Past Exhibitions

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

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

Upcoming Exhibitions

Sèvres Magnifique: French Porcelain from the Collection of Thomas B. Lemann

on view starting February 28th, 2026

France’s royal porcelain factory at Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris, has for nearly 300 years produced both decorative and useful ceramic objects of exemplary craft. Creating vases, tea sets, plates, and bowls that signified wealth, power and opulence to the eighteenth-century French court at Versailles, Sèvres factory artists worked alongside chemists and the best sculptors of the Rococo era to produce fine porcelain with luscious glazes in a range of colors. This exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art celebrates the bequest of a superb group of Sèvres porcelain from New Orleans collector Thomas B. Lemann. Read More

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Current Exhibitions

Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity

on view through May 3rd, 2026

Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity is the first monographic exhibition dedicated to the work of American modernist, Hayward L. Oubre, Jr. (1916–2006). Born in New Orleans in 1916, Oubre became the first student to graduate with a bachelor of fine arts degree from Dillard University. Through 52 sculptures, paintings, and prints, the exhibition reveals how the artist shaped American art while working in the South, and underscores the crucial role of Black artists and art departments at HBCUs in shaping the artistic landscape of the twentieth century. Read More

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