Through the course of the nineteenth century, white photographers making portraits of Native American sitters generally framed their subjects in stereotypical ways that exoticized their culture. Many of these photographs augmented the myth that Native American populations could not assimilate into white society and were destined to disappear. Such parallel ideas were often evoked to… Read More
Reimagine your neighborhood. Promote thinking about fundamentals elements of social justice: community, empathy, equity, activism, and advocacy by honing your observation of immediate surroundings within your community. Use a found-object viewfinder as a tool for isolating shapes in drawing and utilize shapes as building blocks for creating a geometric composition that represents a vision of… Read More
American photographers Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Latoya Ruby Frazier turned their cameras on individuals and communities whose stories were less known to expose their daily trials, struggles, and celebrations. Dorothea Lange was a photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. Lange’s photographs influenced the development of documentary… Read More
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
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
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
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
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
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
Joseph Cornell loved to visit New York and collect items he found on the streets and in secondhand stores and bookstores. He built quite a collection and created his own system for filing the objects away in the basement of the house he shared with his mother and brother. Cornell was influenced by artists associated… Read More
NOMA’s Learning and Engagement staff suggests a range books for all ages related to themes of sustainability. In partnership with Octavia Books, links are provided to purchase these titles through this independent bookstore based in New Orleans. Read More
Mandala comes from the classical Indian language Sanskrit. Loosely translated, the word means circle, but a mandala has symbolic meaning as well. The shape of a mandala is circular and has a pattern. Similar designs are seen in cultures in India and Tibet as well as Native American and Early Christian art. Circles may represent… Read More
NOMA’s Learning and Engagement staff suggests the following books related to themes of belief systems. In partnership with Octavia Books, links are provided to purchase these titles through this independent bookstore based in New Orleans. For Adults There There by Tommy Orange, Vintage, 2019, ISBN: 9780525436140 https://www.octaviabooks.com/book/9780525436140 Tommy Orange’s wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve… Read More
As a captain in the East India Company army, Linnaeus Tripe produced some of the earliest photographs of India and Burma in the 1850s. Many of his photographs were ultimately set into a series of lavish bound albums that comprised a visual survey of these locations. Read More
Karl Struss was an active member of the pictorialist photography community, which favored soft, dark, and carefully crafted prints. The Faith Healer is a kind of film still on the set of the 1921 silent movie, now lost. Read More
A visitor to the shrine at Lourdes could purchase a photograph as a souvenir, or such images could order one from a photographer’s catalog without ever making the pilgrimage. For a person of faith, viewing this photograph in an album or on the mantle could call up feelings of hope and reverence across time and space. Read More
In 1935, Roman Vishniac was hired by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a leading humanitarian assistance organization, to photograph Jewish communities throughout Eastern Europe. Over the next few years, Vishniac built an extensive visual record of life in these communities, chronicling poverty in major urban centers and small villages alike. Although many of… Read More
A group of Muslim women pray on Hari Parbat in photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. In this arrested the moment, a woman’s rgesture of prayer ooks as if she is releasing the distant clouds into the air like doves. Read More