Prospect New Orleans is thrilled to announce the final unveiling of its 2023-24 Artists of Public Memory Commission, a new project by an intertribal collective of Indigenous artists and creative practitioners: Nanih Bvlbancha on Saturday, April 6, 2024, at Lafitte Greenway located at 1900 Lafitte Ave.
Join us Saturday, April 6 from 10am–3pm to engage with the space, its myriad stories, Indigenous crafts, food, and games.
For more information, please visit www.nanihbvlbancha.net and www.prospectneworleans.org.
The intertribal collective has come together to write this statement discussing the importance of meaning behind Nanih Bvlbancha:
“We invite you to join us in tending to this special place in the months and years to come! Our mound was built on the Lafitte Greenway between January and March 2024 with community members actively involved in the build process - hauling soil, clay, oyster shells, bagasse, and driftwood to the site, shoveling and stomping to compress the earthen materials into a mound shape. Intertribal community members embedded prayers, gifts, offerings, dances, and even a Houma language dictionary into its layers.
We wove palmetto mats for erosion control, and drew “love letters'' to the mound, using paints made of native plant, clay and ochre pigments! We envision Nanih Bvlbancha as a neutral ground where we honor our Ancestors and yours, their stories and your stories as well, their unbelievable ingenuity and the ingenuity in each of us! We’ve gathered soils from along the Mississippi watershed, from all across this continent, and from other continents. We added those gifts of soil into our mound to honor the distant lands of many cultures and many peoples who call Bvlbancha | New Orleans home. We honor the powerful life force that is the Mississippi River, as she carries silt from other places to form the precious land we stand on, the nutrient rich soil that grows our food, and the water that nourishes the many beings of this place.
Our Nanih calls attention to the lands and other mounds we are losing in South Louisiana, and the urgent need to protect coastal and tribal communities, marking the four directions, calling us into a balanced way of being, recognizing that the health of our world, and ourselves, depends on that balance. We welcome these teachings in these precarious times. Nanih Bvlbancha reclaims a place for Indigenous peoples in the heart of Bvlbancha and honors, not only our ancestral histories, but also, our contemporary realities. It anchors us in relationship, reciprocity, respect for all beings, and inspires opportunities to gather as a culturally diverse community, educate in traditional ways that involve active participation, care and tend in more sustainable ways for our native plants, play ancient Southeastern ball games, and more! We invite you to be a part of Nanih Bvlbancha.”
Nanih Bvlbancha is made possible through the support of Bvlbancha Liberation Radio, Mondo Bizarro, the builders of Nanih Bvlbancha, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, the Dorothy Beckemeyer Skau Art and Music Fund, the Gulf South Open School (an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation project), Lambent Foundation, FootPrint Project, and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. Special thank you to Bayou Rosa, Friends of Lafitte Greenway, NORD, the City of New Orleans, and the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network.
An Intertribal collective of artists, educators, researchers, gardeners, herbalists, water protectors, land defenders and culture keepers 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.
Artists of Public Memory is a new public art commission that invites Louisiana-born and/or based contemporary 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.
Artists of Public Memory is funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project with additional major funding from the Ford Foundation. 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.
Prospect New Orleans was conceived in the tradition of international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and the Bienal de São Paulo to showcase practices from around the world in settings throughout the city with an emphasis on site-specificity. The Prospect exhibition is a citywide contemporary art triennial, formalized in 2008 and now looking ahead to its sixth iteration, curated by Miranda Lash & Ebony G. Patterson and running November 2, 2024 –February 2, 2025.
