The Artists of Public Memory Commission

Artists of Public Memory is a new public art commission that invites Louisiana artists to share their visions of how monuments and collective memories can appear and function in our landscape, society, and public space. This initiative marks the first time Prospect has invited Louisiana-based curators and cultural organizations to nominate artists for a public art commission. Distinct from Prospect.6, which is scheduled to open in Fall 2024, Artists of Public Memory represents a key part of Prospect’s commitment to having a broader presence in New Orleans that extends beyond the parameters of the triennial exhibition. 

Prospect New Orleans is pleased the announce the artists for our inaugural Artists of Public Memory commission: kai lumumba barrow, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, and an Intertribal Collective consisting of Ida Aronson, Tammy Greer, Jenna Mae, Ozone 504, Monique Verdin, and Virginia Richard.

2023-24 Artists of Public Memory

Our Guiding Questions

  • What is a monument and to whom or what is it in service?

  • Which Louisiana stories, movements, groups, and individuals should be honored in public space?

  • How can Prospect elevate artists’ voices in the local and national conversation around how monuments and symbols appear in our civic landscape?

  • How might Louisiana contemporary artists explore and redefine monuments, collective memories, or memorials?

  • How can we situate projects and support artists so that they renegotiate actual political and ecological geographies in the city?

With initial commission development support from Prospect.5 Co-Artistic Directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, these inaugural projects were selected based on the scale and scope of their work, subject matter, relationship to locality, and their creative approach to monumentality and public engagement. Each selected artist or collective will receive between $40,000 and $50,000 to produce their projects.

Artists of Public Memory is funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project with additional major funding from the Ford Foundation; the Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation; the Wagner Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Arts. Projects will be unveiled throughout 2023 and will include public programming, artist and community talks, youth and educational opportunities, an accompanying publication, and digital resources.

2023 New Orleans-based Curatorial Advisors

The 2023-24 artists worked closely with Curatorial Advisors Shana M. griffin and Monique Verdin, as well as city agencies and community organizations (including the New Orleans Recreation Development Commission), to develop and install these new works of art in prominent public greenspaces across New Orleans.

Photo: Jeremy Tauriac

Shana M. griffin is a Black feminist activist, independent researcher, sociologist, abolitionist, and artist. griffin’s practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, and decolonial, centering the experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive regulation, economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and climate change. griffin’s work exists across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, digital humanities, and land-use planning and within movements challenging displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence.

griffin is the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist initiative integrating critical research methods with activism and art, and the creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia public history project tracing geographies of Black displacement. Her latest project, SOIL, interrogates the carceral spaces of what is left behind in and on the grounds of sugarcane plantations in southeast Louisiana. She recently curated First Frame and In the Spirit of Black, an exhibition series of SEEING BLACK, and co-curator of Insurgent Ecologies. griffin is a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow, 2022 Monroe Fellow, 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, and 2020-2021 John O'Neal Cultural Arts Fellow. 

Photo: Jeremy Tauriac

Monique Verdin is an transdisciplinary artist and storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and is supporting the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail), a network of indigenous gardeners, as the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network Gulf South food and medicine sovereignty program manager. Verdin is co-producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love and her work has been included in a variety of environmentally inspired projects, including the multiplatform performance Cry You One, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and the collaborative book Return to Yakni Chitto: Houma Migrations.

In addition to her work as a Curatorial Advisor, Verdin is part of an Intertribal collective of artists, educators, researchers, gardeners, herbalists, water protectors, land defenders and culture keepers who are collaborating as one of the artist teams participating in the Artists of Public Memory Commission. The collective and their networks have been working in collaboration with each other and their Indigenous communities to make visible the Intertribal histories and present realities across Louisiana and the Gulf South.

Previous contributors also include Nora Kovacs (Manager of Operations & Curatorial Affairs, Prospect New Orleans), Emily Alesandrini (Publications Manager, Prospect New Orleans), and Taylor Holloway (Artistic Director, Prospect New Orleans).