NEW ORLEANS—Prospect 1., the New Orleans–based biennial set to open November 1, has announced the 81 artists selected to participate in the unorthodox exhibition, which will be spread throughout a variety of sites in the city, including homes wrecked by Hurricane Katrina. The show is billed as the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States, and selected artists hail from all over the world—from Los Angeles to Cairo, Egypt. Ghada Amer, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Fred Tomaselli are among the better-known names. Highlights will include a wooden ark incorporating the shell of a destroyed house and other discarded scraps of wood in the Lower Ninth Ward, by Mark Bradford; a “green”-powered mobile artist’s studio made out of a discarded FEMA trailer, by Paul Villinski, and a mural inside an abandoned house in the Lower Ninth Ward, by Adam Cuijanovic.

The works will take up about 100,000 square feet of exhibition space across New Orleans. Some of the biennial's participating venues are the Contemporary Arts Center, the Historic New Orleans Collection, L9 Center for the Arts, Louisiana Artworks, the Old U.S. Mint Louisiana State Museum, the National World War II Museum, and the New Orleans African American Museum.