The New York Times recently covered what is billed as the largest exhibition of contemporary art ever held on American soil – see New Orleans Rising, by Hammer and Art. I have written about the situation in New Orleans, my home town, after several visits. See New Orleans Update Part One: the Paradox of Two Cities (2006) and New Orleans Update 2007 Part One: the Paradox of Two Cities Remains.
This event, Prospect.1 New Orleans, a new art biennial that opened there on October 28 and continue through Jan. 18. There is a roster of 81 artists and a projected 50,000 visitors from out of town. This would be a good thing for the local economy. Here are some expamples:
“Some of the art refers directly to Hurricane Katrina, like Ms. Mutu’s “ghost house,” which sits on the property of an elderly woman whose attempts to rebuild were stymied by a vanishing contractor. But most of it does not have to. In a shedlike community center a few blocks from the ghost house, the New York artist Janine Antoni has deposited a “soft wrecking ball” made of lead and scarred by the act of demolition. Nearby, the Chilean artist Sebastián Preece has excavated the foundation of a Lower Ninth Ward house and transplanted it elsewhere. Adam Cvijanovic, another New York artist, has taken a page from traditional New Orleans style and, in an unused house, installed a custom wallpaper that presents a lavish scene of a waterlogged swamp with no humans in sight…Miguel Palma, a Portuguese artist, is building a modified Higgins boat, a World War II vessel manufactured in New Orleans that, in Mr. Palma’s version, contains a mini-tsunami.”
Let’s hope they do it in style. Hundreds of residents have volunteered to act as docents, provide exhibition sites (admission to all events is free) and assist the artists. There are a number of related art events with local artists going on at the same time. Nine of 81 in the exhibit are from Louisiana. I would like to get down there to see this experiment.
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