Past Exhibitions

Torkwase Dyson: Black Compositional Thought | 15 Paintings for the Plantationocene

ended on April 19th, 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

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend

ended on March 15th, 2020

Born of resourcefulness and enlivened by improvisation, quilts made by African American women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are recognized as masterful works of textile art. Read More

An Ideal Unity: The Bauhaus & Beyond

ended on March 15th, 2020

This selection of works from NOMA’s permanent collection will celebrate the centennial of the founding of the Bauhaus, the world-renowned school in Weimar-era Germany that endeavored to unify art, architecture, craft, and design. Including diverse media by Bauhaus teachers and students, this exhibition will show the breadth of the Bauhaus’ influence and its role as one of the most pivotal movements in modern design. Read More

Regina Agu: Passage

ended on February 9th, 2020

Passage is an immersive, site-specific installation created for the New Orleans Museum of Art by contemporary artist Regina Agu and marks her first solo museum show. Inspired by the historical form of the panorama, Agu’s 100-foot-long installation weaves together imagery of waterways from across Louisiana to consider how the landscapes, people, and histories of the region are connected by and through water. This installation was created in partnership with A Studio in the Woods, through an artist residency. Read More

Inspired by Nature | Japanese Art from the Permanent Collection

ended on February 3rd, 2020

The arts of Japan are inseparably associated with nature, whether through themes and subjects associated with seasonal change or through the shape, material, and decoration of objects. This installation focuses on flower and bird subjects, a particularly popular theme during the Edo (1615–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods and one that continues to find enduring resonance in the modern era. Read More

Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana

ended on January 26th, 2020

Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana is the first major exhibition featuring Louisiana landscape painting in more than forty years. Inventing Acadia reveals Louisiana’s role in creating—and exporting—a new vision for American landscape painting in the nineteenth century that was vastly different from that found in the rest of the United States. Read More

Bodies of Knowledge

ended on October 13th, 2019

Bodies of Knowledge brings together eleven international contemporary artists to reflect on the role that language plays in archiving and asserting our cultural identities. Working with materials that range from books and silent film to ink, ashes, and musical scores, these artists counter more staid and static ways of representing our collective pasts. Read More

Timothy Duffy: Blue Muse

ended on August 4th, 2019

Timothy Duffy creates one-of-a-kind direct positive tintype portraits of American musicians using an American photography process that goes back to the nineteenth-century. Despite the importance of these musicians and the national legacy they represent, they remain little known, often outpaced by other popular performers who have built their own careers on top of the “roots” of these musicians and their ancestors. Read More

Paper Revolutions: French Drawings from the New Orleans Museum of Art

ended on July 14th, 2019

Paper Revolutions: French Drawings from the New Orleans Museum of Art traces the politics of draftsmanship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This selection features works on paper by celebrated painters Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, as well as lesser-known artists, such as Nicolas Lejeune. Read More

Keith Sonnier: Until Today

ended on June 2nd, 2019

NOMA hosts the first comprehensive museum survey for Keith Sonnier, a pioneering figure in conceptual, post-minimal, video and performance art of the late 1960s. Born in Grand Mamou, Louisiana, in 1941, Sonnier was one of the first artists to incorporate light into sculpture: an innovation that forms the foundation of his subsequent work. Read More

Bondye: Between and Beyond

ended on May 27th, 2019

Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard created twelve sequined prayer flags inspired by the religious rituals of Vodou in a cultural exchange with Haitian artists in Port-au-Prince. Read More

Mildred Thompson: Against the Grain

ended on March 31st, 2019

Against the Grain marks the first solo museum presentation of the experimental wood works of the American artist Mildred Thompson (1936-2003) in more than thirty years. Made during the artist’s self-imposed exile in Europe, Thompson’s wood pictures are only recently being rediscovered and presented in the United States. Read More

Best Seat in the House: Photographs by Del Hall

ended on March 17th, 2019

Del Hall’s career in photojournalism took him from his home in New Orleans around the world. As an Emmy Award-winning news cameraman and film editor, Hall pioneered the use of moving images on television news, and he applied the same perceptive and sensitive vision to take incredible still photographs. Read More

The Orléans Collection

ended on January 27th, 2019

In celebration of the city of New Orleans Tricentennial, NOMA presents The Orleans Collection, an exhibition of selections from the magnificent collection of the city’s namesake, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. This exhibition reunites a representative group of forty European masterpieces from the Duke’s collection, gathered from museums and galleries across the US and Europe, to tell the complex story of the collection’s formation, reputation, dispersal, and impact for later generations. Read More

Teaching Beyond Doctrine: Painting and Calligraphy by Zen Masters

ended on January 20th, 2019

Painting and calligraphy by Zen monks has a long history in Japan. Introduced from China in the twefth century, Zen (meaning “meditation”) has its origins in the teachings of the Buddha, the sixth-century BCE Indian prince who taught that it was possible to be freed from suffering and the cycles of rebirth. Read More

Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred.

ended on January 6th, 2019

Lina Iris Viktor is widely recognized for her exploration of art’s connection to history, spirituality, and prophecy. Recasting factual and fantastical narratives surrounding America’s involvement in the founding of Liberia, Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred. explores a mythicized history of the West African nation. Read More

Upcoming Exhibitions

New Photography: Create, Collect, Compile

on view starting November 6th, 2020

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

Buddha and Shiva, Lotus and Dragon: Masterworks from the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection at Asia Society

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

Atomic Number Thirteen: Aluminum in 20th-Century Design

on view starting May 7th, 2021

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

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Current Exhibitions

Tina Freeman: Lamentations

on view through October 11th, 2020

Over the past seven years, Tina Freeman has photographed the wetlands of Louisiana and the glacial landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctica. In Lamentations, Freeman pairs images from these disparate regions in a series of diptychs that function as stories about climate change, ecological balance, and the connectedness of disparate landscapes across time and space. Read More

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