What might the world learn from New Orleans? That is the question posed by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s latest offering, “The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home.”

To understand the show, it helps to know a little background, most importantly that the objects on display are recycled from “Prospect.6” — the sixth and most recent edition of the well-regarded art exhibition held every three years in New Orleans.

It also helps to know that the co-curator of “Prospect.6” was Miranda Lash, who also happens to be chief curator at the MCA Denver. There’s the tie-in.

One more important bit of context: The original event, which ran from November 2024 through February, was spread across the historic city, with a considerable 51 artists and 21 venues listed on the program — including such interesting places as outdoor parks, a shuttered Ford motor plant, a jazz club and gallery spaces of various sizes and stature. The work was very much tied into the sites where it was displayed, both the architecture and the activity, and fell easily into the category of what we call “public art.”

The Denver version is cut down to 19 artists and packed into three levels of the MCA’s main headquarters downtown, a setting that is the polar opposite of public. The Denver museum is a fabulous piece of design, but it is also a hallowed, modern-minded temple of high art, a precious place where curators can spend years assembling a single show, and that visitors have to pay $14 apiece to enter.

That radical repositioning of the material puts a very different frame around the question at hand here: What might the world learn from New Orleans? In some ways it brings clarity. In other ways, it feels distant and diluted.

The point of the original “The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home” was to de-mystify New Orleans as the magical, musical place that draws so many tourists, and to position it as any other city — only one that is a few steps ahead of other cities in that it is already facing the perils of climate change and has long tried to reckon with the legacy of colonialism.

New Orleans — equally famous for its French Quarter and its flooding — is living the future that every other metropolis is just arriving at.

The premise is intriguing and the work addresses it in multiple ways, frequently exploring ideas around identity, race, migration, gentrification and fabricated historical narratives.It is, by and large, a big and colorful work, and seeing it can be genuinely exciting. Take, for example, “We’re Magic. We’re Real #2,” from the Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers. The piece features a giant ball of synthetic hair, shaped into an afro, that spins around in a room covered on both its walls and floor with reflective gold emergency blankets.

The immersive installation puts a hairstyle that has been frequently employed as a symbol of liberation in Black counterculture at the center of a larger body. The artist’s work addresses “the United States’ and Denmark’s role in the transatlantic slave trade,” as the museum signage explains.

The shimmering work comes at you, as do other pieces, such as Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s sculpture that mimics three electric transmission towers, each standing about 12 feet tall. The pillowy pieces recall the landscape of Los Angeles, where the artist grew up, but they also connect to his family history in El Salvador. They are covered in a patchwork of fabric cut from the clothing of friends and family, recalling how his grandmother made dolls from the clothing of family members who disappeared during the Salvadoran civil war.

There is so much massive work in this exhibit. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s two-channel video “Amongst the Disquiet,” about his multi-generational Vietnamese family in New Orleans, fills an entire lower-level gallery. Shannon Alonzo’s “Three Whistles and a Howl,” a textile recreation of the Blue Devil character that is part of carnival celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago where she lives and works, hangs down three floors of the museum’s atrium.

Blas Isasi’s installation — with the title “1,001,532 CE” — spans the museum’s second-floor gallery. The artist symbolically recreates the bloody Battle of Cajamarca that took place in 1532 in his native Peru, collapsing the existing pre-Columbian civilization at the hands of Spanish colonialists. Isasi’s piece is set 1 million years into the future and references traditional Peruvian practices, such as weaving and carving, “to imagine a homeland in which organic matter — rather than humans — will shape the future.”

Lash and co-curator Ebony G. Patterson take something of a gamble here in condensing all of these larger-than-life works into a standard museum show, far removed from the context of a citywide triennial. It reshapes the way we might digest their concept.

The original setting is certainly an enhancement — if you are going to put New Orleans at the heart of a discussion, it helps to be in New Orleans, to hear, see and smell the place and its people, to make the whole experience more show and less tell. There, the exhibit has more purpose.

There is also local interest, and that is a real factor. Local audiences care more about the city where they live and they are more eager to go deep on the topic of self-identity and their global positioning. In Denver, the show feels a bit out of place.

But having the work together, rather than spread out among 51 sites, also has the effect of intensifying the discussion, and that makes it interesting in a different way. Instead of having to travel across a busy urban landscape to take in these pieces individually — as many biennials and triennials do — the museum show brings them into closer dialogue. They speak to each other directly.

There may be less work in this iteration, and it may be packed too tightly into the building, but the dots are connected. We do get a wide view of New Orleans, and we do see where it leads and where it falls behind. In that way, it succeeds.

But again, local interest is a factor. Without the curatorial tie-in, would this exhibit have found a spot on the MCA’s busy schedule? It’s hard to say. Folks who are curious about New Orleans will appreciate this experiment. Everyone else can just enjoy the big art.

Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.