Prospect New Orleans Scraps 2027 Edition
106July 9, 2025
Prospect New Orleans, which inaugurated the model of the citywide triennial when it launched in 2007, will not stage its seventh edition in 2027,Artnewsreports. The organization will instead release a retrospective publication examining its first twenty years. Though officials have not ruled out the possibility of mounting future iterations, “that’s not the focus right now,” Prospect’s onetime executive director Nick Stillman told the platform. “The focus right now is to actually step back outside of . . . the extremely demanding grind of that three-year cycle, and to instead zoom out and focus on this legacy and archive effort.” Stillman noted that though all six editions of Prospect had been accompanied by catalogues, only two documented the event’s installations and commissions. The forthcoming retrospective publication is intended to allow those who might not have been able to attend the triennial to engage with it. Said Stillman, “This is an attempt for us to turn our attention toward ensuring that the accomplishments of Prospect over the last twenty years and its growth and development are recognized and organized in a way that they are not right now.”
Founded in the devastating wake of Hurricane Katrina by independent curator Dan Cameron, Prospect featured work by both international and local artists that responded to New Orleans and took over multiple venues around the city, bringing attention and cash flow to its varied neighborhoods. That concept, new at the time, has since been adopted by other repeating exhibitions, among them Cleveland’s FRONT International triennial, which abruptlyceased operations last year. Cameron curated the first two editions, while noted curators Franklin Sirmans and Trevor Schoonmaker organized the third and fourth iterations, respectively. Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi curated Prospect.5, while Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson organized Prospect.6, which wrapped this past February.
Though only a tiny portion of the event’s budget, which has historically been between $5 million and $6.3 million per iteration, comes from the federal government through the National Endowment for the Arts, Stillman told Artnews that organizers were jittery about financial stability given the current political climate. “Prospect’s board has been very attuned to the macro political situation that we’re facing in this country,” he said. “There’s less funding available for efforts like large scale exhibitions that implicitly or explicitly address highly political topics.”