The contemporary-art triennial Prospect New Orleans will skip its 2027 city-wide exhibition, instead focusing on publishing a book celebrating its 20th anniversary. The publication, 20 Years of Prospect, will look back on the triennial’s six iterations through a collection of essays, personal accounts and archival images. Whether Prospect will host a seventh edition after 2027 remains to be seen.
Nick Stillman, the triennial’s executive director, told Maximilíano Durón at Artnews that launching another large-scale exhibition is “not the focus right now”, emphasising that a step back is necessary to both take a break and reflect on Prospect’s legacy. “We do not want to see a situation where Prospect is ever threatened with erasure,” Stillman added. “This is an attempt for us to turn our attention toward ensuring that the accomplishments of Prospect over the last 20 years and its growth and development are recognised and organised in a way that they are not right now.” He further noted that only two of the triennial’s editions had been properly documented.
Financial considerations and national politics have also factored into the decision. With a budget of between $5m and $6.3m per three-year cycle, Prospect has historically relied only partially on grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). And although the triennial was not impacted by the recent NEA grant cancellations by the Trump administration, there appears to be a general unease as to what the future could hold.
“Prospect’s board has been very attuned to the macro political situation that we’re facing in this country,” Stillman told Artnews. “There’s less funding available for efforts like large-scale exhibitions that implicitly or explicitly address highly political topics.” Historically, the art on view as part of Prospect has engaged with these very kinds of themes. “Was one of those factors what we perceive to be the current landscape of funding? Yes, it has to be,” Stillman added. “We see how the arts threaten this current administration.”
Prospect was created as a response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It was an attempt to reinvigorate the city’s cultural scene. The triennial’s most recent edition, organised by the curator Miranda Lash and the artist Ebony G. Patterson, featured works by 51 artists at 21 venues around the city. Titled The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home, the triennial framed New Orleans as a city of climate catastrophe and historical reckoning—a harbinger for the future of cities at large. The sixth Prospect New Orleans closed in February.
