Past Exhibitions

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

Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories

ended on September 16th, 2018

Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories marks New Orleans’ three-hundredth anniversary by bringing together a group of seven contemporary art projects that focus on forgotten or marginalized histories of the city. Read More

Veronese in Murano: Two Venetian Renaissance Masterpieces Restored

ended on September 3rd, 2018

NOMA is only the second US museum to host this focused exhibition on two recently conserved and rarely seen paintings by the celebrated Italian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), St. Jerome in the Wilderness and St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter.  Read More

Carlos Rolón: Outside/In

ended on August 26th, 2018

Carlos Rolón is internationally recognized for his paintings, sculptures and installations that break down walls. Working with shattered glass, wrought iron fences, and construction cinderblocks, his art takes these barriers to access and transforms them into new points of entry. Outside/In explores the rich connections between New Orleans, Latin America, and the Caribbean through allusions to each region’s natural and built environments. Read More

Lee Friedlander in Louisiana

ended on August 12th, 2018

One of the most famous living American photographers, Lee Friedlander has been visiting Louisiana since 1957 to document New Orleans jazz and to make artful street photographs. Lee Friedlander in Louisiana is the first major exhibition in any institution to examine the full scope and influence of Friedlander’s work in the region on the history of photography. Read More

Personalities in Clay: American Studio Ceramics from the E. John Bullard Collection

ended on July 8th, 2018

In the 20th-century, remarkably creative American potters evolved clay into an expressive art form, free from the confines of function or industrial production. Personalities in Clay: American Studio Ceramics from the E. John Bullard Collection showcases the collection of John Bullard, NOMA’s director emeritus, a promised gift to the New Orleans Museum of Art. This exhibition and catalogue chart the major figures in handmade, studio pottery from 1940 to the end of the 20th century. Read More

Lee Friedlander: American Musicians

ended on June 17th, 2018

Lee Friedlander took promotional portraits for a number of recording companies beginning in the mid-1950s and through the 1970s. Most well-known for his work with Atlantic Records, many of his session photographs became classic jazz, country, and rhythm and blues record album covers. Read More

A Queen Within: Adorned Archetypes

ended on May 28th, 2018

Experimental gowns, headpieces, and jewelry by avant-garde fashion designers Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Gypsy Sport, and Iris van Herpen investigate symbols of womanhood and challenge conventional notions of beauty. More than 100 articles of daring fashion are presented in a dramatic gallery design that explores eight archetypal personality types. Read More

Bror Anders Wikstrom: Bringing Fantasy to Carnival

ended on April 1st, 2018

Bror Anders Wikstrom arrived in New Orleans from Sweden by 1883 and is best remembered as a designer for elaborate Mardi Gras productions. Through the 1880s and 1890s, his fantastical designs elevated the extravaganza of Carnival. This exhibition includes watercolor sketches for parade floats and costumes. Read More

Upcoming Exhibitions

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

on view starting March 13th, 2020

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 April 3rd, 2020

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

New Photography: Create, Collect, Compile

on view starting April 17th, 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

Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds

on view starting October 16th, 2020

Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds is the first comprehensive museum exhibition for the pioneering multimedia artist Dawn DeDeaux. Since the 1970s, DeDeaux’s practice has spanned video, performance, photography, and installation to create art that exists at the edge of the Anthropocene. Anticipating a future imperiled by the runaway population growth, breakneck industrial development, and the looming threat of climate change, DeDeaux has long worked between worlds of the present and the future. Read More

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Current Exhibitions

Tina Freeman: Lamentations

on view through March 15th, 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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