PROSPECT.3: NOTES FOR NOW

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: FRANKLIN SIRMANS
OCTOBER 25, 2014—JANUARY 25, 2015

In Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer the protagonist Binx Bolling is consumed by “the search” in the week leading up to his 30th birthday. The novel, set in a time of heightened social awareness in the first half of the decade’s movement for civil rights in America, delves into the depths of existentialism in a world where people were legally segregated from each other, making it impossible to celebrate the individual. “The peculiar institution” of slavery and immigration during the 18th century created a city that, even in 1961, was a complex social arrangement that remains palpable today. Curated by Franklin Sirmans, Prospect.3 explored “the search” to find the self and the necessity of the other as part of that quest.

Guided by several curatorial themes, P.3’s exhibitions, site-specific installations, and new works addressed “the New Orleans experience,” seeing oneself in the Other, the South, crime and punishment, moviegoing, the carnivalesque, abstraction, and visual sound. Prospect.3 also included an exhibition within an exhibition at the Ogden Museum: Basquiat on the Bayou. Presented by The Helis Foundation, the exhibition was a focused exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jean‐Michel Basquiat that considered his work in light of his relationship to the American South. Basquiat and the Bayou was one of several efforts in the Prospect.3 exhibition to pair art-historical themes and investigations with contemporary artworks. An illustrated catalogue accompanied the exhibition, with an essay by Sirmans introducing the work and its themes in addition to essays by preeminent scholars Robert Farris Thompson and Robert G. O’Meally.