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
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
NOMA’s vast collection of photography includes numerous examples of religious practices captured on film. Featured here are eight selections —ranging from an evangelistic preacher in 1930s-era Harlem to Muslim women in mid-century Kashmir — chosen by Brian Piper, Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator for Photography, and Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings…. 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
Throughout his career, Ansel Adams was always interested in gravestones. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s, Adams photographed old carved headstones in cemeteries from California to New England. He viewed these markers as “profoundly human.” Read More
Between World Wars I and II, James Van Der Zee was one of the most popular photographers in Harlem, New York. Known primarily for his portraits, Van Der Zee also worked for a wide range of clients outside of his studio, including a variety of Harlem’s diverse faith communities. Read More
John Genin’s panoramic portrayal of a leisurely day at the beach in Surf Bathing, Grand Isle (c. 1885–1890) is a scene familiar to generations of Louisianians who have enjoyed carefree excursions to Louisiana’s only inhabited island in the Gulf of Mexico. Read More
A unique camera-less photograph NOMA’s collection was part of an extensive project to document plants from Great Britain and British colonies like Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). This cyanotype illustrates an early example of how important photography would become in our attempts to learn about and protect the natural world. Read More
In the pantheon of Catholic saints, St. Joseph holds a special place of devotion among many New Orleanians. On his feast day of March 19, Sicilian Americans in south Louisiana have long built elaborate food-laden altars of bread, fish, fruits, vegetables, pastas, cookies, and other non-meat Lenten specialties as a carryover tradition from Europe. Churches… Read More
Equal parts sculpture and costume, the wearable Soundsuits of artist Nick Cave appear to defy convention and physics. Two of these wildly imaginative works are on view in the pavilion of NOMA’s Besthoff Sculpture Garden. New Orleans’ own Mardi Gras Indians are among the artist’s inspirations, which are rooted in both whimsy and vulnerability. Read More