Museum Month and Pride of Place close with special tours and talks at NOMA

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Thursday, August 31, marks the last day for reciprocal free admission to sixteen museums across New Orleans as part of the annual Museum Month. In this final week, NOMA will host special docent-guided tours and lectures by artists represented in two special exhibitions. The popular exhibition Pride of Place: The Making of Contemporary Art in New Orleans, featuring more than seventy works of art from the collection of gallerist Arthur Roger, will close two days later on Sunday, September 3.

Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, a husband-wife team of photographers noted for their documentation of New Orleans’ African American culture, will speak at a Noontime Talk on Thursday, August 31, at 12 p.m. McCormick’s photograph, Day Dreaming, City Park, New Orleans, is on view in the exhibition NEW at NOMA: Recent Acquisitions in Modern and Contemporary Art. Originally shot in 1989, the print was made in 2015, a decade after much of her life’s work was submerged in floodwaters following the federal levee breaches of August 2005 in New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina. McCormick and Calhoun’s prints from water-saturated negatives take on an unusual beauty that can result from what is often perceive as damage or destruction. As McCormick said of this body of work, “I’ve recently stopped calling these photographs damaged.”

Courtney Egan, among the artists represented in Pride of Place, will share her creative inspiration on Friday, September 1, at 12 p.m. for yet another Noontime Talk. Her projection-based sculptural installation Sigils, on view in Pride of Place, features two ironwork tree branches draped in wire mesh upon which a high-definition video projection imitates Spanish moss. Sigil is a Latin word defined as an inscribed or painted symbol considered to have magical power. Egan describes her work as “botanical art combined with technology” that is strongly inspired by the profusion of flora in New Orleans, where she has lived and worked in since 1991. Egan will describe how her work digitally manipulates the natural world, and in turn questions human perception of nature through the lens of technology. Read more about Egan’s work in an online exclusive interview from Arts Quarterly.

Docent-guided tours will be offered with no additional fee beyond standard admission on the following dates:

  • Friday August 25: 11 a.m., 2 p.m., 6 p.m., 7 p.m. (From 5 – 7 p.m., as part of Friday Nights at NOMA programming, a Docent Open House will be held for individuals interested in training to become a docent.)
  • Saturday, August 26: 2 p.m.
  • Sunday, August 27: 12 p.m., 2 p.m.
  • Wednesday, August 30: 11 a.m., 2 p.m.
  • Thursday, August 31: 2 p.m.
  • Beginning Friday, September 1, docent-guided tours will be offered every day throughout the month at 1 p.m.