NOMA’s book club meets monthly to discuss fiction and non-fiction books related to art in the museum’s collection and exhibitions.

This month’s book club selection is George Valentine Dureau: Life and Art in New Orleans, an expansive and beautiful survey of one of New Orleans’s most accomplished and provocative artists by Howard Philips Smith.

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About NOMA’s Book Club

NOMA’s book club is an informal group open to anyone on a month-to-month basis. You do not have to attend every meeting or read every book to participate. In addition to monthly book discussions, the book club meets periodically for curatorial programs related to the book selections. 

Books are selected in advance and planned according to the museum’s exhibition schedule. Participants are expected to procure their own copy of the titles. Selections are also available at the NOMA Museum Shop, where museum members receive a 10% discount.

Meetings are held in person or via Zoom. All meetings begin at 12 pm. For more information or questions, please email programs@noma.org.

About the Book

George Valentine Dureau: Life and Art in New Orleans

New Orleans artist George Valentine Dureau (1930–2014) has always been an enigma. His status as an important artist gained momentum beginning with his first exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, then the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, in the mid-1960s. Not only did his career undergo a meteoric rise, but his work proved at once controversial and provocative, nuanced and groundbreaking. Critics and collectors embraced his bold images, describing them as sexual, sensual, exploitative, erotic, iconoclastic, and innovative. Beneath the surface, Dureau was even more complex as a person and persona, as he crafted a sensational character out of his artistic acumen. His reputation dimmed after his death, but in recent years his importance, and that of the New Orleans art scene he occupied, has once again been recognized.

George Valentine Dureau: Life and Art in New Orleans reassembles the pieces of Dureau’s puzzle-work life. The complexity of his life came together in the studio, where he created some of the most important artworks of the latter twentieth century. This lush publication features 100 large-format photographic plates, most of which have never been seen or published and surprisingly some in color. There are more than 200 illustrations and two essays to accompany the plates, along with a special section devoted to the artists and artwork of 1980s New Orleans, featuring hundreds of additional photographs, and several appendices of supplementary materials, such as interview transcripts, a timeline of Dureau’s life and career, a map of important locations, and a section on relevant art publications, invitations, and posters.

-description from University Press of Mississippi

About the Author

Howard Philips Smith is a writer, novelist, and photographer, known primarily for his historical works, which focus on expanding the scope of gay history, especially in New Orleans. He is author of George Valentine Dureau: Life and Art in New Orleans, Unveiling the Muse: The Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans, and A Sojourn in Paradise: Jack Robinson in 1950s New Orleans, all published by University Press of Mississippi. His first novel, which is a work of historical fiction about the gay community in 1980s New Orleans, is The Cult of the Mask: The Strange and Delectable Tale of Life Among the Sybarites. His photography was included in Louisiana Lens: Photographs from The Historic New Orleans Collection by John H. Lawrence.