The Future is Present, the Harbinger is Home

MCA Denver is proud to present a selection of artworks from the acclaimed New Orleans-based international art triennial Prospect.6: The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home. 

Featuring over sixty newly commissioned artworks by nineteen artists in the mediums of sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and large-scale installations, this exhibition represents the first time in Prospect’s history that an excerpt from this multi-venue triennial has traveled outside of its originating city.

Through this exhibition audiences are invited to explore the role of New Orleans and other climate-vulnerable regions of the world, as points of departure for examining our collective future as it relates to climate change, legacies of colonialism, and definitions of belonging and home.This framework situates New Orleans as a harbinger (already living in the ​“future” that other places will experience), and as a home (a beloved place of community, connection, and celebration). New Orleans and places like it are thereby approached as gifts to the rest of the world in their ability to offer lessons and examples for how to live in constant negotiation with the weather, grounded within a community that reflects the global majority, and in direct proximity to the effects and aftereffects of colonial and extractive economies.

The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home: Selections from Prospect.6 New Orleans is organized by Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson. Lash is the Ellen Bruss Chief Curator at MCA Denver. Patterson is an acclaimed artist, 2024 MacArthur Fellow, and the recipient the 2023 David C. Driskell Prize.