Colum McCann is the cofounder and president of Narrative 4 (N4), a nonprofit global network of educators, students, and artists who use art and storytelling to build empathy between students while equipping them to improve their communities and the world. The organization has partnered with NOMA since 2018. Read More
People and cultures all over the world use symbols and images to help pass along stories that are important to them. In this activity, we will create a Story Generator that will provide clues to help us tell a story. Inspiration: This large helmet mask was worn by masquerading characters in the Niger Delta Region… Read More
Tell a story through every-day objects in your home in this activity, inspired by Picasso’s Still Life With Candles. A still life is a work of art that captures still objects like fruit, vases, and fabric, carefully arranged and observed by an artist. Artists often create still lifes of ordinary objects from their home or… Read More
This unique photograph, made without using a camera, has a wonderful story behind its creation, much of which is written directly on the surface of the photograph. The word “photograph” encompasses a wide variety of processes, practices, materials, and objects. Today, it is used to describe images on paper, glass, or metal, as well as… Read More
The New Orleans Museum of Art is excited to present Art Inspires: Short Story Competition. Every object in NOMA’s collection has multiple stories to tell. They include anecdotes about the artist, chronicles from the life of the object, and narratives about the subject or the media used to make the work of art. Every object… Read More
It is said that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” One look at a picture can activate the imagination and encourage a story! In this activity, you will create a drawing of people and things in an environment. But there is a twist! You will work with a partner who will tell you how… Read More
The story behind the making of this photograph is a lesson in how photographers craft stories into pictures. Lewis Hine, who was well known for this ability once said, “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” Some great photographs are the product of circumstance: the right… Read More
While their story-telling symbolism is as old as Christianity itself, “memento mori” paintings saw a particular popularity in seventeenth-century Europe. It was a time of tumultuous politics and religious instability even as wealth flooded in from overseas. The Baroque art that bloomed during this period reflects the contrast between these two realities, as tensely captured… Read More
NOMA’s Learning and Engagement staff suggests the following books related to themes of stoytelling. In partnership with Octavia Books, links are provided to purchase these titles through this independent bookstore based in New Orleans, which offers nationwide shipping or curbside pickup. For Adults Mules and Men by Zora Neal Hurston, Amistad, 2008, ISBN: 9780061350177 https://www.octaviabooks.com/book/9780061350177… Read More
NOMA’s Learning and Engagement staff suggests a range of books for all ages related to themes of social justice. Read More
Louisiana artist Ida Kohlmeyer is known for her highly personal language of symbols and shapes in her abstract paintings and sculptures, often arranged like words on a page. She took inspiration from the mark-making and inventiveness found in Abstract Expressionist and Surrealist works, including the work of Spanish artist Joan Miró. Take a look at… Read More
In this photograph, Arthur Siegel captures the visual power of people united by a common cause. At different times in his career, Arthur Siegel worked as a photojournalist and documentarian, and as an artist who explored various methods of photographic abstraction. This image seems to combine these disparate approaches, documenting a demonstration even as it… Read More
Dorothy Norman was only twenty-two years old when she walked into the Intimate Gallery and met Alfred Stieglitz, then sixty-three. Although they were separated by more than forty years in age, and despite the fact that each was already married, their physical and emotional relationship quickly blossomed. So profound was their connection that Stieglitz… Read More
It is often said that a portrait photograph represents some kind of exchange between the photographer and the subject, and that the resulting image, as the product of this exchange, has something from both of these figures in it. Such a description however, fails to account for the intervention of the camera—or at least the… Read More
In only his second year in Paris, after moving there from Hungary, André Kertész received an invitation to visit Piet Mondrian’s apartment and studio. There, he was immediately immersed in an international and multidisciplinary arts community where he convened and conversed with artists, writers, and architects, many of whom, like him, were recent transplants from… Read More
This week, as NOMA turns its focus towards themes of connection, we are thinking about how human relationships shape artists’ careers, and how we can use those connections to interpret different artworks. In Mexico City during the 1920s and ‘30s, art flourished and grew thanks to the creative, romantic, and political relationships between artists in… Read More
Edgar Degas arrived in New Orleans in 1872 for an extended stay, two years after he had enlisted in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War, and two years before he would join a group of painters back in Paris for the first of what would become known as the Impressionist Exhibitions. It was a… Read More
Danny Lyon took his first photography gig when he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization of young activists that orchestrated sit-ins and carried on the Freedom Rides during the Civil Rights Movement. With leader James Forman and other photographers, Lyon helped make photography an important part of SNCC’s strategy by documenting the… Read More