Current Exhibitions

Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds

on view through January 23rd, 2022

Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds is the first comprehensive museum exhibition for the pioneering multimedia artist Dawn DeDeaux. Since the 1970s, DeDeaux’s practice has spanned video, performance, photography, and installation to create art that exists at the edge of the Anthropocene. Anticipating a future imperiled by the runaway population growth, breakneck industrial development, and the looming threat of climate change, DeDeaux has long worked between worlds of the present and the future. Read More

An aerial photograph shows New Orleans and the Northshore following the opening of the Bonnet Carré Spillway. Land is represented in red and water is represented in blue.

A Brief History of Photography and Transmission

on view through March 20th, 2022

While it may seem that the story of photography traces an inevitable arc from a unique material experience toward an infinitely reproducible phenomenon, it could be argued that one of the most important “histories” of photography is the history of deliberate efforts to improve how a photograph gets from “here” to “there.” While the stresses and realities of the present moment make the topic more relevant than ever, the portability of a photographic object or the transmission of its image has occupied the thoughts of photographic inventors, artists, and publishers throughout the past two hundred years. Read More

Atomic Number Thirteen: Aluminum in 20th-Century Design

on view through April 17th, 2022

When chemists first successfully extracted aluminum from the earth in the mid-19th century, the raw element was as precious as gold. Today we take this ubiquitous material for granted, though aluminum allows for nearly every facet of modern life through its use in architecture, industry, and flight. This exhibition, drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection, explores the changing role of aluminum in twentieth-century design. Read More

Ishimoto Yasuhiro: Centennial Selections

on view through February 6th, 2022

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ishimoto Yasuhiro (Japanese, born United States, 1921–2012), NOMA presents a selection of works from its collection that reveals the artist’s capacity for capturing humanity with both empathy and detachment, as well as his playful sense of humor and skill as a picture-maker. Read More

The Pursuit of Salvation: Jain Art from India

on view through May 15th, 2022

The Jain faith has been continuously practiced in India since at least the sixth century BCE. Nonviolence, a respect for all living beings, and the belief in the existence of a permanent soul whose true nature is obscured by accumulated karma are core principles of Jainism. Created over a period of more than fifteen hundred years — the second through nineteenth centuries — the sculptures, paintings, and manuscripts on view in this exhibition of works loaned from the collection of Dr. Siddharth Bhansali illuminate iconographic and stylistic change as well as regional variation.  Read More

Arte Sacra: Roman Catholic Art from Portuguese India

on view through May 15th, 2022

In the centuries following the arrival of Francis Xavier, a Catholic missionary, in 1542, the state of Goa in western India became the administrative and economic center of a Portuguese empire that extended west to Africa and east to Malaysia, China, and Japan. The vast trade networks established by the Portuguese and Spanish allowed not only for the spread of Christianity, but also an unprecedented artistic exchange within these colonial empires. This exhibition, from the collection of Dr. Siddharth Bhansali, reveals both the global influence of European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles, as well as the transformation of these styles in the hands of Indian artists creating a new visual tradition. Read More

Ancestors in Stone

on view through December 31st, 2021

A recently acquired akwanshi stone monolith from the Cross River region of Nigeria forms the centerpiece of a focus exhibition featuring stone as a material used in ancestral veneration among West African cultures. Read More

Orientalism: Taking and Making

on view through January 2nd, 2022

Drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection, this installation addresses shades of oppression, racism, and superficial cultural understanding layered in 19th-century Orientalist paintings, photographs, and decorative arts. Read More

Upcoming Exhibitions

Stela of Nakhi, “Servant in the Place of Truth”, Offering to Osiris and Anubis

Queen Nefertari’s Egypt

on view starting March 18th, 2022

Queen Nefertari, the royal wife of Pharaoh Ramesses II (reigned 1279–13 BCE), is linked to some of the most magnificent monuments of ancient Egypt. Appearing in sculpture and images, and identified in inscriptions on buildings associated with Ramesses II, she is also known through a complete temple consecrated to her in Abu Simbel, beside the one dedicated to her husband. Her tomb is the largest and most richly decorated in the Valley of the Queens. It was discovered in the early 20th century by a team of archaeologists led by Ernesto Schiaparelli, then director of the Museo Egizio in Turin. Read More

View All Upcoming Exhibitions

Past Exhibitions

Rural Occupations: Images of Work in Edo-Period Art

ended on November 28th, 2021

Lively and engaging images of urban and rural workers populate the works of art created during the Edo and Meiji periods on view in this exhibition. In idealized scenes created to confirm governmental authority and societal stability, as well as in closely observed records of individuals undertaking specific tasks, the lives and labors of workers in pre-modern Japan are the focus of the artists’ attention. Read More

View All Past Exhibitions

Exhibition Videos

View All Exhibition Videos