Gentrification and Culture

How many summers have I watched gauze curtains swing upwards in the breeze? Three (2021, 2022, 2023) from the apartment on Royal Street with the brick interior that my landlords marketed as the setting of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. I did not believe their story at the time I signed the lease, but I told everybody it was so afterward because I wished for it to be.

I tell you this to indicate that we believe lies we are told as a matter of convenience, that what we choose not to argue with can easily become a part of the factual record. And once these innocent embellishments are repeated often enough, they become quite hard to forget. It is harder still to amend the cultural consciousness, to correct the false memory that collective distortion begets.

When P.6, the latest installment of the Prospect triennial, opened in late 2024, promotional materials posited its host city (a term deemed in the same texts as “parasitic,” which I repeat here since no alternative is offered) of New Orleans as a “gift to the rest of the world.”1 Evidenced by its propensity to “hurricanes” (like Houston, Lake Charles, Houma, St. James, Cut Off, Biloxi, Pass Christian, Pascagoula, Cutler Bay, Homestead, the Florida Keys, Collier County, Fort Myers, New York, and, now, Asheville), its proximity to coastal communities experiencing “receding coastlines,” its “histories of violence” (I am unsure to which these refer and struggle to identify how they might differ from others without falling into troubled stereotypes), and its “cyclical commitment to celebration” (we do follow the Gregorian and liturgical calendars), the port city is able to “offer lessons and examples for how to live in constant negotiation with the weather… [and] in direct proximity to the effects and aftereffects of colonial and exploitative economies.”2 This is quite a charge. Titled The Future is Present, the Harbinger is Home, works on display were spread across twenty-one venues through February 2, spanning themes as vast as migration and the environment and as niche as temporary queer interventions and hired domestic help.

These ambitions were unlikely to be accomplished by a single art exhibition. But I appreciate the awareness underlying this writing—the sense that something has been exploited.

It is true that Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall on the Louisiana–Mississippi border in August 2005, was a category three hurricane that caused widespread destruction. And it is true that in New Orleans much of this destruction was caused by flooding after the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal, and the London Avenue Canal levees were breached by surging water from the Gulf of Mexico and Lakes Borgne and Pontchartrain. But contrary to common media sensationalism, it is untrue that damage of this nature was unprecedented in the region, or in New Orleans—Hurricane Betsy in 1957 resulted in flooding of the same. And like with Betsy, Katrina’s devastation must be attributed not to an Act of God as much as to human error—specifically, faulty workmanship by the Army Corps of Engineers. It is a misnomer, at least when speaking about the storm’s impact in Southeast Louisiana, to call Hurricane Katrina a natural disaster, or to attribute its subsequent devastation to bad “weather.” What happened then, is happening now, may happen again in due time is due in part to climate change, yes, but more importantly, to the folly of men. 

Man’s hubris can also be blamed for the volatile state of the arts in contemporary New Orleans. It is true that in 2007 when US Biennial Inc. began planning the inaugural Prospect program, the city was still in a bit of a sorry state: a third of addresses registered with the United States Postal Service had yet to resume receiving their regular mail.3 The program was initially conceived as a roving intervention to be hosted across other US cities in need in each subsequent edition, but it was quickly reimagined as site-specific.4 Three years after the first, organizers reconvened to host P.1.5 in order to spotlight art by Louisiana locals in New Orleans. Census data taken at the time accounted for a loss of 140,845 of the city’s residents since the start of the new millennium (and the 2020 census accounts for only having recuperated some 40,000 since).5

I choose to believe that Prospect’s initial ambitions were well-meaning, if not short-sighted, aiming to improve morale in a city best known for entertaining guests. I also believe that the grandiose idealism that informs the stated mission of the most recent edition is meant to respond to criticism of carpetbagging in order to assert that its organizers’ politics (and hearts!) are in the right place (home!). But it is difficult to overlook the precedent the program set early on, which enabled the self-serving aims of arts programs that have cropped up since, limiting the creative endeavors that are funded and supported in the South and unduly catering to outside influences in efforts to revitalize New Orleans.

At their best, Prospect and the programs that followed it encouraged artistic homogeneity and cultural erasure. At their worst, they enabled a post-disaster savior complex led by foreign actors with limited experience commensurate to the influence they were to exert on Southern aesthetics. Consider, for example, the Joan Mitchell Center, which has offered one of the most sought-after residency programs for artists in the region since 2013. Designated slots are reserved for artists born in New Orleans and for residents who have lived in the city for at least five years in each application cycle. But this limitation’s jurisprudence is arbitrary and superficial (Where are the residencies targeted towards artists who survived Rita? Harvey? Maria? Laura? Helene? And what, really, does Joan Mitchell have to do with New Orleans?).

The limitation excludes other Southern artists who hold residence outside of Orleans and Jefferson Parish (Read: in lower-income and less well-connected communities) and further encourages the displacement of New Orleanians by opportunistic arts professionals with the means to relocate (This is precisely what is meant by the portmanteau artwashing). Artists are paid a stipend for their time disrupting affordable housing for long-term residents of New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, altering the neighborhood’s original character and demographics (Creole, low income, predominantly Black), and eroding any semblance of solidarity between the working and creative classes.

This amelioration borrows from strategies first employed by the Prospect endeavor, which was founded to extend “an invitation to experience [New Orleans] through the eyes of artists” (or venture capitalists, or disaster tourists).6 I would still prefer to see New Orleans through the eyes of a competent group of urban planners and civil engineers… And yet, the occupation of the Southern capital continues, while its unique character is flattened to a palatable aesthetic, its drawl groomed to approximate a foreign vernacular, its folk culture watered down to the taste of tourists—all to professionalize and self-promote as the US’ only international art triennial, while local artists make up only twenty percent of those invited to participate.7

Perhaps it was because P.6 was titled in such a way so as to acknowledge that New Orleans is, in fact, residential, that I was open to some of the works on display in ways I was not in editions prior. Could it be possible that after an unyielding series of logistical failures and curatorial oversights the Prospect program was finally able to home in on its complicated setting?

Of the works I saw in this most recent edition, I was most impressed by Ruth Owens’s Black Delight, An Ecopoem (2024) staged upstairs in the Contemporary Arts Center. A four-channel video installation accompanied by musical compositions by Water Seed, Erika Flowers, Anjellika “Jelly” Joseph, HaSizzle, and Sava Wolf, the installation addressed Louisiana’s natural environment and the cultural traditions imperiled by the petrochemical engineering, oil, and gas industries that have encroached on it since industrialization. Footage of Black children and elders dancing to bounce music were projected onto panels, while other video footage, taken at dawn and dusk in Barrataria Bay, streamed on opposing walls. The work is a departure from the two-dimensional paintings Owens is best known for; the built environment deftly layers three distinct environments to characterize social concerns most pressing in contemporary New Orleans.

At the Ford Motor Plant in Arabi, one encountered a work by Robert Tannen constituted of set of table and chairs that were draped with charred strips of fabric. On display at a booth organized by the Creative Alliance of New Orleans, a group that facilitates professional development and grantmaking opportunities to local artists, the work, which was not accompanied by a placard, subtly alluded to what can be salvaged after loss.

Another of this iteration’s more successful interventions occurred at Sweet Lorraine’s, a bar conveniently located on St. Claude Avenue in the Seventh Ward. Here L. Kasimu Harris displayed photographic prints from his series Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges (2018–), which commemorates the local haunts threatened, ironically, by the very conditions that facilitate the exhibition of this body of work. Portraits of various bars’ regulars decorated the walls of the venue, drawing attention to the idiosyncrasies of locals’ style and dress: “King” Joe Lindsey, photographed at Robertson’s Vieux Carre Lounge adorned in gold, is described in a wall placard as donning his “Sunday best.”

Most provocative was the artist’s King & Blue: The Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges Experience (2024), which resembled what a party at the neighborhood bar is usually like, replete with a brass band performance and generous helpings of red beans and rice. I felt uncomfortable surrounded by a group constituted primarily of white arts professionals in from out of town; this dissonance was, quite possibly, exactly the point.

In contrast, for Prospect.3 in 2014, the artist Tavares Strachan, who works in New York and the Bahamas, was commissioned by Prospect to float a barge down the Mississippi River. It displayed a sign that read “You belong here” in a neon pink script, tellingly assuaging the concerns of arts professionals who convened to consider the piece in an unfamiliar setting. The work was met with profound criticism at the time, which still recurs in reviews published of the triennial today.8 Though belated, I like to think of Harris’s party as a meaningful response to that piece.

I am reminded here of Sharon Zukin’s 1987 essay “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core,” in which she correctly identified a confluence of culture and capital in facilitating the gentrification of SoHo in Manhattan.9 It would be remiss not to consider the possibility that in New Orleans we are witnessing the rolling effects of this same wave of gentrification in New York—perhaps by the very same agents, or their successors.

In her 2014 review of Prospect.3: Notes for Now, the art historian and critic Eva Díaz astutely noted that urban sprawl and New Orleans’s resultant inaccessibility limited public access to the works on display.10 This impediment has not yet been corrected by organizers to this day—the sheer volume of works, compounded by the geographic spread of the galleries and museums hosting them, makes it a challenge to engage with all projects exhibited in any meaningful way.

To be fair, New Orleans’s wanting infrastructure is not entirely Prospect’s fault. Long before the gentrification that followed Hurricane Katrina, the Seventh Ward was home to a thriving corridor of Black businesses housed along Claiborne Avenue. The construction of I-10 first disrupted them—replacing the green space that characterized the area (full of live oaks and azaleas) with concrete beams and interstate freeways, dislocating the marching routes of Black cultural groups, like the Mardi Gras Indians.11 Harris’s work, beyond addressing the impact of more recent waves of gentrification, documents the loss of long-standing institutions in this area that have gradually succumbed to the long-term effects of this construction—displacement, division, and a municipal government that prioritizes commerce and capital over communities and culture. Prospect is, after all, but a signal of this tendency before it is a direct cause.

In 2021, when Prospect last decorated the city, I wrote an essay that acknowledged the triennial’s origins in

the bodies, the smell, the 2,000 dead, and each of the survivors who climbed onto roofs and attics and were stranded for days… the mass displacement that followed when generations of families were priced out of homes and neighborhoods they were unable to return to… the role that artists play in the early stages of gentrification… the interlopers [who] have not held pause [since].

In a sane world, we might call this exploitation, but under capitalism, we call it opportunity. And since then, the interlopers have not held pause: every few years (since its inception, the program’s scheduling has been irregular and erratic) more burgeoning art stars show up and attempt to form some cogent response to the city’s unique geography and cultural cachet over the course of a brief encounter. Who follows next are satellite groups of artists that watch them get away with it, paying rents and mortgages at auction-block prices compared to the ones they are accustomed to up north: unimaginable to long-term tenants pushed out of them; bargains to developers keen to move more affluent residents in.

What are they trying to do? “Rebuild the city,” investors first claimed. So why, then, invest in an art triennial ahead of reconstructing displaced residents’ homes? Perhaps what New Orleans needed after Hurricane Katrina was not an international art show, but affordable housing, investments to our public school system, accessible grocery stores, and sustainable wages, particularly in the service industry, the mechanism by which Prospect measures its philanthropic output and on which its sociologistic framework depends.12

I no longer know what I do and don’t believe about that period in New Orleans, the one that preceded it, or the one that came after. At the time I was writing, we were in the midst of the umpteenth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic; the years that followed were fraught with paranoia, disbelief, and what appeared to be a total collapse in any sense of authority or control by the entities charged with the public’s wellbeing. The harbinger may, in fact, have been home. I still remember the sense of dread I felt upon learning of the 2020 death of Larrice Anderson a month after Mardi Gras, who worked as a nurse in New Orleans East, the first healthcare worker to die of the virus in the state. I also remember, in 2020, being teargassed on top of the Crescent City Connection by the New Orleans Police Department in defense of Black lives, a flicker of time outside early months of enclosure. I remember each of the four hurricanes my family and I survived in 2020 and the year following, and the exact nature of the damage caused to each of the houses we lived in. This story is not unexpected if the harbinger is Louisiana, my home. 

I tell you this to indicate that there is never only one lasting trauma; like the construction of I-10 and Hurricane Katrina, superficial injuries tend to compound as they unfold. P.6 was organized after Covid-19, after Black Lives Matter, after Hurricane Ida, and yet these recent historical turning points and their fallouts are glossed over—rather, the program is increasingly focused on a growing awareness of the true impact of Katrina, only arriving some twenty years too late.

Many parts of the review I wrote three years ago are still true: New Orleans’s housing politics are still polarized by the encroachment of Airbnbs on residential neighborhoods-cum-tourist traps in the Treme, Bywater, Marigny, Seventh, and Ninth Ward neighborhoods, particularly following the expiration of the pandemic’s eviction moratorium and the influx of remote workers encroaching on available leases (subsidized by state income tax breaks).13 Rents are only ever raised.

Newer residents who moved to New Orleans since Prospect’s inception now mark time by an additional group of named hurricanes (Zeta and Ida), not unlike previous generations did before them (Katrina and Rita; Betsy and Camille and Audrey). I have watched countless waves of these residents move in and out since I first arrived from across the state twelve years ago; I have watched countless businesses I considered landmarks shutter and be replaced.

And I am skeptical of Prospect’s leadership’s commitment to its host city—its director since 2018, Nick Stillman, has since abandoned New Orleans for Austin, another Southern city undergoing the rolling effects of gentrification. And Dan Cameron, Prospect’s founding director, who begrudged “wealthy New Orleanians… still exercising a lot of clout” in a 2021 reflection on P.5’s opening weekend, also publicly lamented his inability to retire in the Treme house he purchased following conflicts within Prospect’s board.14 I struggle to imagine any circumstances in which the owners from whom he purchased the home in 2007 and began collecting mail at felt any differently when they were replaced; I also struggle to imagine retirement in a dwindling arts economy.

Another press release mentions:

We regard New Orleanians as Prospect’s first audience. In our collaborations within the city and other regions often framed by tourism, stereotypes, and service economies, we strive to honor the people who manifest the vibrance of these creative communities. We are asking: what does it mean to speak “from” a place, rather than “at” it?15

More than anything, I struggle to understand how this register was meant to be accomplished by parties no longer living here and what exactly the eighty percent of non-local artists who participate in each edition felt they had to say.

Other things have changed: I have since left the Royal Street apartment from which I wrote for two and a half years after forgoing the rent I could no longer afford. I have taken on a series of low-paying jobs in Louisiana’s service industry, working as a hostess on Decatur in the French Quarter, as a nail salon maid and receptionist, and as a saleswoman at a women’s department store. And I have recovered, more or less, from the strange series of traumas that punctuated those recent calendar years as Louisianians weathered the aforementioned events: I no longer cover my face with a cotton mask to walk the block, I have not gathered debris after any new hurricanes, and I no longer play host to a blinding rage misdirected at God or any other available culprit I might assign responsibility to for the bewildering circumstances that had befallen me and many others, for which no one is singularly responsible and I am not to blame.

I am three years older and tired now, less able to sustain the emotional wherewithal necessary to support any real sense of ill will towards the Prospect endeavor. Life is cruel and strange by design; God absent from this plane, off tending to Heaven. And I do admire our peculiar human decorations, which occasionally resemble natural phenomena, like the rain that drenched the curtains I hung on Royal Street till they hung stagnant on the night Hurricane Ida broke open my French doors while I watched from across the room. But the storm did not cross the threshold.

1 “About,” Prospect.6, accessed March 8, 2025, https://www.prospect6.org/about.

2 “About,” Prospect.6.

3 “Who Returned to New Orleans After Katrina?” Population Reference Bureau, July 11, 2010, https://www.prb.org/resources/who-returned-to-new-orleans-after-hurricane-katrina/.

4 “Frequently Asked Questions,” Prospect New Orleans, accessed March 8, 2025, https://www.prospectneworleans.org/prospect-new-orleans-faq.

5 “Quick Facts: New Orleans city, Louisiana,” United States Census Bureau, accessed March 8, 2025, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/neworleanscitylouisiana/PST045223.

6 US Biennial Inc., “990: Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax,” 2022, 2, accessed March 8, 2025, https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/208374608_202212_990_2024010922200386.pdf.

7 “Frequently Asked Questions,” Prospect New Orleans.

8 Emily Farranto, “Art Brine,” ANTIGRAVITY, December 2024, https://antigravitymagazine.com/column/art-brine-7/.

9 Sharon Zukin, “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core,” Annual Review of Sociology 13 (1987): 129–147, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2083243.

10 Eva Díaz, “Prospect.3: Notes for Now,” e-flux, October 27, 2014, https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/236449/prospect-3-notes-for-now.

11 John Stanton, “New Orleans Black Business Area Lost to Racist I-10 Construction Plan to be Honored,” Gambit, December 5, 2024, https://www.nola.com/gambit/news/the_latest/new-orleans-black-business-area-lost-to-racist-i-10-construction-plan-to-be-honored/article_2e1176e4-b32f-11ef-a104-1753f23d5b96.html.

12 “Prospect.1,” Prospect New Orleans, accessed March 8, 2025, https://www.prospectneworleans.org/past-prospects/prospect1.

13 “La. Admin. Code tit. 61.I.1357,” accessed March 8, 2025, https://casetext.com/regulation/louisiana-administrative-code/title-61-revenue-and-taxation/part-i-taxes-collected-and-administered-by-the-secretary-of-revenue/chapter-13-income-individual/section-i-1357-income-exemption-for-digital-nomads.

14 Dan Cameron, “Prospect New Orleans Opening Weekend Reflections,” October 25, 2021, https://www.dancameron.art/post/prospect-new-orleans-opening-weekend-reflections.

15 “About,” Prospect.6.

Lauren Stroh is a writer from Louisiana. Her essays about the culture of the state have been published by Oxford American, The Nation, n+1, and Artforum, among others.

Installation views of L. Kasimu Harris's Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges and Ruth Owens's Black Delight, An Ecopoem: Courtesy Prospect New Orleans, Photo: Jonathan Traviesa

Images of L. Kasimu Harris's Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges and King & Blue: The Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges Experience: Courtesy the artist

This text was supported by a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities NY.