Past Exhibitions

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

John Scott: Blues Poem for the Urban Landscape

ended on January 26th, 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

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

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

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