The distinctive swishing, clinking sound of ice cubes and liquid jostling inside a cocktail shaker is a joyful part of mixing up a daiquiri or a French 75. NOMA’s collection includes two American chrome cocktail shakers that date from around 1930, during an era known for the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. But with some irony, the Prohibition era slo saw Americans drinking more distilled liquor than they ever had before. Read More

In the United States, Ishimoto Yasuhiro is perhaps best known for his street photography—in particular his fascination with the people and environs of Chicago. This photograph is typical of Ishimoto’s street work, in that he most often turned his view perpendicular to whatever street he stood on (as opposed to looking down the thoroughfare towards a horizon) to better to capture the people and buildings that interested him. He rarely staged his photographs, but rather took notice of what was in front of him and carefully composed a picture in his mind. Read More

Way Over There Inside Me (Ocean as a super throughway #4) layers dense, minimal shapes, diagrammatic lines, and thick textures of graphite, acrylic, charcoal, and ink over washes of deep blue paint. Within her practice, Dyson has developed a unique vocabulary of abstract lines, forms, shapes, and edges inspired by the design systems of architecture, water infrastructure, the oil and gas industry, and the physical impact of global warming. Read More

Facing the greenery of City Park, the majestic Spirit Gates at NOMA stand as a testament to centuries of artistic achievement by Black artists in New Orleans. While the gates poetically celebrate the city’s jazz traditions and ironwork craft, in this artwork John T. Scott also addressed a history of racial segregation in the City Park, and by extension, the New Orleans Museum of Art. Read More

On September 3, 1916, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson of the Royal Air Force was on night patrol in his biplane, when he spotted the wooden-framed Schütte-Lanz airship outside of London. It was one of sixteen that had launched from Germany for the largest air raid over England. Robinson first lost the airship in the clouds, but found it again and made three attack runs on it. During the third, the airship burst into flames and crashed into a field. Read More

This month, Ida Kohlmeyer’s painted aluminum sculpture Rebus 3D-89-3 returns to the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, newly refreshed from structural repairs and brandishing a brand new coat of paint. The expert restoration—undertaken by Kohlmeyer’s longtime fabricator G. Paul Lucas of Lucas Limited in Louisburg, Kansas—brings the work back to its intended brilliancy and allows us to appreciate the work of one of Louisiana’s most influential and enigmatic abstract artists anew. Read More

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. Read More

In 2002, the Vållö watering can’s designer, Monika Mulder, was asked to solve a clunky logistics issue. Her result is a graceful work of art. The challenge was that a standard watering can’s handle, pouring spout, and cavity take up a large volume of space. For IKEA, a company organized around the principle of using thoughtful design to address shipping efficiency in furniture, this excess volume was a big deal. The design request was for a watering can that could be stacked, one within another, which saved tremendously on international transportation costs. Read More

Skylar Fein’s immersive installation Remember the UpStairs Lounge commemorates the 1973 arson at a popular gay bar in the French Quarter. Fein, whose work has long explored New Orleans’ many diverse subcultures and informal communities, recreated the space of the UpStairs Lounge to offer a haunting memorial to the event and those impacted by the tragedy. Read More

In this work, by Okuhara Seiko (Japanese, 1837–1913), an orchid in full bloom sits atop a wooden plant stand—a “scholar’s rock” at its feet adjacent to a stack of traditionally bound books and a Chinese-style vase holding an ornamental reishi mushroom. The objects are closely associated with the furnishings and decor of a scholar’s study, and represent—individually and in the aggregate—a scholar’s intellectual curiosity and taste. Read More

A pair of six-fold screens by Kano Tsunenobu (1636-1713) in NOMA’s collection that depicts the labor involved in rice cultivation throughout the year has provided both the title and focus of the current exhibition in the Japanese galleries: Rural Occupations: Images of Work in Edo-Period Art. Images of urban and rural workers were popular painting themes during the Edo period (1615-1868), created largely for patrons within the governing classes: the military rulers, or shoguns; the daimyo (provincial leaders akin to governors); and the samurai.  Read More

When chemists first successfully extracted aluminum from the earth in the 1850s, the raw element was as precious as gold. Today we take aluminum for granted, though it allows for nearly every facet of modern life through its use in architecture, industry, and transportation. From the nineteenth century until today, artists and designers have increasingly turned to aluminum because its unique properties–lightweight, strong, can be pressed thin, resistant to corrosion–allow for the exploration of new ideas through objects. Read More

Symbols of Communication is a large-scale, bas-relief mural by Enrique Alférez, a Mexican artist who lived and worked in New Orleans. The mural celebrates the diversity of human culture, and showcases our desire to share our stories and connect with one another through language. Read More