Friday Nights at NOMA features an exciting lineup of programs in 2020: live music, movies, children’s activities, and more. Regular admission prices apply—NOMA members are FREE—but there is no extra charge for programs or films. All galleries, the Museum Shop, and Café NOMA remain open till 9 pm.

5 – 8 pm | Art on the Spot drop-in activity table

5:30 – 8:30 pm | Music by Shawn Williams Band

6:30 pm | Arts & Letters Series: Nathaniel Rich discusses Losing Earth, joined in conversation with Mark Davis, founding director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy of Tulane University and former director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. A book signing will follow in the Museum Shop.
▶ READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

ABOUT SHAWN WILLIAMS BAND

New Orleans’ pioneering voice in “alt-rock countrybilly serial-killer blues,” Shawn Williams describes her sound as that “of a dirtier-minded Elvis deciding to get it on in the back of some roadhouse saloon with one of those sad-eyed cowboy types that would rather be drinking alone.”

Her debut album Shadow (2017) is a skillfully-mastered collection of originals that moves seamlessly from old-school R&B-inflected rockers to softer, wistful numbers. On recording as in live performance, she conveys a sense of rawness, a depth of feeling, and a lack of pretension that set her apart from the rest of the city’s pool of talented up-and-coming musicians. Aside from her own music, she is also the founder of the all-female Elvis tribute band, Pelvis Breastlies.

ABOUT NATHANIEL RICH

By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change―including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. In Losing Earth, Rich chronicles their story, and ours.

The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon―the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight. Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

Rich is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine; his essays on literature appear regularly in the Atlantic, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books. His reported pieces have appeared in various anthologies, including the Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is the author of three novels: King Zeno (2018); Odds Against Tomorrow (2013); and The Mayor’s Tongue (Riverhead, 2008).

ABOUT MARK DAVIS

Davis spent 14 years as executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, where he helped shape programs and policies at the state and federal level to improve the stewardship of the wetlands and waters of coastal Louisiana. He has practiced law in Indianapolis, the District of Columbia and Chicago and has taught at the Indiana University (Indianapolis) School of Business and the IIT-Chicago Kent School of Law in Chicago.

Friday Nights at NOMA is presented by The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate and supported in part by grant funds from the Azby Fund; Ruby K. Worner Charitable Trust; New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation; and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council.