Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home
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, the Susan Brennan 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 also positioned as a city that reflects “the global majority,” a term used to describe the near eighty percent of the global population, which is comprised of Indigenous, African, Asian, Latin American, and mixed-heritage peoples. The exhibition’s fifty-one artists, presented across twenty-one 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, artist Deborah Jack has created an expansive photography and video installation that combines footage from the coastlines of St. Maarten and York, Maine, with the shorelines of Louisiana's Lake Peigneur, Neptune Pass, and Quarantine Bay. These shorelines and coastlines continue to evolve, underscoring the limitations of humans’ ability to control these waters. Jack's installation prompts a consideration of how the land repairs itself in the wake of erosion.
Jack received an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2002. Her work has been featured in significant exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA; the Houston Center of Photography, TX; and other renowned institutions. In 2021, a retrospective, Deborah Jack: 20 Years, was presented at Pen + Brush in New York, NY. Her work is in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Des Moines Art Center, IA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA. Jack was a 2023 Changing Climate Resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute and a Surf Point Foundation artist-in-residence. She is a recipient of a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (2024), a Soros Arts Fellowship (2023), a Jersey City Artist Grant (2022), and a Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2021). Jack is currently a Professor of Art at New Jersey City University.
The exhibition will be on display from November 2nd through February 2nd, 2025.
The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11:00 - 5:00 pm.
U.N.O. St Claude gallery is 2429 St. Claude Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70117
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