on view through December 31st, 2020
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
on view through December 31st, 2020
Produced for the New Orleans Museum of Art, this new series of fifteen paintings by Torkwase Dyson are inspired by the design systems of architecture, water infrastructure, the oil and gas industry, and the physical impact of global warming. The exhibition also examines the legacy of plantation economies and their relationship to the environmental and infrastructural issues of our current age, which many characterize as the “plantationocene.” Read More
on view through March 7th, 2021
Over the past two decades, the ways in which we create, collect, and compile photographs have shifted dramatically. In broad strokes, we might define this shift as away from photographs as singular, iconic, and private objects to a ubiquitous, public, and collective phenomenon that is now often immaterial. This exhibition presents the work of four photographers, all of whom work with, and critique, these new practices in photography. Unified by their understanding of the photograph as an ambiguous messenger, each of these artists creates, collects, or compiles photographs to trace narratives about identity, community, and power. Read More
on view through June 20th, 2021
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
on view through June 20th, 2021
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
on view through April 18th, 2021
In 2019, the New Orleans Museum of Art commissioned Philadelphia-based artist Roberto Lugo to create “Stunting,” a set of three ceramic pots inspired by NOMA’s traditional collection. Best known for cultural mash-ups that blend contemporary social issues with traditional porcelain pottery, Lugo’s powerful commentary on poverty, inequality, and racial injustice has made him a defining artist for our moment. Read More
on view through January 31st, 2021
Mending the Sky brings together eleven artist projects that envision our world after disaster. The exhibition takes its title from a Chinese fable in which a rip in the sky causes the earth to split open, bringing floods, fires, famine, and disease—until a goddess takes on the arduous task of mending the broken sky. Read More
on view through December 31st, 2020
Working with natural elements like earth, wind, water and fire, the contemporary artists in Ear to the Ground show how nature can spur artistic innovation and spark new thinking about human culture and community. Read More
on view through December 31st, 2020
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
on view starting March 6th, 2021
Nearly seventy of the finest examples of Asian art in the United States, collected by John D. Rockeller 3rd and his wife Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller between the 1940s and ’70s, will be showcased in an exhibition on loan from the Asia Society Museum. The extraordinary range of bronzes, ceramics, and metalwork reveals great achievements in Asian art spanning more than two millennia. Read More
ended on November 15th, 2020
Yemeni-Bosnian artist Alia Ali explores cultures at geographic crossroads. Her work considers how politics, economics and histories collide in fabric patterns and techniques, showing how fabric both unites and divides us. Focusing on wax print fabric—a form with roots in Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Javanese, Dutch and African traditions—FLUX captures the way textiles move and migrate across different cultures. Read More
In conjunction with New Photography: Create, Collect, Compile, one of the four represented artists in the exhibition, Guanyu Xu, spoke with Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings. Born and raised in Beijing in a seventeenth-floor apartment of a military housing complex, Guanyu Xu (Chinese, b. 1993) came to the United States… Read More
