Founded in 2007, Prospect New Orleans is a citywide triennial exhibition of contemporary art featuring artists from Louisiana and around the globe. For the sixth iteration of Prospect, co-Artistic Directors Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson highlight New Orleans’s role as a city situated in the future, where questions around survival, continuance, and joy are being asked in advance of other places. New Orleans is positioned as a city that reflects “the global majority,” a term used to describe the near eighty percent of the global population comprised of Indigenous, African, Asian, Latin American, and mixed-heritage peoples. The exhibition’s fifty-one artists, presented across twenty-plus venues, honor this city’s history and offer opportunities for shared contemplation, discovery, and a reimagining of possibilities.

A harbinger can be foreboding. The origins of this word, however, point towards a host, a harbor, or a scout who makes a safe space for others. Prospect.6 looks to New Orleans as a signal of the future, in conversation with regions of the world that have long experienced the effects of climate change, labor migration, and histories of colonialism. Together these places offer sanctuaries and indicators of the yearnings and tensions that will define our collective future.

For P.6, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn has created a two-channel film made in collaboration with musician Thảo Nguyễn and New Orleans-based producer and director Marion Hoàng Ngọc Hill. This film features performances by Vietnamese and Black community members from New Orleans East and New Orleans’s West Bank. Nguyễn’s manipulation of the film’s soundscape is inspired by twentieth century movie houses in Vietnam that featured dubbed Western films.