Prospect.6 Co-Artistic Directors

Miranda Lash & Ebony G. Patterson

Prospect New Orleans is thrilled to announce the appointment of Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson as the Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors of Prospect.6. The pair will collaborate to conceptualize and curate the sixth edition of Prospect New Orleans, which is slated to open in Fall 2024.

Lash and Patterson first met in 2017, when Lash co-organized a major exhibition with P.4 Artistic Director Trevor Schoonmaker entitled Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art while Lash was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum. They connected through this collaboration and their many shared curatorial interests and concerns. Their collaboration as Co-Artistic Directors marks the first time a curator-artist pairing has been tasked with curating the renowned triennial.

“I am greatly looking forward to returning to New Orleans for Prospect.6. In many ways this is a homecoming, as New Orleans’ traditions, themes and artists have always influenced my practice, said Miranda Lash, the Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Director of Prospect.6. “I find myself continuously returning to the lessons and inspiration given to me by this special place on a daily basis, and am thrilled to collaborate with artists and facilitate international artistic dialogues in a city I care for so deeply.” 

“I am greatly looking forward to bringing our collective curatorial vision to life for Prospect.6,” said Ebony G. Patterson, the Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Director of Prospect.6. “I have always been moved by the history and culture of New Orleans, and how it occupies a unique space in the US, as a much closer reflection of the richness of the global majority. There are so many practices that knit New Orleans together that generate and reflect both local specificity and global concerns. Through bringing my artistic background and perspective to the role and our collaborations with artists, I plan to center the value of the artist.”

Miranda Lash. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans.

Ebony G. Patterson. Photo: Frank Ishman

Miranda Lash

Ellen Bruss Senior Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

Miranda Lash is the Ellen Bruss Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Lash has organized a wide range of museum exhibitions including Eamon Ore-Giron: Competing with Lighting/ Rivalizando con el relampágo; Jason Moran: Bathing the Room with Blues; Keltie Ferris: *O*P*E*N*; the traveling retrospective Mel Chin: Rematch; Camille Henrot: Cities of Ys; Rashaad Newsome: King of Arms; Swoon: Thalassa; and Quintron and Miss Pussycat: Parallel Universe, Live at City Park. In 2016 Lash and Trevor Schoonmaker co-organized the acclaimed exhibition Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art. From 2008 to 2014, Lash was the founding Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her most recent projects include Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe, a traveling survey and monograph of Jackson's work; and Cowboy, a large-scale traveling exhibition on the myths and realities associated with the American cowboy, co-curated with Nora Burnett Abrams, the Mark G. Falcone Director of MCA Denver.  Lash currently serves on the board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. 

Lash currently serves as Vice President on the board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation and is a 2022 Fellow with the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She has been a Clark Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and a member of the artistic director’s Curatorial Council for Prospect.4. She holds a BA with honors from Harvard University in the History of Art and Architecture and an MA from Williams College from the Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Ebony G. Patterson

Artist

Ebony G. Patterson's expansive practice addresses visibility and invisibility, through explorations of class, race, gender, youth culture, pageantry and acts of violence in the context of "postcolonial" spaces. With the strong sensibility of a painter, Patterson works across multiple media - including tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, drawing and installation - united by her consistent visual language and intention. Each work is intricately embellished and densely layered, in order to draw the viewer closer and to question how we engage in the act of looking. The idea of the garden, both real and imagined, has formed an essential arc of Patterson's practice. Framing the garden as an active site of power, Patterson explores it as a metaphor for "postcolonial" space and an extension of the body. 

Patterson received her BFA in painting from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica in 2004. She received an MFA degree in 2006 in printmaking and drawing from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Patterson has taught at the University of Virginia, Edna Manley College School of Visual and Performing Arts, Associate Professor in Painting and Mixed Media at the University of Kentucky, and was the Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in the public collections of 21c Museum and Foundation, Louisville, Kentucky, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Nasher Museum, Duke University, Durham, NC, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL, Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. In 2021 Patterson was included in both the Liverpool and Athens Biennials. She lives and works in both Chicago, IL and Kingston, Jamaica and is co-represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, and Hales New York/ London, who will co-present Ebony’s monumental installation from the Liverpool Biennial at The Armory Show NY in Platform section curated by Tobias Ostrander.

Prospect.6 Curatorial Advisory Committee

The triennial’s sixth edition, led by the Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson, will emphasize New Orleans as a point of departure for examining our collective future as it relates to climate change, legacies of colonialism, and definitions of belonging. This commitment to building an international conversation centered around issues germane to Louisiana has directly informed the expertise sought in the Co-Artistic Directors’ Curatorial Advisory Committee, which consists of Ron Bechet, Zoe Butt, Raphael Fonseca, Tumelo Mosaka, Krista Thompson, and Dyani White Hawk.

  • Ron Bechet

    Artist & Victor H. Labat Professor of Art, Xavier University of Louisiana

    Ron Bechet is a painter and art maker, and has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. He is also the Victor H. Labat Professor of Art in the Department of Art at Xavier University of Louisiana. He has been teaching over 20 years at Xavier and nearly 30 years at the college level. He holds a B.A. degree in Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans, and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art, Yale University. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees at the Ogden Museum and has served on other boards and commissions, such as The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Imagining America’s National Advisory Board. He has served as the first director of Xavier Art Department’s Community Arts Partnership Program and served in many arts and youth programs in the New Orleans area both as an advisor and a practitioner

  • Zoe Butt

    Curator & Writer

    Zoe Butt is a curator and writer who lives and works between Chiang Mai, Thailand and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Her practice focuses on critically thinking, historically conscious artistic communities, fostering dialogue among cultures of the globalizing souths; working with public/private institution and independent artistic operatives, globally. After near two decades of directing artist-initiated arts infrastructure, enduring ideological censorship and surveillance in firstly China and then Vietnam, she founded ‘in-tangible institute’ in Thailand in 2022. This institute seeks to nurture locally-responsive curatorial talent in Southeast Asia, believing the resilience of artists in their collation of hidden histories and its ensuing evidential social disenfranchisement is deserving of greater value in our increasingly commodified, cultural and educational landscape.

  • Raphael Fonseca

    Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Latin American Art, Denver Art Museum

    Raphael Fonseca is a researcher in curating, art history, art criticism, and education. He works as a curator in modern and contemporary Latin American art at the Denver Art Museum. He holds a PhD in Critic and Art History from the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is one of the curators of the 22nd edition of the SESC_Videobrasil biennial, to happen in 2023, in São Paulo, Brazil. He worked as a curator at the Contemporary Art Museum of Niterói, Brazil, from 2017 to 2020.

  • Tumelo Mosaka

    Mellon Project Director and Curator, African American and African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University

    Tumelo Mosaka is a Johannesburg born and New York City based independent curator. He has worked within and outside museums exploring global transnational artistic practices especially from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. He has curated numerous exhibitions including: Beyond Tradition: Contemporary Sculpture from Africa (2022), Opa-loka, FL; YAKHAL INKOMO (2022), Javett Art Center, South Africa; Usha Seejarim, A Solo Exhibition (2020), Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; Turning Tide (2017), Mémorial ACTe Museum, Guadeloupe; Andrew Lyght: Full Circle (2016), Dorsky Art Museum, New York; Poetic Relations (2015), Perez Art Museum, Miami; and Otherwise Black at the 1st edition of International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Martinique (BIAC) 2014. Mosaka is currently the Mellon Arts Project Director for the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University and the resident curator for Opa-locka Community Development Corporation in Miami.

  • Krista Thompson

    Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History, Northwestern University

    Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, where she teaches modern and contemporary art and visual culture of the Africa Diaspora and the Caribbean. Her publications have included An Eye for the Tropics (Duke University Press, 2006) and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015). Thompson has curated several exhibitions including: Developing Blackness (2008), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas; and En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, co-curated with Claire Tancons (2015), Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Thompson is currently working on Black Light, a manuscript about Tom Lloyd, electronic light, and archival recovery in African American art (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) and The Evidence of Things Not Photographed, a book that examines notions of photographic absence, fugitivity and disappearance in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica (forthcoming, Duke University Press).

  • Dyani White Hawk

    Multimedia Artist & Independent Curator

    Dyani White Hawk (Sičaŋǧu Lakota, b.1976, Madison, WI) is a multimedia artist and independent curator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through painting, beadwork, installation, performance, and curation her practice challenges the lack of representation of Native arts, people, and voices in our national consciousness while highlighting the truth and necessity of intersectionality and relatedness across life. White Hawk has received numerous awards, including an Arts and Letters Award in Art (2021), McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship (2021 and 2014), United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art (2019), Eiteljorg Fellowship for Contemporary Art (2019), Jerome Hill Artists Fellowship (2019), Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship (2017 and 2015), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2014). She has participated in residencies in New Orleans, Santa Fe, Australia, Russia and Germany. White Hawk was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and recent solo exhibitions, Speaking to Relatives, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.