Past Exhibitions

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

Stela of Nakhi, “Servant in the Place of Truth”, Offering to Osiris and Anubis

Queen Nefertari’s Egypt

ended on July 17th, 2022

Queen Nefertari’s Egypt brings to life the role of Nefertari and other powerful women in ancient Egypt through 230 exceptional objects, including statues, jewelry, vases, papyrus, steles, wooden coffins, and stone sarcophagi, as well as tools and various items of daily life from the artisan village of Deir-el-Medina, home to those who created the royal tombs. Read More

Ancestors in Stone

ended on July 10th, 2022

A recently acquired akwanshi stone monolith from the Cross River region of Nigeria forms the centerpiece of a focus exhibition featuring stone as a material used in ancestral veneration among West African cultures. Read More

Atomic Number Thirteen: Aluminum in 20th-Century Design

ended on April 17th, 2022

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

An aerial photograph shows New Orleans and the Northshore following the opening of the Bonnet Carré Spillway. Land is represented in red and water is represented in blue.

A Brief History of Photography and Transmission

ended on March 20th, 2022

While it may seem that the story of photography traces an inevitable arc from a unique material experience toward an infinitely reproducible phenomenon, it could be argued that one of the most important “histories” of photography is the history of deliberate efforts to improve how a photograph gets from “here” to “there.” While the stresses and realities of the present moment make the topic more relevant than ever, the portability of a photographic object or the transmission of its image has occupied the thoughts of photographic inventors, artists, and publishers throughout the past two hundred years. Read More

Ishimoto Yasuhiro: Centennial Selections

ended on March 20th, 2022

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ishimoto Yasuhiro (Japanese, born United States, 1921–2012), NOMA presents a selection of works from its collection that reveals the artist’s capacity for capturing humanity with both empathy and detachment, as well as his playful sense of humor and skill as a picture-maker. Read More

Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds

ended on January 23rd, 2022

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

Orientalism: Taking and Making

ended on January 2nd, 2022

Drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection, this installation addresses shades of oppression, racism, and superficial cultural understanding layered in 19th-century Orientalist paintings, photographs, and decorative arts. Read More

Rural Occupations: Images of Work in Edo-Period Art

ended on November 28th, 2021

Lively and engaging images of urban and rural workers populate the works of art created during the Edo and Meiji periods on view in this exhibition. In idealized scenes created to confirm governmental authority and societal stability, as well as in closely observed records of individuals undertaking specific tasks, the lives and labors of workers in pre-modern Japan are the focus of the artists’ attention. Read More

A person stands in the museum Great Hall listening to an audio installation

Marta Rodriguez Maleck: Morir es Vivir

ended on October 3rd, 2021

Morir es Vivir (To Die is to Live) is a sound and light installation that weaves together voices from across the New Orleans community. The audio collage, presented in NOMA’s Great Hall, is the result of a series of conversations in which New Orleans-based artist Marta Rodriguez Maleck held space for people who wanted to express their grief and loss, contemplate mortality and rebirth, and explore the potential for healing and hope. Read More

New Photography: Create, Collect, Compile

ended on June 6th, 2021

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

ended on May 31st, 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

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