Friday Nights at NOMA opens the museum’s doors for many interesting activities throughout the year: 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 and exhibitions, Café NOMA, and the Museum Shop remain open till 9 pm.

• 5 – 8 pm: Art on the Spot family activity table
• 6 – 8:30 pm: Music by the New Orleans Opera Association’s Opera on Tap
• 6 pm: Gallery Talk with Mary Niall Mitchell on “The Photographer and the Cityscape in the 1850s” within the exhibition East of the Mississippi
• 7 pm: Landscape on Film Screening: Days of Heaven

ABOUT OPERA ON TAP

In October 2007 the Big Easy partnered with the Big Apple to make New Orleans the first official Opera on Tap franchise. Each season, the New Orleans Opera presents the finest young local and regional singers in casual, 90-minute concerts of opera, Broadway and more. Now in its eleventh season, Opera on Tap–New Orleans is attracting people from around the world. 

ABOUT MARY NIALL MITCHELL

Mary Niall Mitchell is the Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Chair in New Orleans Studies, Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History, and Associate Professor of History at the University of New Orleans where she co-directs the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies. She will deliver a Gallery Talk on “The Photographer and the Cityscape in the 1850s,” with emphasis on Philadelphia photographer James McClees and New Orleans photographer Jay Dearborn Edwards.

Mitchell is the author of Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (NYU Press, 2008). Her latest book project, The Slave Girl in the Archive, is a study of race, photography, slavery, and memory in the nineteenth century.  Mitchell is one of three lead historians for Freedomonthemove.org, a collaborative database of fugitive slave advertisements housed at Cornell University.  She has written for the New York Times Disunion blog, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and Common-place.org. She has received fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the J. William Fulbright Foundation.

ABOUT DAYS OF HEAVEN

In conjunction with East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography, three films with dramatic landscapes will be screened. In Days of Heaven, a steelworker, Bill (Richard Gere) flees Chicago after a fight with his boss, taking his little sister, Linda (Linda Manz) and girlfriend, Abby (Brooke Adams) with him to the rural Texas panhandle. Terrence Malick’s screen poem about life in America at the turn of the century is a story of love and murder told through the voice of a child and expressive images of nature in 1916. (Rated PG | 1 hour, 35 minutes | Watch the trailer)

Friday Nights at NOMA is 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 as administered by the Arts Council of New Orleans.