A powerful new voice in contemporary craft, Joyce Lin makes work that is both conceptual and beautifully crafted. For her Ghostwood Chair and Table, commissioned by NOMA, Lin collected driftwood nearby in Louisiana’s Bayou Bienvenue Wetlands. The work’s title references a “ghost forest,” the geographical term for marshes where salty water has encroached into once-verdant swamp forests, leaving a landscape of poisoned trees. Read More

Over three decades, renowned photographer Robert Polidori has photographed Versailles. Together, the pictures document the transformation of the complex from a decadent symbol of imperial grandeur to a modern museum, whose architecture and contents are almost impossible to maintain. In these images we witness what Polidori once called “society’s superego,” an attempt to reconstruct the past according to our own contemporary worldview. His photographs probingly peel back the various layers of history, framing the building and its contents as something very much in the making. Read More

NOMA’s exhibition Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans primarily examines distinctive pots made by Katherine Choy, a national leader in evolving ceramics from utilitarian objects into the purview of expressive fine art. While Choy’s radical work in pottery and her founding of the Clay Art Center in New York will be the lasting legacy of her short career, the artist also made award-winning enamels and had an active career in textile design.  Read More

In 1908, the recently chartered National Child Labor Council hired Lewis W. Hine to make photographs to aid efforts to end exploitative and abusive child labor practices. Hine traveled throughout the country photographing children working long hours and at dangerous tasks in textile mills, factories, meatpacking plants, and mines. Read More

Periods of “Egyptomania”—the madness for things related to ancient Egyptian culture—have occurred in the Western world for the past three thousand years. Read More

Vibrant glazes bubble lusciously, crack sharply, and drip dangerously off the edges of these meticulous little “Weed” Pots by Doyle Lane. In late 2021, the New Orleans Museum of Art welcomed into the permanent collection these seven extraordinary works by Doyle Lane, including two that come as a gift from NOMA Director Emeritus John Bullard’s exemplary collection of American Studio ceramics. These pots become the first works by the celebrated Black Los Angeles potter to join a public collection in the artist’s birth city. Read More

Currently on view in the exhibition The Free Hermit Life: Images of Reclusion and Retirement in Japanese Edo-Period Painting is an enigmatic image: a seated man smiling beatifically, his fingers poised above a stringed instrument—one that has no strings.  Read More

Insightful, funny, wise, and critical, Saul Steinberg’s work often defined profound aspects of the human condition with just a few simple lines of a pencil. At the end of last year, NOMA was the fortunate recipient of a gift of thirty-six works by Steinberg from the Saul Steinberg Foundation. Among them is an excellent group of parade drawings, fitting works for a collection based in New Orleans. Read More