ended on October 9th, 2022
This exhibition, drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection, explores themes of retirement and reclusion in Edo-period Japanese painting. The works on view look to longstanding Chinese and Japanese artistic traditions of seclusion and exile to comment on larger social issues of the time. Read More
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
ended on July 4th, 2021
A selection of recently bequeathed photographs from the collection of Dr. H. Russell Albright represents the core of NOMA’s modern and contemporary photography collection. Read More
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
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
ended on April 11th, 2021
In 2019, the New Orleans Museum of Art commissioned Philadelphia-based artist Roberto Lugo to create “Stunting,” a set of three ceramic pots inspired by NOMA’s traditional collection. Best known for cultural mash-ups that blend contemporary social issues with traditional porcelain pottery, Lugo’s powerful commentary on poverty, inequality, and racial injustice has made him a defining artist for our moment. Read More
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
on view starting November 6th, 2026
“Danielle Mckinney: Shelter” is a survey exhibition of paintings spanning the last six years of the artist’s practice, offering a collective understanding of the artist’s gift for weaving together art history, emotionally resonant subjects, and beautifully rendered paintings. Read More
on view starting November 20th, 2026
“Confluence” presents a selection of photographs from the 1840s to the present day—with concentrations in European and American modernism, photographs by women makers, surrealism, and nineteenth-century landscapes—all part of the promised bequest of the photography collection of Tina Freeman to the New Orleans Museum of Art. Read More
on view through February 14th, 2027
“Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection” offers an immersive look at the influential tradition in Japanese art, featuring nearly 60 works drawn from the collection of Alice Yelen Gitter and the late Dr. Kurt A. Gitter, as well as selections from NOMA’s collection. Read More
Watch as Chief Bassey Nsa introduces himself to visitors of the “New African Masquerades” exhibition and honors Dr. Jordan A. Fenton, an Ekpe Society Chief and exhibition co-curator. Read More