ended on March 7th, 2021
Working with natural elements like earth, wind, water and fire, the contemporary artists in Ear to the Ground show how nature can spur artistic innovation and spark new thinking about human culture and community. Read More
ended on January 31st, 2021
Mending the Sky brings together eleven artist projects that envision our world after disaster. The exhibition takes its title from a Chinese fable in which a rip in the sky causes the earth to split open, bringing floods, fires, famine, and disease—until a goddess takes on the arduous task of mending the broken sky. Read More
ended on January 10th, 2021
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
ended on November 15th, 2020
Yemeni-Bosnian artist Alia Ali explores cultures at geographic crossroads. Her work considers how politics, economics and histories collide in fabric patterns and techniques, showing how fabric both unites and divides us. Focusing on wax print fabric—a form with roots in Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Javanese, Dutch and African traditions—FLUX captures the way textiles move and migrate across different cultures. Read More
ended on 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
ended on August 11th, 2019
This exhibition of works from NOMA’s permanent collection explores photography’s complicated relationship to the places it represents, the places in which it is created, and the places in which we experience it. Read More
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
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
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
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
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
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
on view starting February 10th, 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
on view starting July 21st, 2023
From cowboy boots and bathing suits to Hollywood gowns and streetwear, Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour presents American fashion as a powerful emblem of global visual culture. Read More
on view through August 20th, 2023
This exhibition includes important works recently given to the New Orleans Museum of Art by Diane and Charles L. Frankel, collectors who have long been interested in African art, from the historical to the contemporary. Read More
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. Read More
