What to See During Prospect New Orleans

Scott Covert | Johnnie B & Friends | 2 – 30 November

Since 1985, when he memorialized the late Florence Ballard of 1960s girl group The Supremes, Scott Covert has made a litany of portraits of the most famous stars of yesteryear, via rubbings of their tombstones and grave markers, to no small notoriety; his work has been exhibited internationally and domestically at venues such as Studio Voltaire in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Now, the works are on display in a charmingly intimate venue in New Orleans: the recently established Johnnie B & Friends, which utilizes church pews as gallery seating in a repurposed, three-room, shotgun-style home in the Seventh Ward, and has been known to host dinner parties and other community events. Works on display in ‘The Dead Supreme’ include a campy ‘double feature’ uniting the epitaphs of Marilyn Monroe and Candy Darling (‘blonde on blonde!’ the artist tells me) and an austere grayscale rubbing devoted to the singer Hank Williams. Covert’s rubbings are especially appropriate in this most haunted of American cities, in a show whose opening coincides with the Day of the Dead.

Katrina Andry | Other Plans | 18 October – 22 December

Artist Katrina Andry is no stranger to the Prospect programme – her prints were featured in the triennial’s last iteration at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Other Plans, a contemporary gallery in the Tremé just shy of celebrating its first anniversary, is showing the artist’s new and recent works in her native New Orleans. These prints build on her explorations of Black womanhood and gentrification in the American South while also indicating a clear evolution in style. Linocuts such as Madame of Eternal Bloom. A Portrait Study. (2024) see the artist moving away from the white backgrounds that previously characterized her work to apply her highly saturated inks to black grounds. Numbered editions with titles like The Promise of The Rainbow Never Came #6 (2018) allude to the artist’s suspended disbelief in narratives of redemption, while the human-animal hybrids depicted suggest potential relief via fantasy and the natural world

‘Show & Tell: A Brief History of Photography and Text’ and ‘Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art’ | New Orleans Museum of Art | 12 July – 16 February 2025; 30 August – 10 February 2025

Come for the special exhibitions and stay for the permanent collection! The New Orleans Museum of Art features the most varied collection of works on display for visitors passing through town on borrowed time. Temporary exhibitions include ‘Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art’ – which features colourful flasks from 19th-century American manufacturers, a minimalist grid titled Tied Drawing (1971) by Christopher Wilmarth and Dawn DeDeaux’s Hurricane Category Four (2007) – and ‘Show & Tell: A Brief History of Photography and Text’, which places Patti Smith’s photographs Jack Kerouac Big Sur Scroll (2007–08) and Hermann Hesse’s Typewriter (2003) in dialogue with surrealist lithographs by Robert Heinecken and Ilse Bing’s Beethoven Autograph, Ode to Joy (1933), a gelatin silver print that superimposes ballet dancers onto a musical score. Works by Louisiana-born artist Lynda Benglis and Robert Rauschenberg, who had family in the state, hang in the galleries of the permanent collection, while Malick Sidibé’s Portrait of a Woman (2003) – a high-contrast print depicting a stylish woman and showcasing the Malian artist’s eye for West African fashion – delights in ‘Afropolitan: Contemporary African Arts at NOMA’.

Raine Bedsole | Callan Contemporary | 1 November – 20 December

Raine Bedsole’s mixed-media sculptures and paintings, presented in ‘Toward a Destination Unknown’ at Callan Contemporary, often integrate organic materials – including dragonfly wings, shells and quartz – with historical maps that the artist has salvaged from research libraries and family archives, creating a prototype for a new kind of cartography. The most compelling among the works on view are the artist’s ‘boats’ – some named for figures in Greek tragedies, like Daphne and Apollo (both 2024) – in which spindly vessels dangle glass bulbs and flowers constructed from paint-coated silk fibres. The irregular shadows these works’ silhouettes cast against the gallery walls result in secondary artworks, painted by light. Throughout the show, the artist also incorporates motifs from Eastern religion and thought, her delicately constructed vessels suggesting metaphysical journeys over literal ones.

Inner World | The Front | 12 October – 3 November

Works by the Mess Arts Collective, currently on display at The Front in the St. Claude Arts District, are a reminder of how intrinsically fun artmaking can be – particularly when approached with the right spirit. The brainchild of a local non-profit offering arts education to youth in New Orleans – devised as a counter to the stripping of art programmes following the rise of charter schools post-Hurricane Katrina – the show features sculpted ceramics of animals and painted iron seeds by students aged four to 12. Underscoring the importance of environmental stewardship and the sanctity of the natural world in the face of the ongoing climate crisis, the works include phrases such as ‘Don’t Litter’, ‘Little Lives Matter’ and ‘Animals are People Too!’ One eight-year-old sculptor included in the show, Lockett, is a self-professed graffiti artist: in support, his peers have tagged one of the gallery’s blank walls.

^{Main image: Raine Bedsole, Marigold Offering, 2024 bronze, patina, watercolour, 180 × 43 × 43 cm. Courtesy: Callan Contemporary; photograph: Jonathan Traviesa}