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… 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,… 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… 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,… 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… 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… 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… 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… Read More
In the winter of 1937 the Ohio River overran its banks and flooded the land between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cairo, Illinois, killing almost four hundred hundred people and displacing approximately… Read More
When the reporter and newspaper editor Jacob Riis purchased a camera in 1888, his chief concern was to obtain pictures that would reveal a world that much of New York… Read More
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… 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… 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… 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… 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