"PROSPECT.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp" | Group Exhibition

Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp

November 18, 2017 - February 25, 2018

Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, the fourth iteration of this citywide exhibition opening November 18, 2017, and running through February 25, 2018, alludes to the city’s unique cultural landscape as a creative force. Cultural synthesis and syncretism inform many of the central issues explored in Prospect.4. The rich diversity of New Orleans is rooted in a long history of human interactions including colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, waves of migration and displacement, and Gulf Coast trade buoyed by the city’s position as the American South’s largest port. Many artists in P.4 explore related themes, connecting them to contemporary geographies and cultures around the world.

Prospect.4 overlaps with the city of New Orleans’s tricentennial celebration—the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Nouvelle-Orléans by the French in 1718. Because of this serendipitous intersection, P.4 takes the city’s distinctive character as a point of departure to investigate global concerns, while also directing more of its focus southward, placing greater emphasis on art and artists who engage with the American South and the Global South, particularly those from North America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the European countries that colonized these regions.