Object Lesson: Frontlet Headdress of the Bella Coola Peoples
The Bella Coola Peoples of Canada’s Pacific Northwest, also known as the Nuxalk are renowned as carvers, with a mask-making tradition that includes physical representations of supernatural beings with animal-like features of species common to the tribe’s home region, including owls, killer whales, ravens, and wolves. This headdress in NOMA’s Native American art collection depicts an predatory bird. Read More
Object Lesson: Teapot by Sargent Johnson
With a body like a polished stone and a handle reminiscent of indigenous Mexican animal figures, a recently acquired teapot seems to be of both nature and man, both ancient and modern. This elegant 1941 teapot by the prominent African American Modernist sculptor Sargent Claude Johnson is an extraordinary new addition to NOMA’s decorative arts collection. Read More
Object Lesson: Coal, A Story in Pictures
As NOMA considers the various aspects of sustainability this week, this three-picture story looks at an unsustainable resource and practice: coal and its extraction. As an unrenewable fossil fuel that remains the number one source of carbon emissions globally, the reliance on coal is unsustainable, but so is the human toll that its extraction exerts…. Read More
Object Lesson: Hardware Store, 316-318 Bowery, Manhattan by Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott began her Changing New York project in 1929, an effort to document the city’s transformation as New York entered a new period of demolition and redevelopment. Read More
New Harmony students blend art with environmental history in collaboration with NOMA
The following essay was written by Nic Aziz, NOMA’s Community Engagement Curator. Land is arguably the most sought-after resource on our planet. It has been the source of everything from the impetus for wars to the foundation of oppression and a sacred fabric within spiritual practices. Unfortunately as a result of collective mistreatment and… Read More
Object Lesson: Windmill in Anglia by John Moyer Heathcote
John Moyer Heathcote was an amateur painter and photographer in Norfolk, England, where he likely took this photograph of a windmill. Heathcote documented architecture and rural scenes, compiling photographs in albums including his 1853 Anglia Illustrata. This ghostly image is not a page from that book, but rather the paper negative used to produce a… Read More