With a body like a polished stone and a handle reminiscent of indigenous Mexican animal figures, a recently acquired teapot seems to be of both nature and man, both ancient and modern. This elegant 1941 teapot by the prominent African American Modernist sculptor Sargent Claude Johnson is an extraordinary new addition to NOMA’s decorative arts collection. Read More
As NOMA considers the various aspects of sustainability this week, this three-picture story looks at an unsustainable resource and practice: coal and its extraction. As an unrenewable fossil fuel that remains the number one source of carbon emissions globally, the reliance on coal is unsustainable, but so is the human toll that its extraction exerts…. Read More
Berenice Abbott began her Changing New York project in 1929, an effort to document the city’s transformation as New York entered a new period of demolition and redevelopment. Read More
John Moyer Heathcote was an amateur painter and photographer in Norfolk, England, where he likely took this photograph of a windmill. Heathcote documented architecture and rural scenes, compiling photographs in albums including his 1853 Anglia Illustrata. This ghostly image is not a page from that book, but rather the paper negative used to produce a… Read More
NOMA’s vast collection of photography includes numerous examples of religious practices captured on film. Featured here are eight selections —ranging from an evangelistic preacher in 1930s-era Harlem to Muslim women in mid-century Kashmir — chosen by Brian Piper, Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator for Photography, and Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings…. Read More