Prospect.5 New Orleans: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Prospect.5 New Orleans: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi
• T. R. Johnson

Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi. Prospect.5 New Orleans: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow. New York: Rizzoli Electra, 2021. 272 pp. $60.00.

Prospect New Orleans, the art triennial that began in the years immediately after Hurricane Katrina, is now in its fifth iteration, and the circumstances surrounding the 2021 exhibition are in many ways closer to those of first one than the other three that have been mounted since the series’ inception. Originally slated to open in the fall of 2020, the event was postponed by a year as the world reeled from the COVID-19 pandemic; just weeks before the exhibition’s rescheduled opening in the fall of 2021, Hurricane Ida, the most destructive weather event to strike the New Orleans area since [End Page 266] Katrina, forced another delay. Prospect.5 finally opened in a series of three waves later in the fall of 2021, with its grand gala pushed back to January 2022. As with so many major cultural institutions, its return to something like its original, public life in the fall of 2021 seemed tinged with a sense of the miraculous—that is, in such circumstances, sheer wonder at how much work, how much perseverance, imagination, time, energy, and will were required to bring it off. Unique, however, among the countless institutions trying to reboot themselves in what we hope is the winding down of the pandemic, Prospect.5 has situated itself self-consciously in its very particular setting in New Orleans and can be thought of as a kind of microcosm of the vast cultural legacy of Black people in the surrounding region—a city that served for generations as the central node in the interstate trafficking of the enslaved, a city where floods, epidemics, and hurricanes have regularly challenged, at its core, the dream of stable, functional institutions.

“The catalog came together over the course of 2019, 2020, and early 2021,” write Prospect.5 artistic directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi. Keith and Nawi chose to keep unchanged what was written at early stages in this arc of impossible tumult so that the catalog—and the exhibition as a whole—could serve as “a document of passing through and being in.” Near the middle of this interval, in the spring of 2020, when they assumed that the exhibition’s opening was only seven months away, their original timeline was upended and the organizations’ future became uncertain. Circumstances around them grew yet more dire; that July, Prospect ’s entire staff had been furloughed. Meanwhile, the largest demonstrations for racial justice in the history of the United States were rocking the streets of many dozens of cities, principally Louisville and Minneapolis, where the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd ripped open old wounds and seemed to render the idea of civil exchange—which Prospect has always been particularly intended to inspire and support—all but dead. As they point out, Keith and Nawi’s decision to reflect these dizzying and historic developments is meant to signal that even as the before was not so long ago, we can in no way suppose that we have landed safely in some after. Making Keith and Nawi’s pronouncement prophetic, a major hurricane and the peak of a new variant of the COVID-19 virus further disrupted its much-delayed debut.

The catalog is a work of art commensurate with the extraordinary array of works it features, distinguished by its thematic and moral integrity, particularly in its relationship to the city where it takes place at this juncture of local, national, and global history. For example, two poems by Robin Coste Lewis, whose debut collection The Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems won the National Book Award in 2018, open and close the volume with intertwining notes of joy and pain, vexation, and revelation. In both poems, she explores her family’s deep roots in south Louisiana where one of her ancestors who, originally enslaved, came to own slaves herself, and her dying father cultivated extraordinary joy in brave defiance of the...