Prospect.6 Upholds New Orleans As Harbinger For The World, Good And Bad

What can New Orleans teach the world?

The curators of Prospect, the city’s arts triennial, view New Orleans as a harbinger, a signifier, representative of what’s to come. Through newly commissioned works from more than 50 local and international artists spread across the city, event organizers Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson posit “The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home”–the title for Prospect’s sixth edition.

New Orleans as a global point of departure for examining our collective future related to climate change, legacies of colonialism, and definitions of belonging and home. New Orleans as microcosm for the world. New Orleans on the front lines of rising sea levels, stronger tropical storms, and ecological ruin. New Orleans continuing to reckon with the foul characteristics of its founding and what that hath wrought through the centuries. Perhaps the 21^st century’s greatest calamity outside its front door (climate change), the preceding centuries greatest calamity out back (colonialism).

Humanity’s future unfolds daily in New Orleans–the future is present. Humanity’s direction will be prophesized there–the harbinger is home.

“What would it mean to think about New Orleans as a global place, not a local one, because it is global,” Patterson said in January 2024 at a press conference held in New York introducing Prospect.6. “I come to New Orleans and I go, ‘I know this place. This place seems familiar to me.’ What does it mean then to decenter New Orleans from a North American narrative and to recenter it, because New Orleans is often discussed as a majority minority city. It is only a minority within this context (of America). New Orleans is actually a majority global city because it largely reflects the way most of the world is occupied and lives because most of the world is occupied by people of color.”

Patterson was born in Kingston, Jamaica.

“Although we do celebrate and talk about how New Orleans is unique, we also want to situate it in conversations with other regions of the world that are experiencing similar things, specifically direct proximity to the effects of climate change, being regarded as a site of extraction, pivoting on a tourist economy, having to reckon deeply with its own history in complicated ways, but also being grounded in it is vibrance and its commitment to culture and its commitment to community,” Lash said at the same event.

What can New Orleans teach the world?

Past, Present, Future

New Orleans’ founding mirrors that experienced across North, Central, and South America and Africa. Indigenous people lived and traded and hunted in these areas for millennia before the arrival of European “explorers.” The Spanish first poked around what is today New Orleans in the mid-1500s; the French, in the late 1600s. In the early 1700s, the French set up a permanent settlement on a bend in the Mississippi River–hence the “Crescent City” moniker and French Quarter neighborhood–about 100 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico.

The French and Spanish swapped the city back and forth until the United States bought it, along with 820,000-plus square miles west of the Mississippi River as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The upstart nation doubled its footprint overnight. No one bothered asking the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people already living there their opinion.

New Orleans’ history of enslavement dates to its founding. Kidnapped west Africans. Enslaved people captured or transported from the Caribbean. That is where today’s African and Caribbean influences in New Orleans take root.

The city would become the epicenter of the slave trade in America following the nation’s decision to outlaw the international trafficking in human beings in 1808. The U.S. did nothing to curtail the domestic slave trade, and as a result, it boomed. New Orleans’ prime location along the Mississippi River with easy access to the Gulf of Mexico and then the Atlantic Ocean and the world made it the ideal distribution center for people–as gross as that sounds.

Between 1808 and the Civil War, New Orleans trafficked more humans than anywhere else in the nation, many of them brought from the Upper South–Kentucky and Virginia–to work the cotton and sugar plantations across Louisiana. This was a death sentence and everyone knew it–free and enslaved alike. As horrific as conditions on the rice plantations of South Carolina or the cotton plantations of Mississippi were, life on the sugar plantations of Louisiana was worse.

These are the colonial realities New Orleans was built on and continues reckoning with, most obviously apparent in Louisiana’s galling incarceration rate–highest in the nation, the nation highest in the “free” world–especially pronounced for Black residents. Throughout the course of Prospect.6, visitors should additionally see the special exhibition “Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration” at the Historic New Orleans Collection in the French Quarter. Prospect.6 runs through February 2, 2025, “Captive State” through February 16. Both are free.

Prospect.6 doesn’t simply wallow in New Orleans’ grisly past.

“New Orleans, so much of its narrative is its grounding in the past, right? If you come to New Orleans, you can engage deeply with the past. We want to upend that narrative in some ways, acknowledging, yes, you do need to come to New Orleans to understand our nation’s history and its present, but you also need to come here to understand its future and that its living in the future,” Lash said. “What is happening in New Orleans right now in terms of its proximity to climate change is going to be one of the defining issues of our century.”

That’s where most people’s understanding of New Orleans picks once you get past Mardi Gras and beads and the Saints: Katrina. In hindsight, the first American natural disaster superpowered by climate change, its death toll bloated by how the nation has developed and populated coastal areas. Poorer, African American residents waving at rescue helicopters from roofs and highway overpasses, all captured by television. Sacrifice zones. Sacrifice people. The popular origin for words and phrases commonly used today like “resiliency” and “environmental racism.”

Prospect was created in the aftermath of Katrina as the city wrestled with how to move forward.

“Prospect was born out of a moment of crisis for our city with the argument that art is necessary, not only when things are good, not only when we have extra time, not only as a luxury, but as a necessity, as a grounding who we are as human beings,” Lash said. “Now we find ourselves once again in the time of challenge and a year of challenge for our country and we’re saying come here and look at by these artists because we believe it is actually deeply relevant to where the country is and where it’s going.”

Lash made this statement a full nine months before November 5, 2024.

Extraction

New Orleans’ story has been a story of extraction since the arrival of Europeans. Taking without giving. The fur trade. Slavery. Cotton. Sugar. Oil.

Louisiana and the Gulf are a gas and oil extraction hotspot. Refinery and transportation, too. Remember 2010’s Deep Water oil drilling platform explosion that sent approximately 134 million gallons of oil to the beaches of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida?

New Orleans sits at the southern end of “Cancer Ally,” a stretch of the Mississippi River so named for the high incidents of cancer experienced by residents there resulting from all the petrochemical industry activity (oil and plastics) taking place in their backyards. A sacrifice zone inhabited by sacrifice people. Mostly poor, Black people.

“What does it mean to disregard a place, to continue to extracting from a place. We like to think about colonialism as the past tense, when it is very well present tense,” Patterson said. “We don’t think about tourism as extraction, but it is extractive in the same way that one would go to a place for its minerals, that’s extraction, but the extraction of labor is also a part of that too. What does it mean to come to New Orleans and go to Bourbon Street to extract, but to not recognize that around that are many communities of people who are just living, living and existing?”

Taking without giving.

Coming to New Orleans, feasting, getting drunk, getting sick–on the sidewalk–using and abusing and then leaving the place for your home, never considering New Orleans is a home as well. A place to take from, not to give to. Tourism’s extractive components are only starting to be acknowledged by the industry. Cruise ships may be the worst when it comes to extractive tourism, and New Orleans is a major American cruise port.

Prospect.6 purposefully moves visitors around New Orleans’ different neighborhoods, looking at New Orleans from New Orleans, not at New Orleans from the outside.

“New Orleans is like a village because it operates from a communal place in the way that many small places do, but it has also been a place, like many small places, that is about a place of disregard, and when we think about the cultural significance of a place like New Orleans and the people who occupy that place, and how that reverberates across this nation, it is clear that the nation is not possible without New Orleans,” Patterson said.

Nor is the world.

What can New Orleans teach the nation and world? Plenty.

Will either listen?

If Hurricane Katrina is any kind of harbinger, the answer is no. That catastrophe occurred nearly 20 years ago. Since then, America has lustily continued pursuing a fossil fuel economy despite a near consensus among scientists that doing so will create more Katrina’s. As was the case this past fall. Historically strong storms fueled by warming oceans devastated portions of Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. Residents and politicians remain shocked and bewildered by their unprecedented power.

With the cleanup yet ongoing, America, and those three states, just overwhelmingly voted a climate denier into the White House. Again.

New Orleans is a wonderful teacher, America, a terrible student.

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