Prospect 3: Notes for Now: Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans - New Orleans

"In Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer the protagonist Binx Bolling is consumed by “the search” in the week leading up to his 30th birthday. The novel, set in a time of heightened social awareness in the first half of the decade’s movement for civil rights in America, delves into the depths of existentialism in a world where people were legally segregated from each other, making it impossible to celebrate the individual. “The peculiar institution” of slavery and immigration during the 18th century created a city that, even in 1961, was a complex social arrangement that remains palpable today. Curated by Franklin Sirmans, Prospect.3 explored “the search” to find the self and the necessity of the other as part of that quest."