Past Exhibitions

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

Monochromes: Japanese Zen Paintings and Ceramics

ended on February 11th, 2024

In this exhibition, Zen paintings and calligraphies created during the Edo period (1603–1867) and monochrome or unglazed ceramics produced primarily during the past fifty years are presented in dialogue with each other. Read More

Ring Redux: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection

ended on February 4th, 2024

The ninety international artists represented in Ring Redux: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection imagine jewelry as a thought-provoking medium, resonating with contemporary art, design, craft, and technology. Read More

Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour

ended on November 26th, 2023

Take a broad look at fashion history with an emphasis on the spirit of innovation and the diversity of the United States’s fashion heritage. The exhibition spotlights over 100 American designers and brands with garments from the 19th century to present day. Read More

Arte Sacra: Roman Catholic Art from Portuguese India

ended on July 30th, 2023

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

Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club

ended on May 7th, 2023

Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club explores the connection between African American artist Jacob Lawrence and his contemporaries based in West Africa through the Nigerian publication Black Orpheus. The exhibition features over 125 objects, including Lawrence’s little-known 1964–65 Nigeria series, works by the artists featured in Black Orpheus, archival images, videos, and letters. Read More

Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans

ended on April 16th, 2023

Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans mines New Orleans archives and gathers oral histories in the first monographic review of an artist that was celebrated by the 1950s American craft world. NOMA’s exhibition is the first presentation of Choy’s extraordinary ceramics in New Orleans since the artist’s Louisiana friends mounted the Katherine Choy Memorial Show at the Orleans Gallery in fall 1959. Read More

Anne Noggle: Herself

ended on February 19th, 2023

Trained as a pilot, Anne Noggle’s fearless and adventurous spirit is also seen in her second career as a photographer, curator, and educator. As an artist, Noggle often turned her camera to herself to document and explore the aging process for women. Read More

Robert Polidori: Recollections

ended on February 12th, 2023

Robert Polidori: Recollections presents a selection of photographs from the largest private collection of prints by Robert Polidori (Canadian-American, born 1951). Read More

Picture Man: Portraits by Polo Silk

ended on January 22nd, 2023

For more than three decades, Selwhyn Sthaddeus “Polo Silk” Terrell (American, born 1964) has been photographing Black New Orleans, creating a unique body of work that blends elements of portraiture, fashion, performance, and street photography. This exhibition explores how Polo Silk successfully blends all of those elements, while illustrating his role as an important part of photographic history. Read More

Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers

ended on January 8th, 2023

From photography’s beginnings in the United States, Black studio photographers operated on the developing edge of the medium to produce beautiful portraits for their clients, while also making a variety of other photographic work in keeping with important movements like pictorialism, modernism, and abstraction. Called to the Camera illustrates the artistic virtuosity, social significance, and political impact of Black photographers working in commercial portrait studios during photography’s first century. Read More

Louise Bourgeois: Paintings

ended on December 31st, 2022

Louise Bourgeois: Paintings is the first comprehensive exhibition of paintings produced by the iconic French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) between her arrival in New York in 1938 and her turn to sculpture in the late 1940s. Read More

The Pursuit of Salvation: Jain Art from India

ended on October 9th, 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

Upcoming Exhibitions

No Upcoming Exhibitions.

Current Exhibitions

View All Current Exhibitions

Exhibition Videos

View All Exhibition Videos