In New Orleans, the spot where a statue of Robert E. Lee once stood now houses a representation of an African deity. The installation by renowned sculptor Simone Leigh is part of “Prospect New Orleans,” an event every three years that invites contributions from artists around the world. Exhibits are usually temporary, but that changes a lot this time around.

The placement of Leigh’s West African deity, Mami Wata, is controversial. It stands on a downtown roundabout once cradling the Confederacy and sits next to a pedestal where five years earlier a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was removed.

Leigh, however, described it as “medicine”.

“I’m big on public art being public medicine. So what it is is medicine for all of us,” she told CBS News’ Michelle Miller.

Naima Keith, co-curator of “Prospect New Orleans,” said 60% of New Orleans is African American and black.

“And so to have a black female figure in the center of the city, hopefully you can be inspired by that female figure, but also the impact of black culture on the city, both in shaping the city, but also the life continues and the energy of the city continues,” she said.

Keith and his partner Diana Nawi are the first team of women to curate the triennial exhibition which showcases the art in various museums and public spaces around the city. The art itself ranges from replica houses to paintings of the January 6 Uprising.

To coordinate the exhibit, they began a year-long “listening tour,” Nawi explained, which involved meetings with artists and New Orleans community stakeholders to hear what was important. about the show and “what they thought it could do for the city”. ”

The project received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to create a new era of monuments.

“We really wanted to come up with a set of artists that complicated this idea of ​​a monument,” Keith said. “When you think of a monument, you often think of a person, that you’re sort of carving a certain person in stone.”

But one work, by EJ Hill, commemorates an amusement park lost during Hurricane Katrina. Jazzland’s only surviving Ferris wheel gondola now rests in a nearby neighborhood of New Orleans East.

“As we invite artists to New Orleans to work on New Orleans, they are also working on the issues that affect New Orleans the most,” said Chris Alfieri, chairman of the board of directors of “Prospect “. “Climate change, social justice, these are issues that affect us all.”

Alfieri has been a leading force in the expo since its inception in 2006. He said the initial idea was that it could help promote the economy and boost tourism in the region. He hopes this will create visibility for New Orleans around the world.

They took that involvement one step further with an installation that was simply terrestrial.

“The weight of [New Orleans] is so huge that I wanted to do something that wasn’t just there for three months,” said artist Kevin Beasley, whose works have graced the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim.

“What does buying land have to do with an artist’s expression?” Miller asked him.

“That’s a big question, I think, given that the premise was to think about land ownership — black land ownership in particular… the Lower Ninth Ward was a majority black-owned community.”

To this day, large parts of the Lower Ninth Ward remain barren – many owners have not returned since Katrina or have been bought out by speculators and outsiders. As a newcomer, Beasley thinks the garden purchased with his “Prospect” allowance can accommodate neighbors in a modest and subtle way. He even equipped the field with WiFi and electrical outlets to charge phones.

“It’s not just a project people can experience now, but it’s a project they can come back to and see how it evolves,” he said.

It is the promise of a community for a city trying to define what it was, is and hopes to be.

“A lot of exhibitions – triennial, biennial exhibitions – really bring artists to a city and then they leave,” Alfieri said. “That’s not what our artists do. Our artists put their hands and feet into the city of New Orleans.