NEW ORLEANS— It was the day after he sat on a panel discussion at New Orleans's Arthur Roger Gallery that curator Dan Cameron had what he describes as his "duh" moment. The talk was held on January 27, 2006, roughly five months after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and speakers focused on how the New Orleans cultural community could regain its pre-storm status and also contribute to the overall recovery of the city. "It was great to go down and talk to people so soon after the storm, but I wanted to do something more," said Cameron, then of New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. "The day after the panel, I thought, 'What can I do? I'm just a curator who organizes international biennials'—and then there it was."

The result of Cameron's epiphany is Prospect.1 New Orleans, a biennial international exhibition on the model of the Venice Biennale slated to debut October 2008. With commitments from venues throughout the city and a roster of artists from around the world, the exhibition aims to reinvigorate the city by promoting tourism and drawing international attention to its cultural life. But the show’s ultimate goal reaches well beyond hurricane recovery to asserting a place for New Orleans on an international contemporary art map, much in the way that Art Basel's Miami incarnation raised that city's global profile.

Shoring up Support
Cameron, a curator at the New Museum from 1995 until earlier this year, has organized several international exhibitions throughout his career, including the eighth international Istanbul Biennial in 2003 and the 2006 Taipei Biennial. Up until now, he had never lived in New Orleans, but he has been a regular visitor for the last two decades, developing a love for the music, cuisine, and culture of the city. Following his own interests, he plans to keep the theme of the initial biennial simple, focusing on the city's history, physical beauty, and unique possibilities as a venue for contemporary art rather than a specific intellectual framework.

"[New Orleans] has the most extraordinary spaces for showing art," said Cameron. "When I take artists around to visit the warehouses and the historic spaces that—for better or worse—have been untouched by real-estate development for 50 or 60 years, they are just beside themselves."

The biennial is poised to be the largest ever organized in the United States, featuring work by some 75 artists installed at most of the city's major cultural institutions, including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the New Orleans African American Museum, as well as smaller locations throughout New Orleans. There are also plans for roughly a dozen site-specific works peppered throughout the city's neighborhoods and a concurrent schedule of programming, including lectures and performances. "It's going to be one large exhibition that snakes through town," Cameron said.

When he approached the Contemporary Arts Center's executive director Jay Weigel about participating in Prospect.1, Cameron found more than just a venue. Following the hurricane, the CAC's visual art curator had quit and the registrar had been laid off, which left the institution barely able to maintain a base level of programming. Rather than have Cameron swoop in for a short period and install a portion of the biennial there, Weigel asked him to take over as visual arts director.

"I didn't think twice," said Cameron of his decision to leave the New Museum to helm the visual-art side of the struggling institution. "It's just part and parcel of being part of New Orleans' recovery: You can't wear just one hat."

Others have been eager to pitch in as well. Since founding the nonprofit behind Prospect.1 earlier this year, Cameron has seen steady progress toward the fundraising goal of $3.5 million. But with most local organizations involved in the recovery effort tapped out, the biennial has relied on donors in other cities for funding. An initial contribution of $600,000 came from Cleveland and Florida–based insurance billionaire Peter B. Lewis, a former president of the board of the Guggenheim Museum, and major donors from all over the world who have been looking for an opportunity to help rebuild New Orleans's art institutions have followed suit.

Rebranding a City
Though two years have passed, the New Orleans cultural scene is still suffering from the impact of Katrina. While the New Orleans Museum of Art has seen its membership rebound and fundraising increase since reopening in March 2006, even with the 2006–07 blockbuster "Femme: Paintings of Women in French Society from Daumier to Picasso from the Museums of France," an exhibition organized by the French government to help the museum recover from the storm, visitors from outside Louisiana remain remarkably few.

"The show brought in about 80,000 people—probably half of what it would have attracted before Katrina—and only about 15,000 came from out of state," said NOMA director John Bullard. "Normally during a blockbuster, 75 percent of our total attendance would come from out of state."

Many in the New Orleans art scene are betting on Prospect.1 to remedy these sorts of statistics, which are echoed at institutions across the city. The community is hoping for “an Art Basel effect," with the vitality, glamour, and economic largess associated with contemporary art drawing an elite class of tourists to the city, as the Miami fair does every year. But whereas Miami is hip and thoroughly modern, many potential visitors have previously known New Orleans only as a quaintly backward-looking, 19th-century center of jazz, food, and great antiquing, not contemporary art.

To overcome that preconception, the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau is launching a massive campaign to shift the perception of the city in the minds of potential visitors. While the details have yet to be finalized, CVB president Stephen Perry said that the push behind Prospect.1 is part of a larger rebranding of the city as a location that straddles old and new. The campaign’s punning slogan is "Forever 'New' Orleans."

Plans are also in the works for targeted marketing at major annual events, including high-profile fairs such as Frieze, Art Basel Miami Beach, and the Armory Show. "I think the net effect of this [biennial promotion] is going to be a surge of leisure-side, high-end visitors from all over the world," said Perry.

Ambitions Beyond Tourism
Some New Orleans observers are hopeful that the biennial's impact on the city will not only bring a surge of outside interest but also fundamentally reshape the city's sizable indigenous art scene. "We have a long-established art scene here, and visitors in town for the biennial are going to see what the galleries have to offer," said Jonathan Ferrara, an artist and dealer who opened his first New Orleans gallery 12 years ago. And Ferrara wants that encounter to be more substantive than a simple three-month peak in sales every two years.

"I think what the biennial will do is make introductions between New Orleans artists and gallery owners and artists and gallery owners from all over the world," he said. "It will facilitate future exchanges."

In his estimation, those channels into the global contemporary art world, coupled with the low cost of living compared to other important art cities, will attract more emerging artists to New Orleans, a trend that had already begun before Katrina scattered many of them across the country.

From his position at the CVB, Perry shares this ambition, and he sees the growth of the city's talent pool bringing more creative professionals to the city as well. "I think you're going to see New Orleans reborn as one of the bohemian capitals of the world again," he said.

At NOMA, Bullard is more measured but no less hopeful in his assessment of the larger benefits of Prospect.1, noting that while New Orleans has always been an attractive place for artists to come and live, the biennial will showcase contemporary art as a growth industry within the city's economy. His institution seems eager to take advantage of the potential of the city’s contemporary art scene, having recently imported a New York curator of its own, Diego Cortez, to build up its collection of contemporary photography, and announced plans to hire a full-time curator of contemporary art in 2008.

Not surprisingly, it is Cameron who boasts most enthusiastically about what his biennial can do for the city. As he sees it, Prospect.1 is part of a more-than-century-long story that in effect brings New Orleans full circle. In 1887, the city hosted what is widely considered to be the United States' first international art exhibition, and the Big Easy was for a time at the forefront of American involvement in the art world, a position Cameron hopes it will reclaim.

"We don't have a dearth of art fairs, but we do lack a big, disinterested—that is, not market-driven—international biennial," said Cameron. "If this country can find its way to an exhibition on the scale of Venice or Sao Paolo, I think New Orleans is the place to do it."