NEW ORLEANS—In the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, as FEMA’s ineptitude in the face of a humanitarian disaster was assiduously broadcast from a drenched New Orleans to the rest of the world by an increasingly frayed Anderson Cooper, I remember being haunted by the words Andre Malraux is said to have scrawled on his bedside table shortly before he died: “It should have been otherwise.”

In the ensuing months, the story of the storm, subsequent flood, and ongoing FEMA ineptitude would disappear from the papers for a bit, then surge back in, each time with renewed bleakness. On January 9, 2006, the New Yorker magazine published an article by Dan Baum about the, shall we say, challenged state of the city’s police force. Three paragraphs in came the first grisly image:

The Hurricane Katrina crisis began for [police officer Tim] Bruneau on Monday, August 29th, shortly after the storm had passed through. A young woman lay dead in the middle of the 1900 block of Jackson Avenue. Her skull was crushed, and a fallen street light, blown down by the ninety-five-mile-an-hour winds, lay beside her. Along Jackson Avenue, people were emerging from shotgun shacks into a world of smashed oak trees and downed power lines. Some of them knew the woman. She had gone out during the storm to buy drugs.

Bruneau’s police radio carried reports from the Lower Ninth Ward, three miles away: it was flooding rapidly, from a breach in the so-called Industrial Canal. But that was another district’s problem. Bruneau radioed for the coroner. Nobody showed up. Bruneau called again. Nothing.… Bruneau waited by the body for two hours, and finally left it with a patrolman and drove off to another call. When he checked back, in the early afternoon, the woman still lay uncovered on the hot pavement.

And that, for many, many months, was to be the world’s impression of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Around the time that New Yorker story appeared, New York–based curator and longtime New Orleans aficionado Dan Cameron made his first post-Katrina visit to the city. Moved by a panel discussion in which he participated, he decided something had to be done to aid the recovery, but also to show people that the city was, in fact, picking itself up by its bootstraps — that things weren’t as bleak as they seemed. 

Mounting a $3.5 million biennial packed with works by 81 artists — mainly international, but also some locals — may not have seemed the most obvious response to the crisis and recovery, but Prospect.1, the exhibition Cameron organized, which opened last month and runs through January 18, is nevertheless something of a coup. It manages to show off the city and underline its struggles without resorting to art that is cloyingly literal or coming off as big group hug for an ailing landmark. (And this visitor, whose biennial experience is forever anchored in Venice, where one schleps from pavilion to pavilion to arsenale to pavilion, all the while darting between art-world air kisses, battling exhaustion, and attempting not to succumb to yacht envy, can say with assuredness that the New Orleans effort is impervious to cynicism. I witnessed a few attempts at it from jaded art worlders; they failed.)

At a panel discussion during the biennial’s opening weekend, Creative Time curator Nato Thompson said, referring also to Paul Chan’s 2007 restaging of Waiting for Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward, that “New Orleans encapsulates political struggles globally....Lots of biennials feel alienated, but this one feels connected with real political struggles.”

The comment rings particularly true for the handful of artworks in the Lower Ninth Ward, the area hit hardest by flooding. Take the ordinary FEMA trailer — you know, those things now being sold by the U.S. government as “scrap.” New York artist Paul Villinski did, and he transformed one into an artwork — more specifically, into an artist's studio, complete with humane touches like a skylight and environmentally friendly details like solar and wind power — and parked it in an empty lot.