A couple of weeks before the opening of Prospect.2, Dan Cameron’s a little giddy. The founder and artistic director of the New Orleans contemporary art biennial is standing in what will be Prospect.2’s home base at the corner of Rampart and Esplanade when the sawing and hammering stops, and because all the shows planned for Prospect.2 have venues, this space is lagniappe. He gets to plan one more space for the fun of it.

"Wail" by Ivan Navarro

Prospect.2 starts officially on Friday with its opening gala in the Hyatt Regency’s Empire Ballroom and continues through January 29, 2012. It will deliver to New Orleans works by artists from France, Sweden, Japan, Vietnam, Chile, Italy, Poland, Iceland, and the U.S., while also harvesting the field of local artwork.

“Prospect.2 is probably how future Prospects are going to go,” Cameron says, sitting on the office’s front stoop. “Prospect.1 was about making the biggest possible splash, with 80 artists from all over the world and dozens of art installations all over town. I think we succeeded in what we set out to do, which was we established ourselves permanently, in both the collective unconscious here and the international art world. Now everybody you meet from the art world knows about Prospect.”

This Prospect is more modest, with 28 artists. Whereas Prospect.1 included numerous non-traditional art venues, including open space in the Lower Ninth Ward where Mark Bradford built a three-story psychedelic ark, Prospect.2 will largely be presented in more conventional spaces.

“It’s not as if we’ve just written off the Lower Ninth Ward,” Cameron says. “But there was also something very particular about that moment [2008] in terms of the art world, making a belated recognition of what had happened here: ‘We know you all are moving on [after Katrina]; meanwhile, we just got here so we have to make sense of this in a way that we make sense of it.’ It’s important to say that now that we’ve done that, not a single work in this exhibition references Katrina in any way. A couple of them reference the BP oil spill because, in the meantime, that’s the new Katrina.”

Much of Prospect.2 will take place in the city’s contemporary art corridors—the Arts District, NOMA and St. Claude Avenue—but it’s not limited to them.

“I can say with no hesitation, the most beautiful, the most perfect exhibition space in New Orleans is the Delgado Community College Art Gallery,” says Cameron. “So we have our most ambitious project there.” “Below Sea Level,” by Polish artist Pawel Wojtasik, is a 360–degree panoramic video installation that began filming in New Orleans and nearby St. Bernard and Plaquemine parishes in 2008.

"Below Sea Level" at MASS MoCA in 2009

“We had almost 800 people a week going to the African American Museum during Prospect.1 and everybody was discovering this jewel of a museum in Treme, and that’s what we’re hoping will happen with Delgado.”

Another overlooked artistic space that Prospect.2 will highlight is the Piazza d’Italia on Poydras Street. The piazza is an architectural artwork designed by Charles Moore in 1978 that speaks to late post-modernism and pays tribute to the influence of the Italian-American community on the city. Francesco Vezzoli has created a sculpture specifically to be displayed there—Sophia Loren holding the painting by Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico that inspired Moore’s design.

“As far as I’m concerned, most New Orleanians are unaware of its actual architectural significance,” says Cameron. “Which is, I think, exacerbated by the fact that no one knows what to do with the space and I think that the artist took it on as a challenge.”

One significant change this year is that Prospect.2 has an admission charge. Ticket fees will be $10 for day passes, $20 for weekly passes, and $30 for season passes. The cover charge is an effort to stabilize Prospect New Orleans’ finances, which have been hurt by the recession.

“The first time out was 25 million dollars—that’s how much the city gained from Prospect,” says Cameron. “We hope that the same impact is still felt, but this time we have it structured so that we get a piece of it.”

"The Farm" by Alexis Rockman

“We raised most of the money for Prospect.1 in 2007 before Lehman Brothers. Now we’re in a distinctly different era, and we’re quite happy that we’ve been successful in raising half the budget that we had for Prospect.1 and we can pull off what we can pull of at the level that we’re doing it. Meanwhile, we will build slowly back up to that point and as Prospect becomes more rooted in the community, I think that’s going to position us very well so we can say, maybe for Prospect.4 we can crank it up to 45 artists. Maybe Prospect.5 will be up to 60 artists and then maybe in another 10, 12, 15 years from now, it will be this great big show.”

For tickets and details on Prospect.2, go to ProspectNewOrleans.org.

with editorial assistance by Morgan Ribera.