2020 Prospect New Orleans Triennial to Consider America’s ‘Unprecedented’ Political Moment

When the fifth edition of the Prospect New Orleans triennial opens to the public on October 24, the 2020 elections will be only 10 days away. That looming date was very much on the minds of the exhibition’s two curators, Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, when they began thinking about selecting the 51 artists and collectives that will participate in the sprawling city-wide triennial, which has become one of the country’s biggest art events.

Keith, who is vice president of education and public programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Nawi, an independent curator based in Los Angeles, said that, when they took on the project in 2018, just over a year into Trump’s presidency, they were only beginning to understand what the coming political era would look like.

“We were really thinking about this discourse around the unprecedented nature of this moment,” Nawi told ARTnews. “And this counter-discourse saying, ‘Well, we’ve always been here.’ For many people, this doesn’t come as a surprise. And so, how do you hold both of those things that are true? How do you hold them together at once and how do you think that through? What does that mean?”

The two arrived at the theme of “Yesterday we said tomorrow”—which plays on the name of 2010 album Yesterday You Said Tomorrow by jazz musician Christian Scott—as a way to think about the ways in which the past informs the present, particularly in a historically rich city like New Orleans, which experienced disastrous flooding during Hurricane Katrina 15 years ago.