial and promote his Operation Paydirt
project. Though he may have dismissed the stimulus and revitalization Prospect.1
promised, he clearly took advantage of the audience and press coverage descending on
the city.

51
Dan Etheridge, interview with author, November 14, 2008; Ron Bechet, interview with author, July 1,
2008; M.K. Wegmann, interview with author, June 30, 2008.

52
Mel Chin, interview with author, November 16, 2008.

49

Figure 8. Mel Chin, Safehouse, 2008. Installed at KK Projects in the St. Roch
neighborhood.

Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, November 15, 2008. Reproduced with permission of the
artist.

50
Yet the way Chin found to utilize the biennial – by creating a spectacular object in
the sightline of cultural tourists – conforms to the traditional display model Cameron
promoted in Prospect.1. Larger pedagogical and social issues were treated as separate
from the artwork by the institution (though not necessarily by all of the artists), and
limited to a K-12 outreach program. Aspects of this program mirrored the traditional
educational efforts of a museum, including docent-led tours, school field trips, and
educator workshops on art.
53
Very few of the programs appeared to integrate the work of
existing pedagogical art initiatives, nor to address the social issues facing the city like a
corrupt power structure, institutional distrust, racialized space, and a population in flux.
With the benefits conferred by outside support and autonomy from city politics,
could the biennial have done more to delve into broader socio-spatial issues? What
ideological or structural limitations prevented it from fully engaging in this kind of
discourse? In the next chapter I will compare the institutional structure and politics of
Prospect.1 with other biennial models in an effort to formulate a criteria for success, as
well as analyze the aesthetic efficacy of the exhibition and its relationship to the post-
disaster context.

53
“Prospect.1 Education Program,” Prospect.1 New Orleans, U.S. Biennial, Inc.,
http://www.prospectneworleans.org/what.html
51
CHAPTER TWO.

The Inception of Prospect.1
Dan Cameron contextualizes the impetus behind Prospect.1’s inception in his
catalogue essay, entitled “A Biennial for New Orleans.” Beginning with a pointed
encapsulation of American history, he casts the nation as a relatively immature country
still struggling with the repercussions of slavery and the continuing legacy of division
between North and South – a legacy laid bare by the sheer incomprehensibility of
Katrina’s realities and the multiple contradictory perceptions surrounding New Orleans.
He goes on to question the understanding of New Orleans as an anachronism, a city that
eschewed a rising tide of Southern modernity in the 1960s in favor of a romanticized
version of the past. Though Cameron admits he is sensitive to “an incongruity between
the way the city is represented in the media (and the popular imagination) and the actual
place and the people in it,” citing the debased representations of Mardi Gras in Girls
Gone Wild videos, he stops just short of attempting to represent the city critically. Rather,
he resorts to a more palatable tourist narrative – that of the Creolized “melting pot” of a
port city that is no more accurate a depiction of the actual place than the drunken revelry
of Bourbon Street.
54

He then outlines a brief history of international biennials, explaining the impetus
behind them as solidifying a connection between the locale and a global art economy – a

54
Dan Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” in Prospect.1 New Orleans [exhibition catalogue], ed.
Lucy Flint (New York: PictureBox, Inc., 2008), 16.

52
motivation unshared by the United States. Cameron writes in his catalogue essay, “One
reason the U.S. has not held a major international art biennial before is that is already
sees itself as a meeting place for the world.”
55
He cites the dominance of the post-war art
scene in New York and the rise of Abstract Expressionism, thus leading to “the ingrained
habit of many professionals in the American art world to treat contemporary art as a
mostly domestic commodity.”
56
The Whitney Biennial is an example of this tendency –
as Cameron observes, it “suggests an international perspective while its eligibility criteria
remain heavily nationalistic.”
57
Although Prospect.1, as the first international U.S.
Biennial, is positioned to indicate the dawn of a new age for biennials in this country, the
needs of its chosen city resonate all too well with the economic boosterism,
modernization, and cultural tourism goals of other biennial cities.
Cameron draws attention to the scale of persistent need in New Orleans by
recalling the devastation wrought by Katrina, and begins his next section with the
question: “disaster zone to global showcase?” He explains the depth of his own sense of
urgency to do something for the city and its hard-hit visual arts community, but contrasts
it with the “unsettling” lack of investment throughout the rest of the art world. Attributing
this laissez-faire attitude to a disconnect between the New Orleans arts scene and a global
contemporary art dialogue, Cameron points to the biennial as a model for reintroducing

55
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 17.

56
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 18.

57
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 18.

53
New Orleans to an international discourse while simultaneously aiding in its recovery.
58

Situating Prospect.1 among exhibitions like Documenta in Kassel, Germany, which arose
from the rubble of the second World War; the short-lived biennale in Johannesburg,
South Africa, organized after the fall of Apartheid; and the Qwangju Biennial in South
Korea, conceived after the massacre of hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in
1980, Cameron argues how biennial exhibitions offer economic stimulus and hope in the
wake of disaster. He ends by proposing that a redefinition of the biennial exhibition is
needed to break down “the autonomous position of the artist in society” and thus
empower artists to visualize “a sustainable future” in a place like New Orleans.
59

Throughout Cameron’s essay, he presents uneasy contradictions. A tension arises
between his desire to empower the existing visual arts community in reimagining the
city’s future and his efforts to recast New Orleans as a lovely backdrop for imported
international contemporary art. Likewise, he wavers between a desire to represent the
“actual” place and people in it, and a clichéd perception of the city as a site of exceptional
cultural hybridity and relative racial harmony. In addition, though Prospect.1 must appeal
to an international art audience, Cameron also sees an opportunity to redefine the biennial
exhibition in order to better respond to the issues of specific locales like New Orleans.
His curatorial choices for Prospect.1 reflect these discontinuities in a complex collage of
sites and practices, but ultimately reveal Cameron’s priorities of prestige and
international draw over risk and innovation.

58
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 21.

59
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 22-23.
54
Cameron’s artist list includes some emerging local talent, but the overwhelming
majority were biennial stalwarts like Lee Bul, Julie Mehretu, Cai Guo-Qiang, Fred
Tomaselli, Shirin Neshat, and Haegue Yang. The vast majority of the art was housed in
several cultural institutions – the Contemporary Arts Center, which conducted a massive
capital campaign to construct two additional floors, the venerable New Orleans Museum
of Art, and the spacious Old U.S. Mint in the French Quarter. Other projects were
dispersed across a variety of neighborhoods and spaces, culminating in large-scale
publicly sited installations or occupying a large portion of a smaller cultural institution or
former commercial building. Prospect.1 pieced together structures from different
biennials according to the needs Cameron interpreted and prioritized, forming a mélange
of site-specificity, spectacle, and contextual framing. Like the Bienal de São Paolo, which
takes place primarily in the pavilion Ciccillo Matarazzo in Ibirapuera Park, the large art
institutions in the city served as primary locations.
60
The CAC was transformed into an
almost pavilion-like venue, where the entire space was emptied out and new construction
turned the building into a shell for housing the exhibition. Yet clearly Cameron also
prioritized showcasing the city’s unique architecture, so penetrated historic buildings like
the Old U.S. Mint, Edgar Degas House, Gaskin-Southall Mortuary, and the New Orleans
African American Museum. This is unsurprising considering that Cameron used the same
strategy in the Eighth Istanbul Biennial, pushing the exhibition’s conceptual foundation

60
“São Paolo Biennial,” Universes in Universe, http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/sao-
paulo/english.htm.

55
of “contemporary art in traditional spaces” even further by convincing the Turkish
government to open up new historic sites during his tenure as curator.
61

Yet whereas the Eighth Istanbul Biennial included only a few publicly sited
projects,
62
Prospect.1 featured a constellation of works spread throughout the most
devastated portions of the Lower Ninth Ward. For the most part, these site-specific works
engaged thoughtfully with their surroundings, and their semi-public locations in lots that
once held residential homes necessitated a relationship with the dispersed neighborhood
community. Many of the artists pulled from history, memory, and metaphor as points of
departure, aligning with exhibitions like Mary Jane Jacob’s Culture in Action in Chicago,
or the 1991 Spoleto Festival Places with a Past in another southern American city,
Charleston in South Carolina. This aspect of Prospect.1 was arguably the most
provocative, binding art, site, and public more closely than any other venues in the city.
The work in Prospect.1 formed a bricolage reflective of the diversity of its
venues, and like the pattern of a fractal, many individual works were themselves
composed of miscellany. Perhaps the Mardi Gras aesthetic of shiny plastic objects,
ostentatious decoration, and anything-goes juxtaposition inflected itself on these works
because of their immediate location, or perhaps the traditionally spectacular nature of
biennial-style projects inevitably invites such displays. Nevertheless, this pattern cropped
up in all quarters, from artists who were New Orleans natives to those who hailed from

61
Doug MacCash, “A Home for Art,” The Times-Picayune, November 30, 2007,
http://www.nola.com/lagniappe/t-p/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-0/1196403845178840.xml&coll=1.

62
“Istanbul Biennial,” Universes in Universe, http://universes-in-universe.de/car/istanbul/english.htm.
56
far-away continents. Korean artist Lee Bul’s floor chandelier, dripping with beads,
chains, bits of mylar and other shiny objects, shimmers prominently in the museum’s
huge display windows at street level over a mirrored floor (see Figure 9). Part of a series
named after German architect Bruno Taut, who famously constructed the 1914 Glass
Pavilion, the piece is contradictory, a sumptuous spectacle miniaturized to a human scale.
Bul has shown similar structures in Europe over the last year, which seem to reinterpret
and reinvent the aesthetic of Utopian visionaries and the architectural clashes of Taut’s
era (he was labeled both a Modernist and an Expressionist),
63
but the chandelier takes on
a whole new meaning in the land of Mardi Gras. Besides the material relationship
between Mardi Gras and Lee’s shiny cheap beads and filaments, the work appears to be a
once-elegant structure unraveling and collapsing in on itself. In this way it acts as a
metaphor for the city, albeit one informed by the narrative Dan Cameron embraced when
he described the city as a “former colonial jewel” full of “elegant decay.”
64

63
P.1 at the CAC (New Orleans, 2008), 7.

64
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 18.
57

Figure 9. Lee Bul, After Bruno Taut (Beware the Sweetness of Things), 2007. Mixed
media, 101.5 x 75 x 98 inches. Installation view at Fondation Cartier pour L’Art
Contemporain, Paris, France, 2007.

Source: Prospect.1 New Orleans [exhibition catalogue], ed. Lucy Flint (New York:
PictureBox, Inc., 2008), 198.

Permission to reproduce this image was
not obtained in time for publication.
58
This aesthetic of decorative pastiche runs throughout the Contemporary Arts
Center show, informing the work of El Anatsui, a biennial stalwart known for his large-
scale draping foil tapestries; Fred Tomaselli’s stylized paintings formed of delicate beads
of color stringing out in radiating patterns; and the unrestrained, vibrantly colored wall
hangings of emerging New Orleans artist Shawne Major. Major’s work slides effortlessly
between textile, assemblage, and painting, formed of massive collections of kitschy
objects like plastic stars, rubber snakes, costume jewelry, stuffed animals, figurines, silk
flowers, and buttons attached to a fabric backing with thick colored thread. Enveloping in
their size and overwhelmingly crowded with odds and ends, these become taxing to view
too closely, but from a distance take on geometric qualities and eclectic color systems.

59

Figure 10. Shawne Major, Bud Sport, 2008. Mixed media, 72 x 56 inches.
Source: Prospect.1 New Orleans [exhibition catalogue], ed. Lucy Flint (New York:
PictureBox, Inc., 2008), 198.

Permission to reproduce this image was
not obtained in time for publication.
60
These intricate and overwrought works, eliciting sensations imbued with the lush
vegetation, carnivalesque street parades, and the decorative ironwork and architecture of
New Orleans, exist in tandem with works steeped in the historical. One of the most
memorable pieces of the show due to its sheer iconographic power is Sanford Biggers’s
sculpture Strange Fruit. Comprised of a massive, lifelike tree with thick and twisted
limbs splaying upwards into the ceiling (what once may have been called a “hanging
tree”) and a self-playing piano, the two objects at first seem oddly precarious in
juxtaposition. But upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the piano and tree are
entangled, that the tree is growing in and around the piano, enveloping the melancholy
instrument in its embrace. The famous standard of the same name, popularized by Billie
Holiday, plays endlessly, keyed in by dogged invisible fingers untouched by the passage
of time. This is a piece that plays consciously on its context, installed in the Old U.S.
Mint on the edge of the historic French Quarter, center of the most contentious racial
struggles of the city’s past. Though somewhat lacking in subtlety, Strange Fruit is
nevertheless eerily affecting, and represents perhaps the most straightforward example of
much of the Prospect.1 work that rehashes the histories of slavery, segregation, and Civil
Rights struggles in the South.
Others include a new moving image work by Rico Gatson that pulls footage from
Civil Rights-era marches, McCallum and Tarry’s delightfully crowded display of
quaintly framed mug shots of those arrested in Civil Rights protests entitled The Evidence
of Things Not Seen (2008), and Jackie Summell and Herman Wallace’s collaboration The
House that Herman Built. A Black Panther and organizer, Wallace was imprisoned in the
61
infamous Angola prison in Louisiana for the murder of a prison guard, and remained in
solitary confinement for over 30 years. Over the course of a multi-year correspondence
with artist Jackie Summell, Wallace communicated a vision of his dream house from
within his six by nine foot cell, and the archive of correspondence along with models of
the house and cell comprise the exhibition at the CAC.
65

Figure 11. Sanford Biggers. Strange Fruit. 2007.
Source: Prospect.1 New Orleans [exhibition catalogue], ed. Lucy Flint (New York:
PictureBox, Inc., 2008), 94.

65
P.1 at the CAC (New Orleans, 2008), 6.

Permission to reproduce this image was
not obtained in time for publication.
62
Like Summell, New Orleans artist Skylar Fein excavated a little known and
controversial history in his riveting installation Remember the UpStairs Lounge. The
UpStairs Lounge was a well-loved gay bar in the French Quarter that was engulfed in
flames on June 24, 1973, claiming the lives of half of the establishment’s tight-knit
community of patrons. A case that remains an open police file to this day, the probable
arson is credited with provoking a gay rights awakening in New Orleans.
66
Fein wove
together a reinterpretation of the inside of the bar on the fourth floor of the CAC,
complete with beautifully crafted wooden signs meticulously recreated from historical
materials, salvaged artifacts like the miniature statue of a Farnese Hercules that once
stood behind the bar, disco lights and period dance music. A patina of dreamlike
melancholy overlays the faux-aged objects and envelops the viewer with a sense of
unease. Photographs and historical materials like police reports and witness statements
from the Historic New Orleans Collection are displayed along a long hallway leading to
the club room, so by the time one enters the wood-encased gallery, one cannot help but
feel the ghosts inhabiting that space. Through this artistic rendition of locality and
memory, Fein was able to press the weight and importance of a place like the UpStairs
Lounge upon an unrelated display site with vitality and thoughtfulness.
Perhaps because of the existing power of place in New Orleans, the deep
investment in neighborhoods, local social networks, and nodes for interaction like the
UpStairs Lounge, the most powerful work in Prospect.1 dealt with specific sites and
communities. Because of the devastation in the Lower Ninth Ward, the artists who

66
P.1 at the CAC (New Orleans, 2008), 15.
63
displayed there almost had no choice but to engage fully in their context, not only
because of the problematics regarding permissions for siting artworks on semi-private,
contested land, but also because of the moral questions raised by investing in large-scale
sculptures in a place where houses cannot be rebuilt because the owners lack the means
to do so. I will address a few of the Ninth Ward installations and the processes leading up
to their realizations when I discuss Prospect.1’s interaction with local entities in Chapter
Four, but two pieces sum up both the best and the worst of the exhibition: Nari Ward’s
Diamond Gym and Katharina Grosse’s untitled yellow house.
Grosse, a Berlin-based artist whose recent practice incorporates large sculptural
elements and site-specific wall painting with spray paint, created one of the more
controversial pieces in the Lower Ninth Ward. Selecting an abandoned doublewide white
shotgun house in the less damaged southern portion of the neighborhood, she spray-
painted the façade, sides, front yard and fence a glaring orange-yellow color in flame-like
patterns licking up towards the roof. It is unclear whether Grosse was using the paint like
an enormous highlighter, spectacularly marking blight on an otherwise repopulated
section of the street, or recalling destruction through fire rather than flood. Either way,
the aggressive pigmentation blanketing all aspects of the property turned home into
object, and traces of its former occupants seemed forcibly wiped away.
Elizabeth Schambelan of Artforum reviewed many of the Lower Ninth Ward
installations like so many ossified, melancholy monuments to a wiped-out neighborhood,
but I saw other possibilities for the work as dynamic interfaces between site and
community. In her article, she describes Nari Ward’s Diamond Gym, sited in the
64
abandoned Battleground Baptist Church, as “keeping its own murmuring counsel in an
abandoned church in a silent, empty neighborhood,”
67
but the installation also functioned
as a node for life and interaction in a neighborhood that many avoided, even before the
storm. Diamond Gym evoked the huge and iconic spectacle of super-sized biennial
installation, with iron gemstone forms filled with gym equipment and reiterated by
mirrors and lights, but the community wall filled with flyers and missives revealed the
time the artist had spent talking to the Battleground Baptist Church’s dispersed but still
existing congregation. Claire Tancons describes Ward’s commitment to this group:
Nari would have come at least three times, maybe four times … he essentially
spent a lot of time here. Weeks at a time working with Isaiah [McCormick,
nephew of Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick of L9 Arts Center] … so he
had a nice team of local Prospect.1 folks, or otherwise. But his project entailed his
reaching out to the pastor of the congregation of the church within which his work
is housed. So, following Katrina, the congregation no longer used the church and
relocated to another church, but Nari went to see the pastor several times,
attended Mass. I did actually once as well, on a Sunday, I remember very well. So
that’s a great case of the way in which some of the artists would go about really
making strong connections with the neighborhood and community.
68

In reactivating the space, the artist was not calling for a return or memorializing a history,
but shining a light on the strength of a social network that would continue to persist.

67
Elizabeth Schambelan, “Being There,” Artforum International January (2009): 174.

68
Claire Tancons, interview with author, November 16, 2008.
65

Figure 12. Battleground Baptist Church in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, November 15, 2008.

Figure 13. Nari Ward, Diamond Gym, 2008.

Permission to reproduce this image was
not obtained in time for publication.
66
Though a natural inclination towards social engagement helped artists like Ward
mitigate the problematic presence of temporary art in a destroyed residential
neighborhood, much of the work selected by Dan Cameron for the Biennial were simply
iterations of work by big-name artists that had previously shown elsewhere. This non-
polemic, digestible array suggested a strong preference for touristic draw over a leaner
and more deeply engaged complement of practices dealing with issues of rebuilding and
recovery. Caught between its goal to stimulate a new kind of cultural tourism in New
Orleans and an acknowledged responsibility towards the city itself, Prospect.1 presented
an inconsistent aesthetic and critical message. The clear subject and star of the show was
New Orleans, and work that delved into the realities of the city unexpectedly were most
effective, whereas those that harped on tired perceptions and Katrina themes seemed to
come three years too late. As well, the sweeping structure of the Biennial, committed to
infiltrating the geographic whole of New Orleans while remaining conscious of the
particular nature of each site, is pieced together from different biennial precursors in a
precarious balance of contradictory elements. Add to that the enormous amount of
aesthetic and organizational responsibility concentrated in the person of Dan Cameron,
and a careful analysis of the underlying processes and institutional structures becomes
necessary to trace the effects, impact, priorities, and art historical precedents of such an
exhibition.

67
The Changing Biennial Model
In one sense, biennial history is long, citing precedents in the World’s Fairs of the
nineteenth century that fed into the first Venice Biennale of 1895,
69
but these exhibitions
were wholly different from the current biennial model, finding their current incarnations
in enormous art fairs like Art Basel Miami rather than large-scale exhibitions. The
World’s Fairs served as platforms for nations to display cultural or technological
spectacles of innovation and wealth, and that nationalist agenda served as a point of
departure for the national pavilion structure of the earliest biennials. After all, it was not
until after World War I that modern art trends were incorporated into the biennials, which
at first focused on the decorative arts. Only recently have international and transnational
biennials broken with this model, focusing instead on molding their host cities into nexus
points for local practice and globalized culture. International curator Ivo Mesquita
succinctly describes the more recent biennial model through the boom of the 1990s, when
over 80 cities worldwide began hosting such exhibitions:
Biennial or seasonal exhibitions can be said to boost cultural tourism at the same
time that they designate a new geography for international art, integrating remote
regions and globalizing world culture. Whereas this exhibition model clearly
demarcates a space for the dialogue and exchange of artistic and cultural
practices, it also represents an efficient strategy for the articulation and
consolidation of an international art economy.
70

Despite the structures that biennials have developed to bound the “space for the dialogue
and exchange of artistic and cultural practices” that Mesquita identifies – including

69
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 18-19.

70
Ivo Mesquita, “Biennials Biennials Biennials Biennials Biennials Biennials Biennials,” in Beyond the
Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices, ed. Melanie Townsend (Toronto: Banff Centre Press, 2003), 63.
68
international competition among artists at the height of their practice, a broad assessment
or interpretation of worldwide art, the promotion of new trends, and more recently, the
purposeful revision of local histories and integration of overlooked cultural practices into
an international arts dialogue – their periodic, spectacular, and contextual nature “still
seem to validate economy more than art or culture” by feeding into the market-driven
cultural production industry.
71
The Venice Biennale in Italy, and the Bienal de São Paolo
in Brazil are two biennials that demonstrate this economic priority in their strategies and
structures, though rarely in their rhetoric.
The Venice Biennale, for example, was conceived as a way to boost
modernization to keep up with the rest of Italy as the country underwent a period of
industrialization spurred by German investments. Because of Venice’s low-lying
geography and famed canals, it had to rely on its reputation as a tourist destination rather
than its potential as a manufacturing capital. Promoting a large-scale, spectacular
exhibition to draw high-class tourists (in the same vein as the popular World’s Fairs), yet
focused on the prestige and draw of the arts already existent in the historic cultural center,
seemed a perfect solution for the city.
72

The Bienal de São Paolo opened in 1951 with a similar, more boldly stated
intention to radically increase cultural tourism and thus economically revitalize the city.
São Paolo was not a natural tourist destination, but the period of reconstruction after
World War II and modernist thinking supported its transformation into a cultural hub. In

71
Mesquita, 65.

72
Mesquita, 63-64.
69
addition, Bienal organizers intended to assert local Brazilian art on the international
scene, stimulating the country’s own creative economy from the ground up.
73
Dan
Cameron expresses a similar motivation behind Prospect.1 with the goal to
internationalize the local New Orleans arts scene, which he describes as “not a high-roller
scene” and “perhaps too regional for its own good.”
74
He cites São Paolo as one of his
biggest influences in this regard: “The Bienal was, and continues to be, both a platform
for showcasing an emergent generation of artists and a vehicle for contextualizing
Brazilian art internationally.”
75
Dan Cameron understands the economic importance
behind the very act of organizing a biennial, creating a platform for international attention
on local cultural industry. The conceptual pertinence of the show barely seems to matter
in accomplishing these goals, throwing Frieze writer Steven Stern’s words into relief:
“ …I think the first, and most essential, thing to say about the New Orleans biennial is:
there was a biennial in New Orleans.”
76
Ivo Mesquita reiterates the impact of the Bienal
de São Paolo on the construction of institutions and a viable cultural economy in Brazil:
Despite the ups and downs in its prestige and pertinence and despite a lack of
specificity, relevance, and professionalism in its conceptual and political goals,
the Bienal de São Paolo continues to be the most important art event in the
country.
77

73
Mesquita, 64.

74
Will Coviello and D. Eric Bookhardt, “Window to the World,” The Gambit Weekly, July 31, 2007,
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2007-07-31/cover_story.php.

75
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 18.

76
Steven Stern, “Prospect.1 New Orleans,” Frieze, September 2008.

77
Mesquita, 64.
70

Should a “lack of specificity, relevance, and professionalism in its conceptual and
political goals,” as in Mesquita’s criticism of São Paolo, be acceptable in exchange for
mere existence?
The Prospect.1 Agenda
Cameron’s rhetoric must be considered in relation to the identified needs of the
biennial’s specific New Orleanian context rather than a generalized notion of economic
revitalization, and he has been quite clear about his motivations throughout the process,
even as they have evolved. “The agenda is to come here.” he commented in a Gambit
Weekly article on July 31, 2007. “See a fabulous show, eat some food and hear some
music. Have a good time.”
78
Echoing Cameron’s underlying urgency, L9 Gallery director
and documentary photography Keith Calhoun stated around the same time in the Times-
Picayune: “People are forgetting about New Orleans, that’s why we’ve got to bring in the
art community.”
79
According to Cameron and others, the rebuilding and recovery of New
Orleans depends on tourism, population, and attention. Though an infamous early quote
revealed the touristic fandom that ignited Cameron’s drive to produce Prospect.1 in order
to “show New Orleans to the world,” later parroted by biennial artist Cao Fei (“I was
having my first soft-shell crab po-boy, watching the sunset and listening to the
Nevilles”), the P.1 website also espoused a strong educational component, stating that the

78
Coviello and Bookhardt, The Gambit Weekly.

79
Doug MacCash, “A Home for Art,” The Times-Picayune, November 30, 2007,
http://www.nola.com/lagniappe/t-p/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-0/1196403845178840.xml&coll=1.
71
exhibition was “founded on the principle that art engenders social progress,”
80
and
Cameron’s catalogue essay reiterates his awareness of the struggling educational system
in the city. In addition, the exhibition promises to feature local art as well as brand new
artistic practices from around the world, “conceived and developed for the city,”
implying that the regional, isolated nature of New Orleans art requires exposure. Though
these needs are clear and difficult to deny, their real meanings, priorities in
implementation, and accompanying assumptions must be interrogated in order to
critically judge the success of Prospect.1.
Dan Cameron positioned Prospect.1 to occupy a level of importance in the United
States similar to that of the Bienal de São Paolo in Brazil, and the biennial rhetoric
overwhelmingly relies on this economic effect as a given. As the exhibition’s official
website urges: “[An] important reason to visit Prospect.1 New Orleans is that New
Orleans’ economy runs on tourism. For every night you stay in a hotel, every meal you
eat, and every musician you hear performing in a local club, you contribute directly to the
rebuilding of New Orleans.”
81
Cameron himself baldly states that he is a “tourism
promoter”
82
and Steve Perry, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and
Visitors Bureau, is effusive about P.1’s marketing potential in re-branding New Orleans
as a high-class cultural destination rather than a place to get drunk and act badly:

80
“Prospect.1 New Orleans,” Official Press release, October 20, 2008.

81
Prospect.1 New Orleans, U.S. Biennial, Inc., http://www.prospectneworleans.org.

82
Shjeldahl, The New Yorker.
72
Prospect.1 struck me as one of the most important potential events and marketing
ideas in years. We always talk about music and food, but we have potential in art
that has no limit. We’ve been aware of these kinds of things, but not immersed in
it. This could be a whole new dimension to the city’s brand.
83

The fact that Prospect.1 is employed as a branding mechanism diminishes its critical
potential and calls into question whom might benefit. Perry goes on to say, “international
visitors are particularly desirable because they tend to be high-end travelers who stay
longer and spend more while they’re in town.”
84
Contradictory to this statement,
however, the Prospect.1 press release emphasizes the “Louisiana public” and that half of
the expected 100,000 visitors will hail from the city of New Orleans and the state. In
examining the realities, however, the priorities are clear. John Barnes, Jr., a biennial artist
and New Orleans resident, commented on the lack of marketing within city bounds:
Now the only areas where I think [Prospect.1 is] really exclusive is it’s happening
so quietly for the local community. It’s happening really, really quietly. There’s
no real publicity, compared to other events that happen in the city. I think that’s
the only shortcoming.
85

Barnes’s comments speak to the disparity between the class constructs of well-heeled
international cultural tourist class, the regional middle-class tourists, and the numerous
local inhabitants still struggling to rebuild. He mentioned that the poorest members of the
city have little access to technology, and that the most of the information about
Prospect.1 was available only on the website or various arts and culture blogs. Given that
even basic local infrastructure remains under funded, raising such massive funds for

83
Coviello, The Gambit Weekly.

84
Coviello, The Gambit Weekly.

85
John Barnes, Jr., interview with author, November 14, 2008.
73
temporary art projects becomes highly questionable. The explanation that Prospect.1 will
help drive the local economy helps to diffuse these doubts, but realities in terms of how
this will help revitalize the city in any meaningful way remains suspect. Andy Antippas,
long-time French Quarter gallery owner who now runs Barrister’s Gallery on St. Claude
Avenue, lamented that even mainstream New Orleans tourists never learned about the
show, exemplified by the absence of a convention of art-loving heart surgeons that
usually comes to the city:
I told Dan, if you focus on those four days, you’re making a big mistake because
you’re not any good to us, you’re like a Superbowl game, it’s one weekend and
then you’re out of here, and we won’t see you again for five years when we’re
back in the cycle again. You need to be doing something sustainable for us for
two and a half months. None of the surgeons, I didn’t see a single surgeon come
down here.
86

Mr. Antippas was full of experienced advice for Cameron on how to rectify the situation:
He needed to talk to the cab companies, the limo companies, he needed to talk to
the hotels, and have tons of maps. Concierges, he should have a special CAC
[Contemporary Arts Center] deal for them to come over and find out what
Prospect.1 is so they can be enthusiastic and talk to everyone.
87

The appropriateness of Prospect.1’s economic motivations can barely be denied in the
wake of Katrina’s destruction, but is the biennial similarly appropriate in its ideology or
in the implementation of these goals? Some people are indeed coming to the city and
feeding into the tourism industry, but what structural choices codify, legitimate, and
confer power within this new entity? One blogger betrayed the problematics of this art
world versus local community dynamic in a brief anecdote: “A dozen stoop-sitting

86
Andy Antippas, interview with author, November 14, 2008.

87
Andy Antippas, interview with author, November 14, 2008.
74
neighbors eyed us with more curiosity than suspicion; to be sure, ours was the only
gleaming black Escalade they’d seen in quite some time.”
88
His assumptions are
disturbing in their implications, indicating both a self-reflexive guilt for being a tourist in
such a devastated neighborhood and a simplistic characterization of the residents. Yet
clearly, in its marketing structure, content, and mode of address, this biennial was meant
for the Escalade passengers rather than those sitting on their stoops in the Seventh Ward.
The International Horizon
Yet, despite these structural shortcomings and their implications, Prospect.1’s
goal of integrating and recontextualizing the local community within the broader
international art world feeds into “the tradition of great international biennials, such as
the Venice Biennale and São Paolo Biennial,” comprising what scholar and curator
Carlos Basualdo terms the “horizon of internationalism.”
89
He speaks about the
instrumentalization of art in biennials as a means to produce an even greater impact on
the city than pure economic efficacy, what Ivo Mesquita terms the extra-muros
90
of the
biennial:
Biennial institutions are created to respond to the interests that brought them
about – in other words, to promote the contexts in which they take place, giving
them greater international visibility, supplying them with a patina of prestige, and
ratifying the supposed commitment of these different contexts to modernity and,

88
John D. Thornton, “Prospect 1: New Yorker Review of New Orleans Biennial,” Insomniactive Blog,
November 21, 2008, http://insomniactive.com/2008/11/21/prospect-1-new-yorker-review-of-new-orleans-
biennial.

89
Carlos Basualdo, “The Unstable Institution,” in What Makes a Great Exhibition?, ed. Paula Marincola
(Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006), 59.

90
According to Mesquita, these are unquantifiable assets produced by a biennial that go beyond the
“artistic milieu” to inform larger issues and debates. Mesquita, 65.
75
more specifically, to the processes of economic integration associated with late
capitalism. The aura of prestige that surrounds art in general – and modern and
contemporary art in particular – is perfectly suited to this task. What is
instrumentalized in the large-scale international exhibition is precisely the
symbolic capital of modern art, tied to its own presumed autonomy and
independence from market logic.
91

In other words, biennials globalize and modernize with a high-class flourish, and allow
regional centers to recontextualize themselves within an international scope. Yet this
purposeful rebranding masks inherent contradictions – namely, that art, purportedly
removed from market logic, is mobilized to economically integrate provincial contexts.
In contrast with the rhetoric of many biennials, which rarely directly mention economic
stimulus in conjunction with international exposure, Prospect.1 breaks with the modernist
tendency to obscure this linkage. An excerpt from the press release exposes this intention:
Over the course of its eleven-week run, the biennial will draw attention, creative
energy, and economic activity to the City of New Orleans, a historic regional
artistic center, and the struggling Gulf Region. New Orleans was the first U.S.
city to host a recurring international art exhibition, beginning in 1887 with the
Exhibition of the Art Association of New Orleans. In this tradition, Prospect.1
will feature art originating from New Orleans and Louisiana within an
international context and will provide the Louisiana public with new art
conceived and developed for the city.
92

As evinced here, the “international context” that the biennial provides for a “regional art
center” is closely linked with the attention and economic activity New Orleans will
receive as a result of the exhibition. Yet in the same breath, New Orleans is marketed as
the site of a previous international art exhibition, the Exhibition of the Art Association of
New Orleans, and Prospect.1 purportedly represents a continuation of this tradition.

91
Basualdo, 57-58.

92
“Prospect.1 New Orleans,” official press release, October 20, 2008.
76
According to its own rhetoric, P.1 embodies mutually exclusive structures – it both
conforms to historic traditions and carves out a new model, promotes economic activity
and provides a context for exciting new practices independent from the market, features
new art from highly visible international biennial artists yet also focuses on “art
originating from New Orleans and Louisiana.”
93
Considering these contradictory
purposes, I apply a question posed by Ivo Mesquita to interrogate Prospect.1 and its
potential impact on the city: “What kind of knowledge is this system producing?”
94
In
order to speculate on its long-term effects, the biennial’s institutional architecture must be
compared with its rhetoric and implementation.
The Biennial as an Institution
What is the institutional framework that generates events like biennials? Despite
extremely diverse circumstances, these entities essentially deal with a form of city-
building: modernization, revitalization, and internationalization of provincial centers or
third-world capitals. As Carlos Basualdo observes, “In all these shows, diplomacy,
politics, and commerce converge in a powerful movement, the purpose of which seems to
be the appropriation and instrumentalization of the symbolic value of art.”
95
In most
biennials, an established arts institution, either originating in the city government or in
the non-profit sphere, or some combination of the two, spearheads this merging of
political, economic and cultural interests. For example, the Venice City Council produced

93
“Prospect.1 New Orleans,” official press release, October 20, 2008.

94
Mesquita, 66.

95
Basualdo, 58.
77
the Venice Biennale starting in the 1890s, the national Fascist government in the 1930s,
and the city again in 1948.
96
This trend has continued, with the more recent Istanbul
Biennial organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Arts and Culture,
97
and the Shanghai
Biennale “under the sovereignty of the Chinese Ministry of Culture and the Municipal
Administration of Shanghai” and “organized by the city's Art Museum and Cultural
Bureau as part of the Shanghai International Art Festival.”
98
The Bienal de São Paolo was
one of the few exceptions to the rule – Italian-Brazilian industrialist and modernist
thinker Ciccillo Matarazzo initiated it before power was transferred to the Fundação
Bienal de São Paolo.
99
Though all of these institutions have somewhat different structures
and political affiliations, they are for the most part governmental structures with a
President or Chief Executive Officer running the show, perhaps housing another
department directly responsible for the biennial. In the most bureaucratic structures, there
might even be an entrenched biennial directorial staff in addition to the itinerant
international curators who are sometimes dubbed artistic directors. The doomed
Johannesburg Biennale of 1997 is an extreme example of biennial bureaucracy, as
evidenced by the hierarchical series of prefaces in the catalogue: Professor Nicky
Padayachee, Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council;

96
“Venice Biennale,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice_Biennale.

97
“Istanbul Biennial,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_Biennial.

98
“Shanghai Biennale,” Universes in Universe, http://www.universes-in-
universe.de/car/shanghai/english.htm.

99
“São Paolo Art Biennial,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Paulo_Art_Biennial.
78
Mr. Victor Modise, Executive Officer of the Arts, Culture Development, and Facilities
Department of the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council; Christopher Till,
Executive Director of the Johannesburg Biennale; Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa, Director of
the Africus Institute for Contemporary Art (AICA); and finally, Mr. Okwui Enwezor,
Artistic Director.
100
Though the reason for its failure was officially cited as “financial
problems of the city of Johannesburg,”
101
one cannot help but imagine that segmented
power and multiple layers of competing bureaucratic interests sabotaged the exhibition
during the precarious political moment after the fall of Apartheid.
Prospect.1, on the other hand, rests solely in the hands of curator-director-
visionary-fundraiser Dan Cameron. He conceived of the idea during a panel discussion
about the future of arts and culture in New Orleans held at the Arthur Roger Gallery four
months after Katrina hit. Though this inception seemed more personal and less calculated
than the biennial efforts of other cities, it was no less solution-oriented and flatly
economical. Cameron describes the moment this seed of an idea took hold:
I took issue with something Doug Brinkley said – that the recovery of the art
world depends of the vitality of the tourist economy, that tourists buy art. I was
thinking out loud, but I said, ‘Tourists don’t buy art, collectors buy art. If you
want to help the art community, bring in collectors.’ I said, ‘You could have a big
international art show and bring them here.’
102

100
Matthew DeBord, ed., Trade Routes: History and Geography, 2
nd
Johannesburg Biennale exhibition
catalogue (Johannesburg, South Africa: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council and Prince Claus Fund
for Culture and Development, 1997.

101
“Johannesburg Biennale,” Universes in Universe, http://www.universes-in-
universe.de/car/africus/english.htm.

102
Coviello, The Gambit Weekly.
79
Cameron then set to work molding institutional support for his idea. He set up a 501(c)(3)
organization called U.S. Biennial, Inc., and plumbed his New York network of funders
for seed money. At the same time as he was raising money for this project, he fortuitously
positioned himself within the organizing institution, the Contemporary Arts Center,
taking the recently vacated position of Director of Visual Arts. So despite a surface
similarity to institutional architectures like the biennials of Johannesburg, Venice, or even
São Paolo, with a controlling board responsible for fundraising, an artistic director
responsible for curating, and a managing art museum responsible for facilities, Cameron
effectively consolidated power to himself.
This merging of roles is an unprecedented institutional model for a biennial, and
Cameron’s commitment to remain in this multivalent position for the next five
installments is even more unusual. The implications of this for the role of the
curator/artistic director must be investigated, because Cameron necessarily reacts
differently to his layered responsibilities than other biennial curators have in the past. Ivo
Mesquita refers to more traditional itinerant curators when he questions their conceptual
and artistic goals: “Are these exhibition curators contributing to an enhanced dialogue
involving diverse cultural groups or are they merely sophisticated agents of the
globalized capital that funds/sponsors culture on the margins?”
103
This implies that the
creative and theoretical methods of these institutional actors may be suspect, influenced
negatively by “globalized capital.” Perhaps this suspicion stems from a traditional
institutional separation of roles – although artistic directors/itinerant curators must

103
Mesquita, 66.
80
“respond to extra-artistic conditions and questions”
104
like history or local culture, they
are normally freed to do so in an academic way, as the biennial institution itself takes on
much of the broader economic, infrastructural, and political responsibility. Because of
this imbalance, powerful institutions can still influence biennial structures, and the task of
theoretically legitimating such decisions often falls to the curator. Perhaps the very nature
of institutions rubs against the grain of art’s “symbolic capital” within the biennial ideal –
new artistic practices, freedom of implementation, temporality, and a reconsideration of
the ossified artistic canon clash with the way institutions necessarily shape individual
thoughts to conform with convention. As scholar Mary Douglas observes, “Institutions
systematically direct individual memory and channel our perceptions into forms
compatible with the relations they authorize.” Institutions exist to perpetuate themselves,
she argues, thus they “fix processes that are essentially dynamic” while they
simultaneously “hide their influence.”
105
The biennial institution projects the image of
dynamism wholly through its curator, whose position enjoys temporality and a reasonable
level of creative freedom. The real powers and motivations remain diffused in a faceless
bureaucracy, hidden and fixed.
A One-Man Show
The curator in Prospect.1, however, has neither itinerancy nor a shadowy array of
decision-makers pulling his strings and influencing his creative decisions. Cameron is
locked into his role for ten years, and he has crafted the story of his biennial carefully,

104
Mesquita, 67.

105
Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 92.
81
positioning himself as the very visible sole organizer and accepting both accolades and
criticism upon his own shoulders. In effect, his role became both hybrid and paradoxical
– an institution with a man’s face, so closely linked with his judgment and vision that all
the motivations and decisions associated with the biennial seem straightforward and born
of Cameron’s own measured outlook. This consolidation of roles into an artist-like mode,
with individual motivation and creativity supported by an institutional structure, seemed
the only way to pull off a biennial in post-Katrina New Orleans. As a result, Cameron
could issue organizational mandates while remaining flexible enough to shift his vision
up until the last minute. As Associate Curator Claire Tancons describes:
…one of the defining features of the way Dan went about organizing the Biennial
was for each and every one of the artists, even those whose work may not have
any level of site-specificity or was not commissioned specifically for the
Biennials, was to come and visit New Orleans, at least for a couple days.
106

This organizational tactic speaks to Cameron’s clearly stated goals of increasing tourism
by “showing the city” to others, beginning with the artists, and the power he wielded to
enforce such a requirement. This kind of broad-based decision-making is not
unprecedented for Cameron as a curator – after all, he convinced the government of
Turkey to open up some state-owned historical sites for the 2006 Istanbul Biennial
107
–
but he had no need to convince anyone of the efficacy of his decisions in Prospect.1. No
matter how unpopular some of them might have been at first, they were his prerogative to

106
Claire Tancons, interview with author, November 16, 2008.

107
“Istanbul Biennial,” Universes in Universe, http://www.universes-in-
universe.de/car/istanbul/english.htm.
82
make, and his responsibility to change. Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, who later worked for
Cameron, expressed her opinions on the biennial in early July 2008:
“Void” is kind of the general atmosphere here, on every level. The local level, the
state, the national level, it’s sort of feeling forgotten in many ways. And then,
between you and me, even on a visual arts level. With this curator leaving out a
lot of, I think, talented local artists. So here he is hosting – and I have a lot of
respect for his curatorial choices, don’t get me wrong. But hosting a biennial in
New Orleans and then not really reaching out as much … If I was in charge, I
think it would have been really effective to place some more local artists in that
position, as a career maker. So yeah, “void” on a lot of levels.
108

By November, she was far more cautiously optimistic.
…I think Dan Cameron was, to his credit, trying to help out the local scene in
that way. That he agreed to put a P.1 artist in a satellite space. Because there were
satellite spaces first, and then they courted Dan Cameron and Prospect.1, and said
“we have this space… ”
109

Because the decision-making process was collapsed into one person rather than several,
Cameron was free to change, learn, and come to alternate conclusions about the city and
the biennial. As well, the local network of artists, galleries, and organizers found it rather
simpler to interface with him rather than the U.S. Biennial, Inc., the CAC or another
institution. Cameron the man, the former punk rocker, the New Orleans fan, could be
found at art shows and jazz shows. He was fairly approachable, as he needed to be in the
informal New Orleans environment.
As is inevitable in such an inherent contradiction – one man with the permanence,
responsibility, and decision-making power of a biennial institution – the institution itself
quickly evolved beyond his person. Although he was the “gatekeeper” for this first

108
Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, interview with author, June 30, 2008.

109
Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, interview with author, November 14, 2008.
83
iteration, the codifications and ideologies set into place by Prospect.1 will not only affect
expectations for Prospect.2, but also the constitution of the New Orleans art scene as a
whole. Susan Gisleson, arts educator, curator, and artist, laughingly recounted a story in
which Cameron claimed at a panel discussion that he was going to “change the identity of
visual arts in New Orleans.” Her response was “well, we’ve been here for three hundred
years, we’re doing okay, you know what I mean?”
110
And indeed, the thought that one
man could codify visual arts in New Orleans is laughable, but Mary Douglas cautions
that institutions “classify in a different mode.” She goes on:
The instituted community blocks personal curiosity, organizes public memory,
and heroically imposes certainty on uncertainty. In marking its own boundaries it
affects all lower level thinking, so that persons realize their own identities and
classify each other through community affiliation.
111

The Prospect.1 institution, though represented on the surface by Cameron, has set into
place a self-fulfilling feedback loop, what Michel Foucault calls “the constitution of
subjects.” Douglas explains this phenomenon, “At the same time as institutions produce
labels … the labels stabilize the flux of social life and even create to some extent the
realities to which they apply.” Humans have a certain responsiveness to processes of
naming, gravitating closer to their labels “in hope of relief or expected advantage.”
112

Therefore, the knowledge and decisions Cameron has set into place are systematized
beyond his personal whims, and retaining his multivalent and powerful role will become

110
Susan Gisleson, interview with author, November 16, 2008.

111
Douglas, 102.

112
Douglas, 100.
84
increasingly problematic. The role as it exists is not sustainable – as expectations
surrounding the biennial are sedimented, they will be less easily shifted, and Cameron
will have to answer to institutional expectations that he helped ossify. Part of this
knowledge encompasses the codifications of the existing arts network in New Orleans, a
young and blossoming movement both catalyzed and categorized by Prospect.1. Though
the institution has been immeasurably helpful in jump-starting both the infrastructure and
the Do-It-Yourself spirit of a collective-based arts scene, the privileging of certain spaces
over others within its ideological framework threatens to push out other narratives.
Returning to Cameron’s catalogue essay, it is ironic given his aesthetic and
structural choices that he proposed to redefine the large-scale exhibition and make it
integral to the real recovery and rebuilding issues facing the city. The overwhelmingly
post-critical language of the biennial offered little structure for critical discourse and
proposed few questions about the efficacy of contemporary art to mitigate a post-disaster
landscape, and the biennial ignored a plethora of small extant organizations dealing with
such local issues who had no platform for participation. Moreover, Cameron’s recycled
roster of big-name artists fresh off the global circuit and mélange of existing European
biennial tropes reduced the format rather than reimagined it. One must ask why he has
chosen to hinge the success of this exhibition solely on cultural tourism, and his
unspecific conceptual platform was designed to make the exhibition more palatable to a
range of audience types – or, more disturbingly, whether this conceit pointed to a lack of
confidence in the willingness or ability of his audience to debate such issues.
85
Cameron certainly has the wherewithal to formulate a curatorial platform based
on clear issues and contemporary debates; the theme of the Eighth Istanbul Biennial in
2003 was “Poetic Justice” and based on bridging the gap between the political and the
sublime in contemporary art. He crafted a specific creative and critical framework for
investigating notions of cultural authority, representation, power structures, and the
proper role of art in society. Not only that, he stated that one of his “most important
objectives” was “to create a lively and engaging public forum for responding to the ideas
of artists whose work embodies a form of commitment to the goal of making art a vehicle
for reconciling these two facets of life [poetry and justice].”
113
Given this robust
curatorial framework, why was Prospect.1 so devoid of criticality or concept? Though
many have praised Cameron’s straightforward rhetoric and lack of a specific curatorial
framework, New Orleans is so fraught with continuing problematics that to amass such
cultural capital in the form of so many experienced artists and then barely address the
contextual issues except in a very visceral way seems inappropriate. Cameron’s total
aesthetic and organizational control also played a role in the single-mindedness of
Prospect.1 – without the benefit of other curatorial voices, he was limited in how
critically discursive the aesthetic and political conversation could become.
In a city like New Orleans at a time of flux, where drastic changes occur everyday
to the physical and social landscape and force the population to reexamine the city’s
brand and its future identity, future Prospects could have a strong impact in creating “new

113
Dan Cameron, “The Eighth International Istanbul Biennale: Poetic Justice,” The Light Millenium,
http://lightmillennium.org/today/2003/dcameron_poetic_justice.html.
86
and unpredictable dialogue.”
114
This would necessitate a constant rethinking of structure,
meaning most likely that Cameron would have to give over or divide power and roles.
Examining how he reacts to his own institution will be the measure of the man, and the
potential of Prospect.2.

114
Mesquita, 67.
87
CHAPTER THREE.

The Critical Response
Following the exhibition’s opening, one might have expected a rigorous critical
dialogue to emerge despite the lack of a critical framework, and an analytical discourse to
develop focusing on problematics of context in which the exhibition found itself relative
to questions of psycho-social conditions of trauma, opportunism, racial histories, spatial
politics, and power hierarchies, but this has not been the case. In fact, Prospect.1 opened
to nothing less than glowing praise on the part of both national art critics and the local
arts community.
115
In my own interviews on the ground in New Orleans, local arts
leaders, community organizers, and artists involved in the biennial process who evinced
skepticism about the biennial in late June 2008, seemingly changed their opinions
entirely when we met again after the show had opened. In fact, overall criticism of
Cameron was mild, and the emotional euphoria was overwhelming. At the end of one
interview, artist Tony Campbell took the time to say “I’d like to add that Dan Cameron, if
he succeeds in what he’s doing, it will be the greatest thing for contemporary visual
artists in this town. So, criticism or whatever, that man’s doing something very important
for us here, so, that’s great.”
116

115
This is the opinion of the author as of March of 2009, the publication date of this thesis. More sustained
and critical articles may be published in the next six months to several years.

116
Tony Campbell, interview with author, November 14, 2008. Tony Campbell is a member of the artist
collective that runs Good Children Gallery in the St. Claude Arts District, and also runs an alternative tour
of the Biennial called “Art Cops.”
88
John Barnes, Jr., a New Orleanian artist included in the Biennial, had this to say about
Cameron as a curator:
It takes an incredible, incredible amount of skill. You don’t realize it until the
thing is up and running and you stop and you just … you’re enjoying it and not
noticing anything out of place, everything is perfect, and on your way home
you’re like, “Wow! Everything was perfect! How in the world did this happen?”
It’s like “Wow.” He’s definitely got the Midas touch when it comes to biennials. I
can just imagine how the rest of them he’s curated are – they’ve probably all been
brilliant and flawless.
117

Yet this emotional affect was not limited to the local context. In subsequent written
reviews on the part of national art critics displayed a surprising lack of criticality relative
to a contextual interrogation of the Biennial, such as Peter Schjeldahl’s hyperbolic
language in the November 24, 2008 issue of the New Yorker. Declaring that Prospect.1
was his “favorite biennial since the nineteen-eighties” and admitting that he could not
“suppress [his] own uprushes of sentiment,” he goes on to conflate the city’s very real
problems with its mythologized surface as a backdrop for the art:
Be it ever so small and poor, and despite catastrophic displacements, New Orleans
can’t help but remain New Orleans, which is to other cities what a poem is to
prose. The phantasmagoria of high and vernacular architecture, polyglot flavors,
omnipresent music, exuberant cemeteries, and geographical unlikelihood, of a
seaport largely below sea level, stokes continual wonderment. Desire isn’t only a
street name there.
118

Local stakeholders clearly had different reasons for praising the biennial than
national critics, being deeply involved in the process rather than simply feeling the

117
John Barnes, Jr., interview with author, November 14, 2008. John Barnes, Jr. is a sculptor and Professor
of Studio Art at Dillard University. He was one of nine New Orleans artists to be selected by Dan Cameron
for the Biennial, and his work showed at the Contemporary Arts Center.

118
Peter Schjeldahl. “Come on Down: The New Orleans Biennial beckons,” The New Yorker November
24, 2008, 26.
89
emotional effects of visiting New Orleans for the first time since the storm and
succumbing to a tendency to mythologize the city, but the responses of both groups
betrayed a grateful surprise that the biennial happened at all. As Steven Stern wrote in the
September issue of Frieze magazine, “I think the first, and most essential, thing to say
about the New Orleans biennial is: there was a biennial in New Orleans. People came.
The almost miraculous nature of this fact should not be underestimated.”
119
Stern’s focus
here clearly rests in the function of the Biennial in regard to cultural tourism, with its
only criterion for success being its economic efficacy and ability to draw an audience.
Though Dan Cameron did manage to organize an ambitious and monumental effort in a
contracted period of time, the fact of the biennial’s existence hardly warrants a void in
theoretical discourse. This trend is unfortunate, since the biennial’s relationship to the
complex situation in New Orleans presents a dense set of issues and relationships to
unpack. The city is continually rife with infrastructural, economical, and political crisis,
and has become a site of opportunism that is rapidly changing the city. The biennial itself
was unabashedly marketed as a post-Katrina revitalization effort, locally by Dan
Cameron himself in a series of well-attended monthly panel discussions and
internationally on its website and press materials, but critical questions remain about its
efficacy and role in the New Orleans context.
Some of these questions were confronted in small-scale dialogues between
informal networks of viewers or individual artists – I was struck, for example, but Adam
Cvijanovich’s striking bayou murals painted on the third floor of Tekrema in the Ninth

119
Steven Stern, “Prospect.1 New Orleans,” Frieze, September 2008.
90
Ward and the film shown at the CAC created by Jennifer Allora and Gillermo Calzadilla
that portrays the same flooded house just after Katrina. This displacement of context, site,
and art also relates to Anne Delaporte’s work, easily recognizable murals of newspapers
carefully edited with light blue paint until only a fresco of detached images remain. Yet
the decontextualization of the images from their surrounding text resonated strongly with
the displacement of the murals over two sites. Conceptualized as a single work, one
appears in L9 Arts Center and the other in the Old U.S. Mint near the French Quarter,
destabilizing the spatial relationship between the sites and the class constructs they
inhabit. John Barnes, Jr. gave an overview of the issues he felt were being addressed by
works such as these:
It’s the kind of attitude—it’s the stream of consciousness that I think is emerging
from this whole experience. Because there is a stream of consciousness between
all the artists, I think, that makes the show work so well. Even though the works
are very unrelated and different. Some of them are similar, similarly related, but it
still deals with issues of displacement. It still deals with issues of racism,
government abandonment, it’s just dealing with all of these things.
Reconstruction, rebuilding. And it’s happening an in almost organic way.
120

The organic quality of these artistic conversations is compelling, but their temporal
existence within the Biennial structure is too easily construed as a resolution to the
Katrina story. Many writers have responded to the Biennial within a logic of catharsis,
and their language tends to be too effusive and poetical to retain critical pertinency. In her
article in Artforum, Elizabeth Schambelan speaks about New Orleans almost in the past
tense, the “alacrity with which nature is reclaiming” neighborhoods like the Ninth

120
John Barnes, Jr., interview with author, November 14, 2008.
91
Ward.
121
She speaks about the city as “agape, like a mouth,” and how artists have chosen
to put words in this mouth, to “rearticulate histories both recent and not-so-recent.” At the
end of her article, she calls on viewers to turn their gazes of the city on themselves, to
somehow mourn and dissolve the guilt of the past. “Viewer, heal thyself,” she exhorts.
122

Steven Stern of Frieze magazine also succumbs to the bittersweet and heart-
wrenching story-telling that surrounds what he calls an “anecdotal biennial,” recalling
Nari Ward’s story of a displaced Baptist who arrived at Diamond Gym thinking it meant
a return of the congregation.
123
He admits that he is not impartial, and is relieved that the
Biennial was “blessedly free of any ideological hand-wringing.” The narratives and just
“being there” was enough for him.
124

Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker has perhaps the most effusive and least
critical take on the exhibition, admonishing his readers, “You may disdain the frequent
sentimentality in the show if you can suppress your own uprushes of sentiment. I could
not.” He admits that he was “vicariously distraught” by the effects of Katrina, and was
able to exorcise some of those demons with flood-damaged photographs – “Looking at
them was like gazing through a scrim into a joyous and lost past.”
125

121
Schambelan, 172.

122
Schambelan, 177.

123
Steven Stern, Frieze.

124
Steven Stern, Frieze.

125
Schjeldahl, The New Yorker.
92

Figure 14. L9 Arts Center. Run by artists Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick.
Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, November 15, 2008.

93
Indeed, it is undeniable that the Biennial was cathartic in some way, and it was
inevitable that many artists and most critics would respond strongly to Katrina. But an
exchange between Stephen Collier (SC) and Tony Campbell (TC) of Good Children
Gallery implies a desire on the part of local artists for something a little more substantive
and current:
SC: I guess New Orleans is a landscape, and some of them [non-resident Biennial
artists] are discussing issues that have already been discussed, because New
Orleans artists were making work about Katrina the day after Katrina. So it’s kind
of weird to see people from another state, another place, come down and talk
about the same issues.
TC: It kind of has a little bit of people [sic] saying it feels “preachy,” but it’s
preachy too late, kind of.
SC: Yeah, because it’s been three years, and…
TC: But, on the other side of that, I’m aware that people come in to New Orleans
to see Prospect.1, but the backdrop is Katrina, because it’s probably their first
visit since. And this Prospect.1 is going to be the Katrina center of Prospect.1.
That’s not going to be the same next time.
SC: Yeah, hopefully not.
TC: It’ll be different. So I feel that “I’ve Got an Ark… ” [referring to Mark
Bradford’s Mithra] I feel that it’s a given because of the nature of the thing.
SBY: Right, it’s got to be worked out.
SC: I mean, how many FEMA trailer pieces have we seen, like, and then there’s
one in Prospect.1 [referring to a piece by Paul Villinski].
TC: And we also feel, we all made our Katrina work, we all exorcised that ghost
quite a long time ago, and we’ve all had those shows.
SC: Yeah, nobody wants to show those anymore. We don’t want to show Katrina
work in here any more, and I feel like most of the spaces are like that in New
Orleans.
126

Collier and Campbell are looking to the future while the critical response to the Biennial
is focused on the past, still yearning for the fulfillment Dan Cameron’s promise to recast
the identity of visual arts in the city as world-class. I could not help but detect a small

126
Stephen Collier and Tony Campbell, interview with author, November 14, 2008.
94
hint of disappointment beyond the initial excitement about Prospect.1 from many leaders
of the continuing alternative arts scene in the city, accompanied by a determination to
make it until the next one. Prospect.2, perhaps, will bring with it the critical dialogue, as
Steven Stern of Frieze suggests:
Future versions will probably not seem so urgent or emotional, and they are likely
to be less ‘about’ the city itself. Perhaps the idea of a New Orleans biennial will
normalize to the point where more familiar art-world discussion can take place
around it, and it will be debated a people debate the Venice Biennale. This is as it
should be.
127

But in a city with such an uncertain future, more cathartic narratives are little needed.
To contextualize the problematics of this biennial, peel back the layers of
mythologizing rhetoric swirling around it, and map out the power dynamics at play, we
must look back beyond Katrina to the historical inequalities and socio-spatial
relationships that made the hurricane such an epic disaster, and continue to affect the
city’s recovery. Spatial practice in the city of New Orleans is deeply intertwined with a
culture of domination, with topography aligning closely with social divisions. All of this
is overlaid by tourism, which is also rapidly shifting and renegotiating its importance in
the wake of the storm. With a lack of critical reflexivity, Prospect.1 runs the risk of
bolstering the problematic tourism narrative and exacerbating polarized rhetoric about the
city that continually borders on the fictive.

127
Steven Stern, Frieze.
95
A Spatial History of New Orleans
Perched precariously in some of the most fertile and least livable land in North
America, New Orleans has functioned for hundreds of years as the northernmost
Caribbean port and the southernmost American port. A literal crescent-shaped island
when it was first found by Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, in the early 1700s,
and the only solid land for miles on which to construct a viable port city, the survival of
New Orleans has always comprised a struggle for protected growth amidst natural cycles
of deluge and drainage.
128
The present-day topography of the city is an aggregation of
engineering projects designed to keep up with its economic growth as a port city in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and with the laying of oil pipelines in the twentieth
century. In the early eighteenth century, French colonials restricted themselves to the
well-established flood zones shaped by the Mississippi’s seasonal cycles, but shortly
thereafter land owners were required to lay claim to their property through the building of
levees and drainage canals.
129
As Spanish colonials and Americans flocked to the thriving
economic center in the nineteenth century, social historians DeMond Shondell Miller and
Jason David Rivera write that “a push was made to change the topography of the city by
extracting the boundaries and digging more canals for navigability in an attempt to get
the goods produced there to markets in the East and Midwest.”
130
The accompanying

128
DeMond Shondell Miller and Jason David Rivera, Hurricane Katrina and the Redefinition of
Landscape, (New York: Lexington Books, 2008), 27.

129
Miller and Rivera, 29.

130
Miller and Rivera, 28.
96
drainage of swampland below sea level allowed for the suburbanized faubourgs
131
to
spread beyond the natural higher ground determined by the Esplanade, Metairie, and
Gentilly ridges, but also placed new residential neighborhoods in the path of floodwaters.
The geographical features of this crescent-shaped island combined with a social history
of slavery and segregation deeply inform the spatial practices at work in the city today.

Figure 15. Map of New Orleans, showing Wards, early 1870s. Published by S. Augustus
Mitchell, Philadelphia, circa 1872.

Source:
http://www.murrayhudson.com/antique_maps/us_state_maps/NewOrleansMaps.htm.

131
A “faubourg” is an old French term for suburb, and refers to the settlements created beyond established
flood zones in New Orleans that prompted the wide-scale construction of levees in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. See Miller and Rivera, 28.
97
Though I hesitate in drawing linear historical relationships between socio-spatial
realities because I am wary of oversimplifying and ossifying complex current dynamics, I
recognize that the structures of the past frame the present, especially in New Orleans, and
hegemonies are slow to shift over time.
“Spatial practice,” a term advanced by French thinker Henri Lefebvre, provides a
useful theoretical framework for negotiating the social inscriptions on both the
conceptual understanding and lived experience of space. Lefebvre identifies
“representations of space” as the dominant mode of spatial understanding in any society,
conflating “what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived.”
132
This
conceptual space is the space of engineers, planners, and urbanists, and “tends towards a
system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs.” The abstract concepts
of a downtown core, suburbs, plazas, spaces of transit, and arts districts all fall
comfortably within this realm, and tend to be inflected with ideology and knowledge. In
contrast, “representational spaces” are lived spaces, experienced by inhabitants and users
through associated non-verbal signs and symbols. As Lefebvre writes:
Representational space is alive: it speaks. It has an affective kernel or center: Ego,
bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or; square, church, graveyard. It embraces the loci
of passion, of action and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies time.
Consequently it may be qualified in various ways: it may be directional,
situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid, and dynamic.
133

132
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden,
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 38.

133
Lefebvre, 42.
98
Perhaps in New Orleans, qualitative space outweighs the conceptual, contributing to the
city’s mythical, anecdotal character as well as its heavily subjective historicity. But a
three-dimensional understanding of spatial production falters amidst these two poles, as
complex and interweaved as they might be, so Lefebvre introduces the notion of “spatial
practice.” The most complex of these facets, spatial practice is the perception and
deciphering of space, dynamic and wholly dependent on social context. Under
neocapitalism, Lefebvre writes, perceived space “embodies a close association between
daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the
places set aside for work, ‘private’ life and leisure). This association is a paradoxical one,
because it includes the most extreme separation between the places it links together.”
134

This explanation resonates with the ingrained spatial and social divisions in New
Orleans, and the interrelationships that categorize and link them. When one thinks of the
Ninth Ward and the French Quarter and the dissonance of routine, leisure, work and
pleasure between them, it barely seems possible that these two locations are within a few
miles of one another. Add to that the conceptual understanding of these spaces (tourist
versus residential, dangerous versus safe) and their qualitative meanings, and one can
begin to parse how space is uniquely produced. Making sense of spatial politics in New
Orleans is complex, but careful analysis is necessary in order to understand how the
Biennial fits into the current context, and how power/knowledge
135
structures can be at

134
Lefebvre, 38.

135
A neologism coined by French theorist Michel Foucault, power/knowledge connotes a relationship that
reveals the systemic and dynamic nature of power. Power is based on knowledge, but also shapes
knowledge according to its anonymous intentions. Foucault cautions how critical discourse is thus inflected
99
once obvious and obfuscated. Otherwise, like Peter Schjeldahl, one ends up drowning in
received memories, historical myth, and pleasurable phenomena.
The Tourist Narrative
Space and time are conflated and confused in New Orleans, largely because of the
powerful incentives the tourism industry provides to distort and obfuscate contemporary
realities in favor of “representational” spaces. Lived space is all that counts – piqued
senses and memories, romanticism, signs and symbols – Mardi Gras beads, the fleur-de-
lis, the po-boys and gumbo are seductively laden with appropriated history and memory.
This particular production of space, as may be true with other tourism capitals,
consequentially affects the legibility of conceptual “representations of space” and the
ideology and knowledge imbued therein. The city becomes choked with symbols, and
underlying power dynamics are hidden such that even in times of crisis, as scholar Lynell
Thomas describes, New Orleans is “dominated by the troubling images and ideas of the
city’s all-too-familiar and overdetermined tourism narrative.”
136
Lefebvre explains the
distinction between conceptual and symbolic understandings of space:
We may be sure that representations of space have a practical impact, that they
intervene in and modify spatial textures which [sic] are informed by effective
knowledge and ideology. Representations of space must therefore have a
substantial role and a specific influence in the production of space … By contrast,
the only products of representational spaces are symbolic works. There are often

by structures of power that remain invisible to its agents. For more, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology
of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language [1969], translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1982).

136
Lynell Thomas, “The City I Used to…Visit: Tourist New Orleans and the Racialized Response to
Hurricane Katrina,” in Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy
Reader, eds. Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 256.
100
unique; sometimes they train ‘aesthetic’ trends and, after a time, having provoked
a series of manifestations and incursions into the imaginary, run out of steam.
137

Tourism has distorted spatial and temporal perceptions in New Orleans by presenting a
simplistic and glorified version of a problematic Southern past, inviting tourists to
consume representations of black cultural production as it existed in two exclusive
periods: “the colonial period under French and Spanish rule and the antebellum period
following the Louisiana Purchase.” As Thomas goes on to note, “the emphasis on these
periods (to the exclusion of more recent history) and the depiction of these periods
together create a very particular racial image of the city.”
138
White tourists take voodoo
tours and eat Creole cuisine within the “safe tourist space of the heavily police-patrolled
French Quarter,” whereas outside of this overemphasized space, “they ignore the
historical and contemporary realities of the city’s African Americans.” Therefore, tourism
and the perceived history of the city is effectively controlled within a certain spatial
sphere and power structure. It is not surprising that black servility is replicated and
sustained in the tourism industry, contributing to a symbolic feeling of historical
authenticity, as Thomas observes, by “bringing visitors to the past itself, not just a scale
reproduction of the past.”
139
But because tourism relies on representational space that can
be shifted by introducing new symbols that align more with public demand, a narrative of
non-contentious multiculturalism has recently emerged in response to demands for more

137
Lefebvre, 42.

138
Thomas, 256.

139
Thomas, 256.
101
inclusive historical recountings. Since these representational spaces are merely symbolic,
however, and at best forge “incursions into the imaginary,”
140
no practical change in
knowledge or ideology can be effected.

Figure 16. Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, a shop in the French Quarter.
Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, July 4, 2008.

140
Lefebvre, 42.
102
Lynell Thomas describes how both the “gumbo pot” and the term “Creole” are
appropriated to emphasize diversity, imbuing the city with a sense of racial harmony that
is wholly inaccurate.
141
The fetishizing of this unified, hybridized “gumbo pot” culture is
echoed in former mayor Marc Morial’s writings: “Proud of our heritage, we have
combined the influences of our European, African and, of course, American forefathers
into how we live, what we eat and how we celebrate.”
142
Likewise, the overuse of the
term “Creole” to describe this cultural mixing and attach an exoticized origin story to the
city’s majority black population mitigates a cruel and oppressive racial history. “Creole”
evokes the elite population of socially mobile, liberated people of color in the French and
Spanish colonial times, but also romanticizes oppressive practices like plaçage
143
and
obscures the rigid systems of categorization by skin color that occurred in that period.
The conflation of that term to blanket all blacks negates a history of slavery and
segregation in favor of a unique and harmonious space of exceptionalism.
144
As Thomas
argues:
Despite this seeming embrace of different cultural, linguistic, and social
influences, the city’s multiracial tourism narrative is cloaked in the conventions of
a problematic multiculturalism that in the end promotes a clichéd, trivialized

141
Thomas, 262-263.

142
Thomas, 261.

143
Plaçage was a formalized French practice of mistress-keeping, applying to white men and mixed-race
women, many of whom were Creole. See Thomas, 262.

144
According to Thomas, exceptionalism refers to a dismissal of past racial strife in the New Orleans
tourist narrative. She argues that this conception of a unified, harmonious multicultural city as the
exception in the South is reductivist and obscures existing racial conflicts. See Thomas, 260.
103
understanding of race and aggrandizes the structure of oppression that it purports
to disrupt.
145

This powerful overarching narrative was apparent in the immediate response to Katrina,
when multiple journalists inexplicably reported that the city had escaped damage – the
“city” as bounded by the high ground of the French Quarter. As well, exaggerated reports
of violence and a disturbingly slow rescue deployment to the black areas of the city
painfully revealed the implications of an irresponsibly oversimplified and narrow tourist
narrative. In the wake of Katrina, this dangerous narrative went beyond mere tourism to
affect the conceptual understanding of a place, with the qualitative overtaking the real.
Racial Politics in post-Katrina New Orleans
The spatial politics of New Orleans are incredibly complex, and post-Katrina
scholarship has barely begun to scratch the surface of contemporary racial realities. In K.
Animashaun Ducre’s discussion of racialized spaces
146
in the city, the author attributes
the erection of rigid social boundaries to certain policy decisions made by a wealthy elite
class through decades of political maneuvering.
147
Although Ducre’s linear historical

145
Thomas, p 260.

146
Ducre defines racialized spaces as “historic practice and spatial designation of a particular area for
racial and ethnic minorities as a means of containment and social control. This practice serves to reinforce
preconceived notions of Otherness or, result in the creation of a culturally inferior Other.” For more, see K.
Animashaun Ducre, “Hurricane Katrina as an Elaboration on an Ongoing Theme: Racialized Spaces in
Louisiana,” in Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader,
eds. Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 66.

147
Ducre, 71.
104
reasoning (from the Code Noir
148
of French Colonialism to the arrest of Homer Plessy
that led to Jim Crow laws) needs further unpacking to reveal a causal effect on racialized
spaces, some of his examples indeed provide powerful counter-narratives to the official
tourist line. If nothing else, they speak to the depth of the imbalance between the
perceptions and lived realities of New Orleans.
One overwhelmingly powerful symbol in the city is the Mardi Gras parade, but,
as scholar D. Osei Robertson points out, this seemingly innocuous cultural attraction is
quietly funded and manipulated by “private social organizations whose members (nearly
all white) are composed of some of the wealthiest people in the city.”
149
Citing a study by
Alvin Shexnider, he notes “wealth and power in New Orleans are concentrated in a small
but powerful oligarchy that unduly influences the direction of economic development and
public policy.”
150
In contrast, the Mardi Gras Indian parades and second lines, considered
“authentic” New Orleans experiences and thus highly coveted, combining flashy outfits,
a non-threatening black cultural experience, music, and a unique set of visual symbols,
were originally an oppositional reaction to the official (segregated) elite Mardi Gras
parade. Within the overarching tourist narrative, these two conflated and add to a

148
The Code Noir, or “Black Codes,” were laws passed by the French as early as 1724 to govern the rights
of slaves. These included civil rights accorded to gens de colour, or “free people of color” to marry and
own property in addition to classifying blacks according to skin color and ancestry (black, quadroon,
octoroon, etc.), but also ensured a steady supply of plantation labor and limited black mobility. For more,
see Ducre, 68.

149
D. Osei Robertson, “Property and Security, Political Chameleons, and Dysfunctional Regime: A New
Orleans Story,” in Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader,
eds. Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 55.

150
Alvin Shexnider, “Political Mobilization in the South: The Election of a Black Mayor in New Orleans,”
in The New Black Politics: The Search for Political Power, ed. M. Preston et al. (New York: Longman,
1982), 223, quoted in Robertson, 55.
105
perceived “richness” and “cultural heritage,” but the perplexing fact that the Mardi Gras
Indians have difficulty getting street permits is rarely mentioned.
This lack of support reveals an underlying culture of inequality maintained by
institutional racism.
151
Before Katrina hit in 2005, New Orleans was one of the top ten
most racially segregated places out of the fifty largest metropolitan areas in the United
States, with high extremely high concentrations of poverty.
152
This fact, so at odds with
the romanticized version of tourist New Orleans, is not the result of one problematic
policy – rather it is an aggregation of fear, opportunism, individual corruption and
ignorance. The manifestations of spatial segregation are multivalent and have shifted the
demographics of the city into their current geographic configuration: redlining still occurs
with frequency in lending institutions and insurance companies, who nowadays judge by
a client’s use of nonstandard English rather than skin color, but this is far from the only
example. As sociologists Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires attest, “exclusionary
zoning regulations, racial steering by real estate agents, federally subsidized highways,
and tax breaks for homeowners as well as suburban business development prop up the
system.”
153
The property tax-based system of public schools has essentially resegregated
schools according to spatial and socio-economic boundaries, resulting in educational

151
Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires define institutional racism in this way: “Racial disparities and
poverty are the cumulative result of a long history of institutional arrangements and structures that have
produced current realities.” See Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, “The Social Construction of
Disaster: New Orleans as the Paradigmatic American City,” in Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane
Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader, eds. Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 273.

152
Hartman and Squires, 273.

153
Hartman and Squires, 274.
106
inequalities. Most disturbingly, necessary infrastructure is allowed to crumble in areas of
high poverty (such as levees in the Ninth Ward) – areas that are already more
topographically vulnerable and less desirable as real estate – as key resources are diverted
to wealthier districts with more social capital and investment potential.
In light of these dynamics, which are not unique to New Orleans but arguably
have more immediately devastating implications in that city, it is unsurprising that some
residents initially thought that the Ninth Ward levee was purposefully broken and the
impoverished neighborhood sacrificed for the good of the greater city. The fact that
anyone would even consider this to be true is jolting and unthinkable, unless the Great
Mississippi River Flood of 1927 is taken as precedent. Not only were black men forced to
work on levee protection at gunpoint in extremely dangerous conditions, part of the levee
in St. Bernard Parish (a predominantly African-American neighborhood) was blown up to
relieve flood pressure and save the city of New Orleans. As Ducre recounts, “allegations
that the … Ninth Ward of New Orleans was similarly sacrificed during Hurricane Katrina
are not entirely outrageous. At one time, the political elite of New Orleans did pull
together to sacrifice the livelihood of St. Bernard Parish in the interest of New
Orleans.”
154
Evoking this history reiterates the fact that the power inequalities and spatial
domination in New Orleans were not washed away by the storm, and the “blank slate”
155

154
Ducre, 69.

155
Naomi Klein observes the language of conservative free-market fundamentalists casting New Orleans
as a “blank slate” after Katrina as a precursor to large-scale opportunism at the expense of disaster recovery
and the public good. She quotes one of New Orleans’ wealthiest developers, Joseph Canizaro, after
Katrina: “I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big
opportunies.” See Klein, 4.
107
that so many opportunists desire is yet another myth. New Orleans is indeed being
remade, socially and spatially, but how its future intersects with its past remains to be
seen. Large-scale cultural initiatives like Prospect.1 have a stake in renegotiating and
carefully untangling furtive power dynamics, but Dan Cameron seems content to gloss
over most of these polemic issues. His motivations for playing into the overarching
tourist narrative may be qualitatively personal or ruthlessly political, but the Biennial
itself must be questioned in light of its potential impact on this socio-spatial context.
Yet it seems that the symbolism of New Orleans truly touches Cameron, as
evidenced in his catalogue essay, where he lingers fondly on the resonant notes in the
city’s myth: “Creole” as a symbol of racial and cultural hybridity, celebration as a social
adhesive, the magic of live jazz at Donna’s, and culinary pleasures.
156
Though he
expresses outrage at the racialized Katrina response and the city’s reputation for
debauchery and sin, he too easily links these failings to an unwillingness to bury the past
and follow the rest of the South in a move towards modernity. This tired description of
New Orleans, so complicit in the city’s mythological vision of itself, would be less
unsettling if Cameron had truly examined his own biases. It would be even more
acceptable if Cameron had less boldly declared the Biennial as a tool for cultural tourism
and revitalization. However, as admirable as his honesty is in declaring “I’m a tourism

156
Dan Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” in Prospect.1 New Orleans [exhibition catalogue], ed.
Lucy Flint (New York: PictureBox, Inc., 2008), 16.
108
promoter”
157
to an art critic, his lack of critical self-reflexivity and his collusion in
perpetuating a problematic tourism narrative are ideologically irresponsible conceits.

157
Dan Cameron quoted in Schjeldahl, 2.
109
CHAPTER FOUR.

The Prospect.1 Map

The Prospect.1 map is an overwhelming glut of information, beautifully
illustrated but painfully dense, with over 70 satellite organizations tabulated alongside the
26 official sites and 81 artists of the Biennial. The grey snake of the Mississippi arches
through its center amid an explosion of cross-referencing colors, letters, numbers, and red
boundary lines slashed across the flat grids of the city. As a tool it is confusing for the
casual tourist, but as an archive of the vibrant art scene in the city it is invaluable.
Perhaps because it added such finality to the boundary of inclusion in the exhibition,
decisions leading up to the production of the map induced anxieties within the local art
scene.
At the same time, the possibility of reaping even tangential benefits from
exposure to Prospect.1’s international audience catalyzed infrastructure, organization,
and activity amongst half-formed arts organizations and collectives that coalesced after
the storm. At first, an oppositional rhetoric surrounded these activities, which Cameron
anticipated early on. The Gambit Weekly paraphrases his opinion on counter-biennial
activity:
Cameron jokes that there is a Salon des Refusés or counter-biennial tradition in
which artists not invited to participate, but feel that they should have been, create
even more shows in the city at the same time. Peripheral events typically include
music, dance, and theater performances – rounding out the menu for cultural
visitors.
158

158
Coviello, The Gambit Weekly.
110
As an experienced curator, Cameron understands these initiatives as an inevitable part of
the biennial ecology, but the opposition in New Orleans was of a more complex and
varied character than a simple reaction to exclusion. In many ways, it united some of the
competing forces described in Chapter One, such as the Julia Street “tastemakers”
159
who
feared a loss of control; community arts endeavors that distrusted the Biennial’s tourist
rhetoric and alignment with government agendas;
160
and collectives of emerging artists
that felt underrepresented. Though this was not categorically true – the Arthur Roger
Gallery on Julia Street held the panel in which Cameron first conceived of Prospect.1,
161

community arts leader Ron Bechet praised its inception,
162
and both Natalie Sciortino-
Rinehart and Jenny LeBlanc of the Front Collective expressed excitement about the
exposure the biennial would bring – an undercurrent of wariness permeated much of the
arts sector in the summer of 2008.
163

159
A term used by John Barnes, Jr., interview with the author, November 14, 2008.

160
Artist Mel Chin commented that he wanted to “stay far away” from Prospect.1 because of its tourism
rhetoric, and it was called “elistist” and “carpetbagger” by both Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart and Jenny
LeBlanc. Amy Koritz dismissed it as part of “the Lieutenant Governor’s agenda.”

161
MacCash, The Times-Picayune.

162
Ron Bechet, interview with author, July 1, 2008. Ron Bechet is a well-respected community arts leader
and a Professor of Studio Art at Xavier University. He is connected with many organizations like Art in
Action/AORTA, Ashé Cultural Center, The Porch, Home New Orleans, Transforma Projects, National
Performance Network, and others. A generational New Orleanian, Ron Bechet was described a “someone
you wanted by your side if you wanted to get anything done in the city” by Jess Garz of Transforma
Projects. He is also a practicing painter and showed work at the Universal Furniture Warehouse during the
Biennial. He also has a show planned in the L9 Art Center for Spring 2009.

163
Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, interview with author, June 30, 2008; and Jenny LeBlanc, interview with
author, July 7, 2008.
111
Biennial artist John Barnes describes this anxiety, though he only sees it existing within
the “establishment”:
Well, while we were talking over the summer as we were preparing art work and
the city was preparing to receive it, there was a lot of grumbling amongst the
artists who are part of that core established group, or affiliates, subsets of that core
established group. There was a lot of humbug about – they were suspicious about
Dan. They were suspicious about his selections, and they had convinced
themselves it was going to be just another flaky, New York-style show, with
things in it that no one could understand.
164

Barnes’s perception indicates how polarizing and confused the motivations behind the
brief post-Katrina alternative arts upsurge and the Prospect.1 reaction became. Because
of their wariness, alternative arts spaces like the Front Collective were suddenly lumped
in with established galleries as oppositional to the Biennial. Yet despite this, anticipation
for the Biennial and a desire to be involved increased. For many, this was the exposure
they were waiting for, the reason they had stayed in a destroyed city, and a symbol that
New Orleans had been plugged into what Gregory Sholette calls the “global
contemporary art matrix.”
According to Sholette, what independent curator Rachel Weiss calls “the biennial
virus” is a part of the ever-increasing array of contemporary art centers that provide the
“structural grid” for a circulatory, globalized matrix of contemporary art production and
consumption. Sholette is especially concerned about the impact of this circulation on a
local arts scene, wary of what he calls the globalization of culture, which he defines here:
The globalization of culture is the process by which specific local customs, art
practices, forms of knowledge, identities and even cuisine are broken down and

164
John Barnes Jr., interview with author, November 14, 2008.
112
then selectively drawn up into a transnational, circulatory system that parallels the
“floating” value of international capital.
165

Sholette sees this process as inevitably disconnecting culture from place, history, and
community. Yet, perhaps because New Orleans is so suffocated by rigid notions of place,
history, and community, an injection of external taste was sorely desired. Kyle Bravo, a
founding member of the Front Collective, describes his warring emotions:
I could probably think of things that aren’t, no, I’m not even going to say that.
Got to be positive. I just think it’s bringing a lot of energy. So it’s like, I mean,
of course, and kind of the nature of it is its exclusivity. It’s about bringing in
really big name artists to show work. And I guess that’s part of the draw, is that
it’s bringing in the elite of the art world. And so the rest of us, you know, that
aren’t the elite of the art world, I think a lot of people feel sort of like shunned or
something by it.

But, then again, I feel like it’s just given us a reason to be like, well, let’s do our
own thing, like let’s create an alternative to this, do something. So not only do I
think it’s good, I’m excited to see all this work from like international, you know,
contemporary art stars. Because like we’re saying, you don’t get that here. And
we will for a little while. So, it’s pretty cool.
166

Bravo understood that Cameron’s unapologetically authoritarian curatorial choices
brought with them the larger global circulation of contemporary art that he desired. Those
trickle-down effects, though not directly supportive of the local arts scene, would be
tangible for alternative spaces like The Front. Certainly by the time the Biennial had
opened, this sense of exclusion was a shadow of itself, largely because Dan Cameron
made himself available, holding monthly panels and working the existing network in

165
Gregory Sholette, “How to Best Serve the New Global Contemporary Art Matrix,” unpublished
manuscript (February 2000), http://www.societyofcontrol.com/library/_p-
t/sholette_a_guide_2_etiquette_4_international_curators_&_artists.txt, 2.

166
Kyle Bravo and Jenny LeBlanc, interview with author, July 7, 2008.
113
order to explain his reasoning. Andy Antippas reflected on his own initial vitriol and
subsequent change in attitude:
My expectation is that people need to go to him in the same way that I went there
and said, you know what? I don’t really like what you’re doing, and I’m going to
prove it to you by having an exhibit of all the artists you’ve ignored. And he said,
well, you don’t understand what I’m doing. And I said, well, explain it to me. And
he did, and I understood it better. I mean, the tone of it changed. It wasn’t an
aggressive kind of in-your-face kind of show – we’re just showing our good shit
along with your good shit. That’s pretty much what came off.
167

The map remained the turning point, for however much Cameron explained how
beneficial the Biennial would be for everyone, he could not get beyond the local anxiety
about inclusion and exclusion. Clearly the Biennial team was occupied by seemingly
more important things than the map during the planning process, and Associate Curator
Claire Tancons sounded a little baffled about the level of emotion and investment
involved in its production:
It’s really quite pragmatic, it was really meant to be inclusive more so than
exclusive. And I mean, as much as it is important to be, on some level, on the
Prospect.1 map, I really don’t think it’s all that important. I mean, there’s
collectives or organizations, I mean KK Projects, Good Children, Antenna, who
really have an identity of their own and who don’t, I don’t think need to be
promoted by the Biennial. I think it was an extremely generous gesture on the part
of Dan to show his interest in the local community and in the local context, and
but I think that through what he initiated, this wider context will become and has
become, to grandstand, known to the outside public. By dint of existing.
168

Tancons’s perspective is one of a global contemporary art matrix insider rather than a
New Orleans insider. In downplaying the importance of the map, she fails to
acknowledge the burgeoning art movement since the storm (all of the organizations she

167
Andy Antippas, interview with author, November 14, 2008.

168
Claire Tancons, interview with author, November 16, 2008.
114
mentioned were started after August of 2005, Good Children started most recently in
February of 2008), and the enormous impact of the Biennial on the growth of that scene.
The sustainability of these spaces is utterly dependent on outside exposure, and the map
was the tangible, physical guarantee of inclusion. As blips on the map, these spaces
become legitimated as “particulated circuitry” in the global matrix, able to “negotiate and
regulate the shifting value” of contemporary art,
169
rather than islands of activity in need
of a connection to that international flow.

Figure 17. Detail of Prospect.1 Map showing sites and artists. The capital letters refer to
“official” sites, the numbers refer to “satellite” sites, and the red boxes refer to biennial
artists.

169
Sholette, 2.
115
Offering such a vast opportunity was seen as an unnecessarily generous gesture
on Cameron’s part almost ubiquitously. In addition to Claire Tancons, Stephen Collier of
Good Children Gallery commented on the inclusiveness of the Prospect.1 map:
Well, we knew about it and a lot of us knew Dan Cameron, and so we just … I
mean, we’re part of it, we’re just a satellite exhibition space, but, yeah … if you
want to be involved, if you’re an artist in New Orleans and you want to be
involved in Prospect.1, it’s not that hard. You just need to have a little space or
have some work up and contact him – it’s easy to get on the map. So it’s very
inclusive. And I think he made it a point to try to make everybody inclusive and
not just the artists that he’s picked out for these shows.
170

Tony Campbell of Good Children echoed this sentiment, saying, “I think he’s been very
generous with the inclusiveness of the satellite exhibitions,”
171
and Susan Gisleson of
Antenna Gallery expressed surprise at how it turned out, “it’s really been excellent
because at first I did feel like it was going to be exclusive and it just, I haven’t felt that at
all.”
172
Biennial artist and New Orleans resident John Barnes, Jr. also spoke about a
change in attitude, and attributed it to the map’s inclusion of satellite exhibitions:
It just seems like there’s an energy [sic] around the biennial that’s just really
positive, that I think supersedes everything around it. So yeah, it’s a strange thing.
My attitude has changed since we spoke last, in terms of, so many things I didn’t
think were possible are now turning out to be true. I didn’t think that it would be
embraced locally by our community. And the way they dealt with that was with
the satellite locations, and that was a very clever type of way, mechanism, of
calming that population down. Because they now have a presence in it. And
they’re able to be a part of it. Seems rather inclusive in that regard.
173

170
Stephen Collier, interview with author, November 14, 2008.

171
Tony Campbell, interview with author, November 14, 2008.

172
Susan Gisleson, interview with author, November 16, 2008.

173
John Barnes, Jr., interview with author, November 14, 2008.
116
Barnes’s comments reveal a slightly different take on the map – rather than an indulgent,
generous gesture, he sees Cameron’s strategy of inclusiveness as a political move
calculated to assuage the oppositional reactions he initially encountered locally. This
subsumation of opposition by blurring the boundaries of inclusion is a common
institutional practice that penetrates all sectors, and occurs especially rapidly in the art
world. Stella Rollig discusses how the language of interventionism and project-oriented
spaces that began in the alternative arts movement of the 1970s and 1980s became
institutionalized by big temporary exhibitions and museums in the early 1990s, who were
forced to react to the new conditions of production (anti-institutional, set in raw or public
spaces, collectively-oriented and non-hierarchical) and created within themselves a
profound contradiction. She paraphrases Gregory Sholette’s discussion of the evolution
of alternative institutions in New York, which he sees as necessarily opposing terms:
“museums, even former anti-institutionally oriented ones like the New Museum in New
York, have all become outposts for a global art market and that everything incorporated
by the global players in this market tends to become just another commodity.”
174

Certainly the most obvious parallel to this nimble institutionalization of reactionary
practices is the Internet – companies like Google and Facebook utilize pared-down
design, user participation in coding, and seemingly non-hierarchical corporate structures
and office set-ups to enormous success. Scholar Mary Douglas cautions that we must
remain cognizant, because the institutionalization of reactionary practices contributes to a

174
Stella Rollig, “Contemporary Art Practices and the Museum: To Be Reconciled at All?” in Beyond the
Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices, ed. Melanie Townsend (Toronto: Banff Centre Press, 2003), 105.
117
new thought style that remains invisible to the individual and yet exerts preconditions for
the understanding of truth and knowledge. She quotes Ludwick Fleck:
The individual within the collective is never, or hardly ever, conscious of the
prevailing thought style which almost always exerts an absolutely compulsive
force upon his thinking, and with which it is not possible to be at variance.
175

This invisible compulsion can extend to curatorial thought about the process of
institutionalization itself. Gregory Sholette remarks:
Ironically it is not uncommon to discover that international curators will, in all
sincerity, feel an obligation to critique the dominion of the market and its negative
impact on local cultures. However, when such criticism is made it often takes on a
resigned and melancholy tone in which the apparent death of real opposition is
presented as inevitable and mourning serves as the only possible response for the
mature intellectual.
176

Though Dan Cameron has not been accused of this kind of dissimulation – in fact,
Prospect.1 was praised by Artforum Editor Elizabeth Schambelan for its unabashed
emphasis on “tourist-driven revenue streams” and a lack of explicit “critical reflexivity”
in the curatorial methodology
177
– perhaps the map process itself reveals more about the
institutional negotiations and motivations of Prospect.1 than either the art shown or the
rhetoric published. Artist Andrea Fraser points towards an analysis of process and
relationships in a question she poses to Stella Rollig:
The challenge is to understand the relationship between the kinds of recent
developments in contemporary art that you mention (project-orientation, pop

175
Ludwick Fleck quoted by Douglas, 13.

176
Sholette, 3.

177
Elizabeth Schambelan, “Being There,” Artforum International January (2009): 177.
118
culture, participatory strategies, and interventionism) and the institutional
developments. Is the relationship critical? Symbiotic? Parasitic?
178

I argue that Dan Cameron’s blurring of “official” biennial boundaries was indeed a
symbiotic negotiation with existing arts networks rather than a visionary or magnanimous
gesture, completely necessary for the success of the biennial, as its process implies.
Rather than an idea that sprung forth fully formed, it seems that Cameron was actually
averse to total inclusivity at first. Susan Gisleson describes her experience with the map:
And there was this whole, like the whole map thing. Like at first, I think I
probably still have the emails, it’s just ridiculous, but there was so much
confusion coming from the Prospect.1 camp and surrounding like, oh they’re
going to put out one map of just stuff that’s designated, curated, chosen by Dan
Cameron map. And then there’s going to be another map for stuff that’s
happening around it, and then there’s going to be a third map … and so they
started talk about all this, like, for months, and it was like … the communication
was like nobody really knew what would happen, and so the fact that a map
actually came out – that was pretty astounding.
179

In addition to this hierarchical initial structure for the map production, a variety of terms
emerged to describe artistic production in the city surrounding the Biennial: “official”
sites and artists, “peripheral” activity, “satellite” spaces, “related” events, “satellite
exhibitions,” and “cultural sites.” From Gisleson’s comments, it seems that the whole
process was fairly unorganized – in fact, Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart was only hired on at
the end of August 2008 to organize and research what were then called “satellite
exhibitions.” Her hiring speaks to an unanticipated institutional need for the codification

178
Andrea Fraser quoted by Rollig, 108.

179
Susan Gisleson, interview with author, November 16, 2008.
119
of local practices, spurred perhaps by the rapid coalescence of new organizations like the
Front Collective and the Colton School only weeks before the Biennial opened.
180

Yet, after the map was produced, Claire Tancons described the motivation behind
including the local artists as a shared drive of the Contemporary Arts Center, Dan
Cameron, and herself to “showcase local talent alongside international talent,” and spoke
of a “broader vision” of nurturing local practices, as if these goals had driven the
inclusive nature of the map.
181
When I asked her about the confusing categorizations of
satellite exhibitions and related events, she clearly opined that she did not hold to the self-
perpetuating dichotomy of global and local artists, and implied that the map was an
attempt to broaden the scope of the arts scene in New Orleans to an international scale:
Yes, it’s very confusing, but also very simple because it’s very organic. And again
– and this is really my position – my position is always to say to anxious artists, to
anxious local artists, that the Biennial is only but the beginning and not the end,
that it was only the means through which to accomplish this broader vision. So I
was always trying to antagonize artists to think for themselves and not wait for the
Biennial to brand themselves as worthy visual artists. And of course I would
always try and also encourage local artists to drop the local and just be artists.

So to me I would be more interested in an artist from New Orleans putting his
sights even further ahead than the Julia Street galleries. But I mean, of course, it
may be easier for me to say so because I have traveled and I know what is beyond
the borders of New Orleans, and for an artist who only has … but, I mean, in
terms of ambitions, as an artist living and working in New Orleans, my aspiration
would not be to ultimately feature my work in a gallery in New Orleans. I mean,
that may be a stepping-stone to something else, but if you really want to be at the
highest level, until maybe New Orleans generates a big arts scene of its own, I
think that you would have to expand.
182

180
Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, interview with author, November 14, 2008.

181
Claire Tancons, interview with author, November 16, 2008.

182
Claire Tancons, interview with author, November 16, 2008.
120

Her comments are not meant to be disparaging, only pragmatic about the necessities of
circulating through the global contemporary art matrix in order to reach “the highest
level,” and cautionary about confining one’s ambitions too regionally. Yet this position of
highlighting “local talent” in order to redefine and nurture the burgeoning arts scene in
New Orleans is highly disingenuous, serving to obscure rather than expose the actual
negotiations, power structures, and lessons learned along the way. Dan Cameron always
needed the fully buy-in of the local arts communities to be successful – he had walked
into a post-Katrina flurry of activity, and the spaces he needed, the artists he wanted, and
the human resources he cultivated were already invested in a tight network of local
relationships. Though these relationships will be explored further in the next section,
especially in how they intermix with the so-called “official” biennial sites and artists,
their importance in shaping the Biennial itself remains unacknowledged. This
phenomenon is the nature of such exhibitions and institutional power: Gregory Sholette
jokingly quotes a “Guide to Etiquette for International Curators and Artists” in the
beginning of his article, cautioning them to “never make the actual social and economic
practices of the art world visible to the public.”
183
As is the nature of institutions,
following Mary Douglas’s analysis, there is an imperative to make real processes
invisible and self-perpetuating, and as a result the Biennial generally (and Dan Cameron
more specifically) set the standard for arts in New Orleans. She notes that institutions
“endow themselves with rightness and send their mutual corroboration cascading through

183
Sholette, 1.
121
all the levels of our information system.”
184
By acknowledging this power, local arts
organizations that comprised an alternative movement initially, became complicit in the
stated goals of Cameron and the Biennial, surrendering to some extent their powers of
self-legitimation in order to be part of it.
The Spatial Codification of Prospect.1

In its final form, the Prospect.1 map calmed opposition, diffused the post-Katrina
alternative arts movement, and institutionalized a new spatial matrix for art within the
city. The website FindArtNola.com, which organizes information about all the art venues
and current exhibitions in the city, is an excellent example of the codifying power of
Prospect.1. On their “neighborhoods” page, a disclaimer in the top right corner reads, “In
New Orleans there are many opinions as to the proper names and boundaries of ‘official’
neighborhoods. We are using the current Prospect.1 neighborhood definitions as our
mapping guideline.”
185
In comparing the neighborhoods listed on the FindArtNola.com
website with the Prospect.1 map, however, it becomes clear that the Biennial privileges
certain neighborhoods above others – thick red lines mark out three main arts districts as
central to most of the Biennial activity – the Warehouse Arts District, the St. Claude Arts
District, and the Lower Ninth Ward. Of these, only the Warehouse Arts District was
known as a center for visual arts prior to Katrina. Returning to the three dimensions of
space proposed by Lefebvre (conceptual space, lived experience, and perceived space),
useful for parsing out the social and institutional values assigned to these three

184
Douglas, 92.

185
“Find Art Nola,” http://www.findartnola.com.
122
districts,
186
I can uncover Prospect.1’s goals in siting art as well as the extent to which the
Biennial was shaped by a pre-existing network of relations.

Figure 18. Detail of Prospect.1 map, showing districts outlined in red.

186
Lefebvre, 38-39.
123
The Lower Ninth Ward
The site-specific art installed in the indeterminate (formerly residential, not quite
public) space of the Ninth Ward was considered by critics to be one of the most powerful
aspects of the Biennial. The thirteen installations in that loaded landscape, nine of which
were (semi) publicly sited, recall the blueprint of the “Places With A Past” Spoleto
Festival exhibition of 1991 in Charleston, curated by Mary Jane Jacob. Jacob envisioned
a project-based model in which artists researched the history of a place, determined their
own sites, and formed community and place attachments to create site-specific and place-
specific installations. She speaks to the power of history and the ability of art (or at least
the systems that produce the art) in these situations to impact life and society:
It is when exhibitions speak about issues related to or inspired by a chosen site,
pointing to the contemporary power of the past, and making connections between
art and society, that they must fulfill a role that befits their real-life situation, that
demonstrates the necessity for this art to be outside a museum’s walls, and, at the
same time, impacts the theoretical discourses of art today.
187

She lays out a difficult task for such work, and perhaps an awareness of these imperatives
explains why painters like Prospect.1 artists Wangechi Mutu and Mark Bradford departed
so dramatically from their usual practices, both creating large-scale sculptural works with
a community dimension (“the social sculpture aspect” as Claire Tancons calls it,
borrowing a phrase from Joseph Beuys).
188
Neither could their pieces exist anywhere else
than where they were sited, unlike some of the works sited in various museums like the

187
Mary Jane Jacob, “Making History in Charleston,” in Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at
Charleston’s Spoleto Festival, ed. Terry Ann R. Neff (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.,
1991), 17.

188
Claire Tancons, interview with author, November 16, 2008.
124
CAC. Though works like El Anatsui’s ubiquitous foil tapestries, Lee Bul’s beaded
chandelier, and Fred Tomaselli’s patterned paintings took on a certain Mardi Gras,
carnivalesque quality just by inhabiting New Orleans, the Ninth Ward artists went
beyond symbolism and representational space to bore into actual socio-spatial
production.
189

Perhaps most telling are the various communities that were created around a few
of these installations. Wangechi Mutu rarely engages in social practice, but her House for
Miss Sarah (2008) focused on the single, ongoing story of one Katrina survivor. A tale
with metaphorical implications, Miss Sarah is a venerable community leader in the Ninth
Ward whose house was first washed away by Katrina, then destroyed a second time by
unscrupulous contractors who swindled the elderly woman out of her insurance money.
Mutu created a folly on Miss Sarah’s property, a few darkly painted beams outlining the
footprint and forms of a house-to-be, strewn with Christmas lights dovetailing towards a
single rocking chair in the center evoking the woman herself. This visible sculpture,
which prompted many residents and visitors to ask about Miss Sarah, where she had
gone, and when she would return, also physically represented a more invisible aspect of
the piece. On the opening weekend, Mutu held an auction of her work to create a fund for
Miss Sarah to rebuild her house, with the idea that the actual structure would slowly
replace the folly. The poetics of the intended life of this piece intermixed with its modest
but real reciprocity begins to answer the question that Artforum editor Elizabeth
Schambelan poses in her piece on Prospect.1: “What kind of dispensation can a

189
Stern, Frieze.
125
contemporary art biennial offer?”
190
The art itself, taken on its own – perhaps not much.
But the combination of individual efforts by artists to instill some social exchange into
the system of art production, complemented by the trickle-down effects of tourism
dollars, makes a strong case that art, economy, and social rebuilding are not contradictory
elements. Perhaps they are a bit “messy,” as Glenn Ligon admits in his Artforum piece,
but not mutually exclusive.
191

Mark Bradford’s engagement in the Ninth Ward, which went far beyond his
iconic piece Mithra (2008), a giant wooden ark-shape built around a shipping container
and made of plywood salvaged from construction sites around Los Angeles, is perhaps
the best example of how an artist affected the spatial representations and conceptions of
the Ninth Ward through his own relationship to an existing socio-spatial network. During
one of his first site visits, Bradford “stumbled upon” Keith Calhoun and Chandra
McCormick renovating their doublewide shotgun house into the studios and gallery space
known as L9 Arts Center. Though Bradford’s donation of a painting that raised $65,000
for L9 has been much publicized, Calhoun and McCormick’s reciprocal effect on the
Biennial is less noted.
192
Rather, they are often described as the passive recipients of
Mark Bradford and Dan Cameron’s largesse, even in their own words.

190
Schambelan, 174.

191
Glenn Ligon, “To Miss New Orleans,” Artforum International January (2009): 168.

192
Doug MacCash, The Times-Picayune.
126
Keith Calhoun says:
I think it’s just a great thing for me and Chandra [sic] because we wasn’t [sic]
even Biennial artists, so, with Mark Bradford’s supporting efforts here, helping us
to arrange certain works and putting the collection together, you know, it’s been
great for us because now we get the world to see our work, right here in the
Lower Ninth Ward, so that shows me the power of art. I mean, even if I was [sic]
in a big mainstream gallery, right now I might not have the type of people coming
to L9, so we’re honored to have that support right now.
193

Curator Claire Tancons, however, describes Calhoun and McCormick’s undeniable
importance to the success of the Ninth Ward installations and therefore Prospect.1, giving
them most of the credit for the spatial production occurring there:
The story with Mark is that he is actually the one who quote unquote ‘discovered’
– it sounds very colonial – Keith and Chandra … stumbled upon Keith and
Chandra, brought them to Dan’s awareness, following which he decided to
include L9 as one of our official sites. And again, it’s really from Mark’s
encounter with Keith and Chandra that the entire Lower Ninth Ward site, if you
see it as a site of its own, took shape. If there hadn’t been that encounter, I am not
quite sure that Dan had intended to select the Lower Ninth Ward as a site for
projects.
194

Tancons went on to say that she did not want to speak for Cameron’s intentions, for she
knew that he wanted to spread the Biennial sites across the city so as to take people “out
of their comfort zone,” but what she was certain about was that “none of what you see in
the Lower Ninth Ward would have happened the way it did without Keith and
Chandra.”
195
Along with their nephew Isaiah McCormick (who was employed by
Prospect.1 as a site coordinator), Calhoun and McCormick had knowledge that was

193
Keith Calhoun, interview with author, November 15, 2008.

194
Claire Tancons, interview with author, November 16, 2008.

195
Claire Tancons, interview with author, November 16, 2008.
127
beyond the capacity of the Biennial. They were repositories of information on the
diasporic community of the Ninth Ward, able to negotiate site permissions from
displaced owners, facilitate the research of artists like Wangechi Mutu (they introduced
her to their former neighbor Miss Sarah), and legitimize the work of international artists
in the community.

Figure 19. Mark Bradford, Mithra, 2008. Sited on Caffin Street in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, November 15, 2008. Reproduced with permission.

128
It is because of this networked presence implicit in the works themselves and
evident in the activity permeating the Ninth Ward that a spatial shift is beginning to
occur. The conceptual understanding of the space was dramatically altered by the storm –
once residential, the neighborhood now rests in a liminal category. Most of the northern
part of the Ward is stripped of buildings, with only concrete steps, an odd mailbox, or
leftover foundations reminding visitors of its previous conceptualization. Some of the lots
are beyond overgrown, indicating abandonment or uncertain status – others are neatly
mowed and landscaped, with signage or the beginnings of reconstruction marking the
site. This space is certainly not public, but neither is it completely private. Only the
devastation of Katrina allows visitors to experience the queasy feeling of standing in
what was once someone’s living room without their permission. This uneasy liminality is
inevitably what opened the space for art in the Lower Ninth.
Although the Ninth Ward can be conceptualized as a residential space prior to
Katrina, the perceptions and symbolic space in the Ninth Ward, what Lefebvre calls
representational space, is still largely determined by media coverage of the storm. Scenes
of Ninth Ward residents on rooftops, the incredible devastation, racialized response, and
the associated spectatorial guilt, creates what Schambelan calls a “permanent meniscus”
between perception and reality. She is one of the few critics who do not succumb to the
phenomenological pleasures of aestheticizing the Ninth Ward and the city as a whole, but
questions art’s role in such a thoroughly mediated space. By “mediated space,” it is clear
that she means the Ninth Ward, not the French Quarter or the Warehouse Arts District,
129
and she ultimately leaves it to the viewer to decide how to negotiate spectatorship.
196
To
artist John Barnes, Jr., however, the spatial practices of the Biennial (through individuals
like Keith Calhoun, Chandra McCormick, and Mark Bradford) are creating a new iconic
status for the Ninth Ward beyond devastation:
There’s never been a venue of this scale that has not been completely contained
and managed in the French Quarter, where all the city’s tax dollars and resources
and police force are assigned to do. So they’re sending out people to all these
different neighborhoods so that is a taboo that’s been violated, that’s needed to be
violated. And that group of the wealthy of the city, they aren’t really part of this
conversation, and I think that’s where your harshest criticisms are gonna come
from, from people those areas, who feel left out of all this. Who, to some degree,
feel as though they’ve been shafted. And there’s no way they can reclaim that,
because the cat’s out of the bag. So I think you’re going to start to see a lot of
development in the Ninth Ward. It’s now an icon, the Ninth Ward. It’s now the
ultimate symbol that sums up this whole thing, the Ninth Ward. And progress in
the Ninth Ward spells progress for everything. If there’s nothing happening in the
Ninth Ward, then there can’t be any real progress.
197

To Barnes, the Ninth Ward is symbolic of power structures being rewritten, and resonates
with the ideas of French scholar Jacques Rancière. Rancière offers us some answer to
Elizabeth Schambelan’s question about art’s role in such an environment, positing,
“critical art intends to raise consciousness of the mechanisms of domination in order to
turn the spectator into a conscious agent in the transformation of the world.”
198
In the
case of the Ninth Ward, it is not the art itself – which largely evokes the perceptions of
the past Ninth Ward through boats, images of destruction, and ghost houses – but the

196
Schambelan, 177.

197
John Barnes, Jr., interview with author, November 14, 2008.

198
Jacques Rancière, “Problems and Transformations in Critical Art,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop
(Boston: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2006), 83.
130
spatial practices which claimed such space for art that will transform perceptions and
future conceptualizations of the neighborhood.
The St. Claude Arts District
The St. Claude Arts District, one of three districts including the Ninth Ward that
warranted a special inset map within the larger Prospect.1 map, formed a symbiotic
relationship with the Biennial that elevated many of the participating organizations
beyond the “satellite” status assigned to them on the map. Local art intermixed with
“official” Biennial art most fluidly along this stretch, so much so that some writers
confused the two when reviewing Prospect.1. For example, Ariella Cohen of the “Next
American City” online magazine featured Mel Chin’s Safehouse and Peter Nadin’s The
First Mark (see Figure 20) installed at KK Projects as her favorite examples of Biennial
work – yet neither of these projects were associated with the Biennial.
199
Mel Chin’s
Safehouse project was a strategic representation of nearly three years of research and
collaboration to remove dangerous levels of lead from New Orleans soil, and was never
“commissioned” as a singular work by Kirsha Kaeschele of KK Projects as Cohen
claims. In fact, it is associated with Transforma Projects, an umbrella organization started
by artists Rick Lowe, Sam Durant, and arts organizer Jessica Cusick that infrastructurally
supports and partially funds projects dedicated to rebuilding and revitalization. Yet
Transforma has remained largely invisible by design during the Biennial, wary of exactly
the kind of subsumation that occurred with Mel Chin’s installation – Biennial viewers,

199
Ariella Cohen, “The New Orleans Biennial,” Next American City, November 17, 2008,
http://americancity.org/daily/entry/1195/
131
for the most part, seemed to make few distinctions in the overspillage of art, consuming
and aestheticizing what was available spatially rather than disregarding some works and
embracing others according to arbitrary categorizations of “official” and “satellite.”
Whereas Chin tactically positioned Safehouse to open just before the Biennial to gain
more support and exposure for his project, despite the possibility of mischaracterization,
many artists followed suit without compunction.
200

Figure 20. Peter Nadin, The First Mark, 2008. Sited at KK Projects.
Photographed by Sue Bell Yank, November 15, 2008. Reproduced with permission
courtesy of KK Projects/Life is Art Foundation and Peter Nadin.

200
Mel Chin, interview with author, November 16, 2008.
132
As discussed in the first chapter on the collective-based alternative arts movement
in New Orleans after Katrina, many of these burgeoning organizations had already begun
renovating spaces before the Biennial was announced. The Biennial initially incited a
flurry of “counter-biennials” and catalyzed spatial production along the Avenue as these
organizations hurried to coalesce their identities (and the identity of the district itself)
before the opening, realizing full well that their activities would soon be represented to
the world. Although the motivations of these organizations to participate in the biennial
were clear, Dan Cameron’s willingness to site Biennial artists in local art spaces like the
Universal Furniture Warehouse up until just before the opening was seen as
magnanimous.
201
In fact, he needed space, and he needed a connection between the
Warehouse Arts District (the CAC and Louisiana Artworks) and the Ninth Ward. St.
Claude Avenue runs along the river and across the industrial canal to the Ninth Ward, and
the arts activities along its sidewalks just happen to be situated halfway between the
Warehouse District sites and the Ninth Ward installations. In the ecology of Biennial
sitings within the city, the Colton School site and Universal Furniture Warehouse along
with myriad small galleries made up essential links in the chain. Cameron even described
the Universal Furniture Warehouse as a “watering hole on the way to the Ninth Ward” to
Andy Antippas, which betrayed his motivation for siting official Biennial artists Pierre et
Gilles there.
202
With one or two Biennial artists anchoring these enormous spaces,

201
I make this observation from the language used by Claire Tancons, John Barnes, Jr., and various critics.

202
Andy Antippas, interview with author, November 14, 2008.
133
experimental local art proliferated extensively, mingling with the international and
available for consumption.
Success is New Orleans
Ultimately, the success of Prospect.1 cannot be attributed to Dan Cameron’s
curatorial strategies, nor to the majority of the art he selected. Instead, as many critics and
locals like Tulane professor Dan Etheridge have noted, “New Orleans stole the show.”
203

Not New Orleans in a personified sense, as Glenn Ligon evokes in his punnily titled
Artforum article “To Miss New Orleans,”
204
the mistress, the seductress, the companion;
nor New Orleans the party town, home to Carnival, Mardi Gras, and impromptu parades;
not even old historical New Orleans, the land of plantations, voodoo, and Creoles. All of
these played some part in drawing visitors to Prospect.1, but it was the reality of current
New Orleans – defeated but not broken, uncertain, and struggling – that provided them
something unique.
More than anything else, post-Katrina New Orleans offered space: new spaces for
art opened up by the alternative arts movement along St. Claude and in the Ninth Ward,
liminal spaces in previously unshakable boundaries dividing neighborhoods, and new
conditions of possibility for both international artists and local artists. This space allowed
international artists like Wangechi Mutu and Mark Bradford to break with their
traditional practices and engage directly with site, community, and the aftermath of
Katrina, pushing the boundaries between art and life. Local artists, on the other hand,

203
Dan Etheridge, interview with author, November 14, 2008.

204
Ligon, 168.
134
took the opportunity to push their practices beyond the regional, focusing on a more
global art conversation, and Prospect.1 offered them viewers and other artists to dialogue
with. Dan Cameron’s success lay in his willingness to embrace the space created by the
storm rather than constrict it.
Yet, the sustainability of the arts infrastructure and organizations catalyzed by the
Biennial is in question, especially in light of the current global recession, and tourism
dollars for a four-day opening weekend are unlikely to support them through the dark
times ahead. None of the gallery owners I spoke with on St. Claude admitted to making
anything close to big money. And perhaps this is the flaw in Cameron’s magnificent
choreography – by focusing on making the Biennial huge, fantastic, and attractive to
international tourists, he shortchanged the powerful discussion and innovative practices it
could have inspired and sustained. For the most part, these practices are already occurring
– projects like Transforma Projects, the Porch, and Home, New Orleans. Struggling to
meld art with rebuilding in a sustainable, impactful fashion, these initiatives had no
platform in Prospect.1. The enormous level of interdisciplinary scholarship and academic
research occurring in the fields of ecology, architecture, urban planning, and policy were
ignored in the pursuit of art, but the possibilities for inclusion could have been endless
and fascinating. Though we are told that art cannot truly impact life, not in the long-term,
Prospect.1 could have encouraged discussion and produced peripheral scholarship on the
pressing issues facing the city. With luck and good planning, this activity might have
catalyzed even more scholarly production and strengthened existing practices in an
endless feedback loop.
135
CONCLUSION.

When the stock market crashed in October of 2008 and a little-understood
recession sent ripples of anxiety throughout the nation, Prospect.1’s broad and bold
promise of economic revitalization through cultural tourism slowly trickled away.
Attendance, though never as high as projected,
205
ground to a halt along with the world’s
financial sector in the last weeks of the exhibition. Not only that, Prospect.1’s costs had
ballooned beyond its original 2.9 million dollar budget to over 4.5 million. As of the
exhibition’s closing in January of 2008, it was $600,000 in debt and had experienced
severe cash flow problems that prevented some artists and employees from being paid for
months.
206
The cost to various institutions in the city has not been reported, but all had to
waive their admission fees during the course of the free exhibition and were not
compensated for that loss. The myriad small spaces that went for broke in order to
participate in the Biennial found themselves in dire financial straits, and their
sustainability remains in question as the coffers of foundations and philanthropic
individuals begin to dry up.
Despite Cameron’s recent claim that “visual arts is a growth industry” in New
Orleans, and that he remains hopeful about “present[ing] to the community the viability

205
Prospect.1 originally predicted drawing 100,000 visitors, but conservative estimates point to about one
third of that number. Given that admission was free and various errors were made in head counting, Dan
Cameron insists that these estimates are too low, and claims about 70,000 people saw the show. For more,
see Doug MacCash, “Citywide art show Prospect.1 ends today,” The Times-Picayune, January 17, 2009,
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/01/citywide_art_show_prospect1_en.html.

206
MacCash, “Citywide art show Prospect.1 ends today.”
136
of visual arts as a vocation,” it is probable that the brief spurt of mobilization and
organizational growth catalyzed by Prospect.1 will contract dramatically in the next two
years.
207
In fact, this already seems to be happening to the pedagogical infrastructure
necessary for a dynamic arts center – the most affordable Master of Fine Arts program in
the city (offered by the University of New Orleans) may be cut in 2009, along with the
jobs of the city’s artists employed in that department. With these sober predictions for the
future, the efficacy of a biennial format to develop the visual arts as a viable industry
remains uncertain, especially when necessary recovery projects are also threatened.
Early in his catalogue essay, Cameron urged a sense of personal responsibility for
post-Katrina New Orleans and the centuries-old social failures that compounded the
disaster. This problem, he writes, “starkly fell on the shoulders of every American.”
208

These words resonate in the current economic crisis, a situation in which local disaster
reflects broader failures, and global plight has very local ramifications. The arts, like the
financial system, are an interconnected ecology, and although biennial critics have
rehashed the global/local dialectic for decades now in a cultural context, the urgency to
examine the implications of globalization in a more focused and interdisciplinary manner
continues to increase. Though this discourse has elicited ruminations about the biennial
format and its social, economic, and cultural reverberations, only recently have these
structures begun to take a self-critical tone. For example, the most recent Bienal de São
Paolo, curated by Ivo Mesquita, was predicated on a curatorial framework based on

207
MacCash, “Citywide art show Prospect.1 ends today.”

208
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 15.
137
questioning biennials themselves, and a commitment to more transparency and local
responsibility has dialogically emerged. This pattern promises to shift even more
dramatically in coming years as deep external pressures raise concerns about the validity
of spectacular, resource-draining exhibitions of global contemporary art consumed by
cultural tourists.
Prospect.1 certainly hinges on the success of the old stimulus model and Cameron
coordinated all aspects to appeal to an international audience of art-loving visitors, but
asked few questions about the Biennial’s critical role in a post-disaster environment.
Already Prospect.2 promises to leave Katrina behind for a different aesthetic dialogue,
and will be much smaller in scope. The 2010 iteration will have only 65 artists, with
almost twice the amount of Louisiana artists (18 to 20 total), and far fewer sites across
the city. On top of that, visitors will be charged an admission fee for the first time – a
questionable move in such a poor city.
209
What does the future hold for these exhibitions,
given their cost, temporality, and reliance on tourism?
Certainly the efficacy of the large-scale exhibition must be reexamined, and
Cameron’s dogged determination to keep pushing Prospect into the international biennial
mold without the added value of alternate curatorial voices seems critically shortsighted.
As well, given the fact that Prospect.1 fell well short of its economic promises, the model
itself should be reworked rather than simply scaled back. Even a cursory evaluation of
the many works in Prospect.1 reveals a stunning and well-reviewed artist commitment to
social practice and examining art’s role in a crisis environment, typified by artists like

209
MacCash, “Citywide art show Prospect.1 ends today.”
138
Mark Bradford, Nari Ward, Superflex and Wangechi Mutu. Following those kinds of
strategies one step further away from traditional display structures and into the realm of
the truly social (not “relational aesthetics,” a term Cameron flippantly mentions towards
the end of his essay;
210
but rather a measured, sustainable engagement in questions of
public and private, social justice and creative problem-solving, and interdisciplinary
collaboration), one runs into a multiplicity of small organizations with missions like The
Porch or Transforma Projects. How could Prospect.1 better curate or support social
practices like these? Although this comprises a knotty and difficult problem, fraught with
organizational issues, figuring out how to approach it seems right and necessary in our
current world. And where else to do so than in New Orleans, which Cameron himself
calls the center of “outside-of-the-box” thinking?
Such strategies would not only help to reimagine the large-scale exhibition
altogether, but could dramatically open up what comprises artistic practice in such a
structure. With the arts community solidly in his corner after Prospect.1, Cameron now
has license to relax his tight grip on the biennial’s future, allowing for new curatorial as
well as artistic voices to shape the dialogue. Only then can more of a critical space be
created, a platform for harnessing the intellectual power of artists and scholars to explore
new possibilities for a rebuilt New Orleans. We can only hope Cameron takes Ivo
Mesquita’s message to heart:
Instead of repeating the Venetian model, each exhibition should be continually
questioning its very format … it would be better for artists and exhibition curators
to design and carry out projects based on interdisciplinary, intercultural, and

210
Cameron, “A Biennial for New Orleans,” 23.
139
international collaboration, taking into account the challenges of a world of fluid
identities and trespassed borders – one in which local and global are inexorably
linked, where politics is a cultural rather than institutional practice, and where
such unresolved contradictions provide the dynamic space of creative
inventiveness.
211

Echoing writer Steven Stern, I congratulate Cameron. He had a biennial in New Orleans,
one that he believed needed to be uncompromisingly simple in its message, if not in its
organization. It is with Prospect.2 that innovation can take the place of certainty, and
dynamic interdisciplinary collaboration can replace singular vision in both rhetoric and
structure.

211
Mesquita, 66.
140
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Ault, Julie. “For the Record” In Alternative Art New York: 1965-1985, edited by Julie
Ault, 1-16. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Ball, Karyn. “Introduction: Trauma and Its Institutional Destinies.” Cultural Critique 46
(Autumn 2000): 1-44.

Basualdo, Carlos. “The Unstable Institution.” In What Makes a Great Exhibition?, edited
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2006.

Cameron, Dan. “The Eighth International Istanbul Biennale: Poetic Justice,” The Light
Millenium, http://lightmillennium.org/today/2003/dcameron_poetic_justice.html.

Cameron, Dan. “A Biennial for New Orleans.” In Prospect.1 New Orleans exhibition
catalogue, edited by Lucy Flint, 14-23. New York: PictureBox, Inc., 2008.

Cameron, Dan. “Acknowledgements.” In Prospect.1 New Orleans exhibition catalogue,
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Cameron, Dan and Toby Devan Lewis, Peter B. Lewis, and Mark Schwartz. Artworks:
The Progressive Collection. New York: D.A.P./The Progressive Collection, 2007.

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145
APPENDIX A.

Figure 21. Network map of relationships. Selected arts organizations and individuals in
New Orleans.

Created by Sue Bell Yank, 2009.

146

Figure 22. Network map of resources. Including spatial support and financial
relationships among selected art organizations and individuals in New Orleans.

Created by Sue Bell Yank, 2009.

147

Figure 23. Network map of Prospect.1 designations. Selected arts organizations and
individuals in New Orleans.

Created by Sue Bell Yank, 2009.

148
APPENDIX B.

Interview Questions for November 2008 Site Visit

1. How do you see the cultural/arts landscape in New Orleans before and after
Katrina, with Prospect.1 potentially marking a shift as well (either positive or
negative)?
Do you agree with these markers?

2. What resource have been available to the cultural/arts communities in New
Orleans and how are they distributed? How have these patterns been shifted or
disrupted by the storm? What about the flow of resources through Prospect.1,
from donors to artists to community?

3. What is the role of art in the urgent rebuilding needs of the city itself? How does
Prospect.1 fit into this and how does it compare to other cultural or arts
initiatives?

4. What are the implications and dynamics of the inclusion or exclusion of certain
organizations and artists in this Biennial? What might future iterations mean for
the city’s arts landscape?

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Asset Metadata

Creator Yank, Susan Bell (author)

Core Title Biennial rising: Prospect.1 New Orleans and the post-disaster arts movement

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Degree Conferral Date 2009-05

Publication Date 04/09/2009

Defense Date 03/15/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag alternative arts,biennial,contemporary art,creative economy,Dan Cameron,disaster,New Orleans,OAI-PMH Harvest,prospect.1,recovery,revitalization

Place Name Louisiana (states), New Orleans (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anastas, Rhea (committee chair), Decter, Joshua (committee member), Firstenberg, Lauri (committee member)

Creator Email syank@hammer.ucla.edu,yank@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2068

Unique identifier UC1442028

Identifier etd-Yank-2806 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-215959 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2068 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Yank-2806.pdf

Dmrecord 215959

Document Type Thesis

Rights Yank, Susan Bell

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu