Creative Assembly

GIRLS NOLA Spends the Day at NOMA and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden

After several quiet months, the museum is slowly and safely welcoming small groups of young visitors back into our spaces, sprinkling chatter and laughter back into the sounds and rhythms of the galleries. Lit in hot pink on a Saturday in May, NOMA’s new Lapis Center for the Arts became home-for-a-day to GIRLS NOLA—the Girls Initiative for Reproducing Leaders in Society—for an incredibly special reunion and retreat.  Read More

New Harmony High Students Use Photography to Imagine the Future

Building on an ongoing collaboration between New Harmony and the New Orleans Photo Alliance, this spring NOMA collaborated with local students to explore the fundamentals of photography and curating with some of the city’s foremost artists. The culmination of this project, What Is Harmony?, is on view to the public on an exterior fence to the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden starting June 19. Read More

A Choice of Weapons: Photography, Surveillance, and Ethics⁠

Gordon Parks famously stated that photography was his “choice of weapons” against racism, intolerance, and poverty. While photographs have certainly been used to document and advance social justice causes in the past, the use of photography in recent protest movements has demonstrated one of the dangers of the medium. While protest photographs have amplified these movements’ messages and visibility, those very same photographs have been used against their makers by other authorities. This panel explored the new emerging chapter in the ethics of photography, considering how the digital, social world has made photography an instantaneous and global “weapon” that can slip easily from one hand to another, and offering guidance on ethical and inclusive approaches to protest photography.⁠ ⁠ Read More