Art Exhibitions That Don’t Look Away From the Rocky Realities

Another epochal election. Another horrific backdrop, from the nightmare in Gaza — however you analyze it — to Sudan, Congo and Ukraine. Another season of demagoguery and bad-faith argument gone global.

So … go look at art? Yes, more than ever.

As always it falls to artists and curators to document and interpret the world and to propose possibilities for living in it — and living together in it — in ways that are rigorous and free. And beautiful too, please. All while negotiating institutional politics and the vagaries of the market, and for many, the rocky reality of their own economic precarity.

And here’s the good news: There’s loads to see. This fall I’m especially excited for two large undertakings — the Prospect. 6 triennial in New Orleans and a suite of exhibitions on the theme of “Panafrica” anchored by the Art Institute of Chicago — that promise fresh ideas and propose global connections. And if my picks tilt away from New York, consider that a nod to exhibition makers in the regions, where American creativity is constantly renewed.

It’s timely that Prospect New Orleans (Nov. 2- Feb. 2, 2025) comes at the crest of this high-intensity election year. First held in 2008, the triennial was founded after the Katrina disaster, which underscored the vulnerability of Black and poor Americans while shattering illusions about social progress and state competence. Now in its sixth edition, Prospect has cemented its place on the international circuit, even as it must continually negotiate its relationship with tourism and gentrification and the implications for local artists.

This year’s edition comes cloaked in a slightly gnomic title, “The Future is Present, the Harbinger is Home,” which sounds like a Zen koan but in fact is a proposition about the city. For its artistic directors — Miranda Lash, a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Ebony G. Patterson, the Jamaican-born artist — New Orleans is a laboratory of past and future, shaped by waves of colonialism, the slave trade and plantation economy, oil and gas extraction and now extreme climate vulnerability.