Past Exhibitions

Dawoud Bey: Elegy

ended on January 4th, 2026

Through the interweaving of three photographic series—”Stony the Road “(2023), “In This Here Place” (2019), and “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2017)—Bey offers a framework through which to conceptualize the landscapes of Virginia, Louisiana, and Ohio (respectively) not merely as sites of a troubled history, but also as places that still hold the memories of our shared American past. The exhibition also includes two films: “Evergreen” (2019) and “350,000” (2023). Read More

The View from Here: Women Photographers of the American Landscape

ended on January 4th, 2026

The photographs included in “The View From Here: Women Photographers of the American Landscape”—all of which are from NOMA’s permanent collection—illustrate some of the exceptional diversity of landscape photographs made by women artists working in the United States since the year 1900. Read More

Delicate Sights: Photography and Glass

ended on July 14th, 2025

This exhibition looks at several processes and formats of photography made on glass surfaces—ambrotypes, magic lantern slides, and glass plate negatives—illustrating ways that glass facilitates the production and presentation of photographs, and offering a chance to consider its unique visual qualities. Read More

John Scott: Blues Poem for the Urban Landscape

ended on June 29th, 2025

One of the most globally renowned artists in the history of New Orleans, John T. Scott worked in a variety of media, including the monumental prints that make up the artist’s series Blues Poem for the Urban Landscape. This installation of ten woodcut prints in NOMA’s Great Hall includes that entire series, in which Scott uses the landscape form to visualize the history and visual cacophony of New Orleans. Read More

Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home

ended on February 2nd, 2025

Founded in 2007, Prospect New Orleans is a citywide triennial exhibition of contemporary art featuring artists from Louisiana and around the globe. For P.6, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn has created a two-channel film made in collaboration with musician Thảo Nguyễn and New Orleans-based producer and director Marion Hoàng Ngọc Hill. Read More

Rebellious Spirits: Prohibition and Resistance in the South

ended on January 5th, 2025

Rebellious Spirits: Prohibition and Resistance in the South explores the unique methods in which the South, in particular New Orleans, dealt with the passage of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which banned alcohol in the United States. Read More

Come! Come! Come!: A Triptych by Wang Qingsong

ended on November 29th, 2024

The contemporary artist Wang Qingsong creates elaborately staged large-format photographs that focus on the dramatic social, political, and cultural changes in China in the post-Mao era. Qingsong’s 2005 triptych Come! Come! Come!, on view in the Stafford Gallery this spring, both documents and comments upon the embrace of capitalism and the rapid Westernization of China in the 1990s through the early 2000s. Read More

Double Space: Women Photographers and Surrealism

ended on August 4th, 2024

On the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto, The New Orleans Museum of Art presents works by six women photographers whose work explores the subconscious mind, blurs the boundary between reality and dreams, or magnifies the uncanny in everyday life. Drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection, works by Ilse Bing, Ruth Bernhard, Lola Alvarez-Bravo, Carlotta M. Corpron, Florence Henri, and Lee Miller illustrate ways that women pushed the boundaries of surrealist art. Read More

Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined

ended on July 14th, 2024

This major solo exhibition of work by Wangechi Mutu brings together nearly one hundred sculptures, paintings, collages, drawings, and films to present the breadth of the Kenyan–American artist’s multidisciplinary practice from the mid-1990s to today. Read More

Debbie Fleming Caffery: In Light of Everything

ended on May 5th, 2024

Including nearly 100 dramatic black-and-white photographs installed in three distinct spaces of the museum, In Light of Everything is the first career retrospective for the important Louisiana-born photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery. The exhibition presents examples from her most important series made in the American South, Mexico, and France, from the 1970s to the present. Read More

Upcoming Exhibitions

Sèvres Magnifique: French Porcelain from the Collection of Thomas B. Lemann

on view starting February 28th, 2026

France’s royal porcelain factory at Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, has for nearly 300 years produced both decorative and useful ceramic objects of exemplary craft. Creating vases, tea sets, plates, and bowls that signified wealth, power and opulence to the eighteenth-century French court at Versailles, Sèvres factory artists worked alongside chemists and the best sculptors of the Rococo era to produce fine porcelain with luscious glazes in a range of colors. This exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art celebrates the bequest of a superb group of Sèvres porcelain from New Orleans collector Thomas B. Lemann. Read More

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Current Exhibitions

Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity

on view through May 3rd, 2026

Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity is the first monographic exhibition dedicated to the work of American modernist, Hayward L. Oubre, Jr. (1916–2006). Born in New Orleans in 1916, Oubre became the first student to graduate with a bachelor of fine arts degree from Dillard University. Through 52 sculptures, paintings, and prints, the exhibition reveals how the artist shaped American art while working in the South, and underscores the crucial role of Black artists and art departments at HBCUs in shaping the artistic landscape of the twentieth century. Read More

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Exhibition Videos

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