New Orleans Museum of Art Backgrounder

The New Orleans Museum of Art was founded in 1910 by local businessman Isaac Delgado, and today, its encyclopedic collection includes nearly 40,000 works of art that represent human creativity across different time periods, cultures, and disciplines. The collection is particularly strong in French and American art, photography, glass, African, and Japanese works, and includes a notable group of works by French Impressionist Edgar Degas, who visited his relatives in New Orleans in the 1870s and painted just 20 blocks from the museum. The five-acre Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at NOMA is one of the most important sculpture installations in the United States, with over 65 works situated on a beautifully landscaped site with meandering footpaths, reflecting lagoons, Spanish moss-laden 200-year-old live oaks, magnolias, camellias, and pedestrian bridges. The collection includes works by master sculptors including Claes Oldenberg, Pierre-Auguste Rodin, Fernando Botero, Henry Moore, and Louise Bourgeois, as well as contemporary sculptors Anish Kapoor, Do-Ho Suh, Allison Saar, and Yinka Shonibare. 

Exhibition Schedule 2016-2017

Essence of Things: Design and the Art of Reduction, June 24-September 11, 2016

The Essence of Things, an exhibition of the Vitra Design Museum, brings together 180 objects from 100 years of design history, ranging from humble everyday items like flip-flops and golf balls to conceptual chairs and lamps. This exhibition will explore the many facets of minimalism and demonstrate the highly disparate ways designers have sought to capture "the essential" in an object.

Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection,

October 14, 2016-January 15, 2017

Co-organized by the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, this exhibition examines the evolution of European and American landscape paintings featuring approximately 40 masterpieces spanning five centuries including artists Brueghel, Canaletto, Monet, Cezanne, Klimt and Hockney.

George Dunbar: A Retrospective, November 3, 2016-February 19, 2017George Dunbar: A Retrospective, an exhibition that surveys the career of George Dunbar (American, b. 1927), a New Orleans native who played a pivotal role in introducing abstract art to the South.

A Life of Seduction: Venice in the 1700s, February 17, 2017-May 21, 2017

A Life of Seduction explores the cultural wealth of Venice in the 1700s, the century of Casanova, Canaletto, Tiepolo and countless other figures who spread Venetian taste, style, and lifestyle throughout the world. The exhibition examines paintings, costumes, and decorative arts organized by five themes: A City that Lives on Water, Venice Beyond Venice - Country Life, Celebration of Power, Life in the Palazzo - Art & Style of Aristocratic Life, and the City as Theater - Feasts, Festivals & Carnival.

Making the Modern: Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, June 23, 2017-September 3, 2017

Making the Modern showcases a selection of 20th century paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures recently donated to NOMA by prominent New Orleans gallerist and art collector Arthur Roger. The exhibition celebrates Roger's long career as a collector and gallerist in New Orleans, and explores the rise of modern and contemporary art across the South.

East of the Mississippi, October 5, 2017-January 7, 2018

East of the Mississippi will be the first exhibition to exclusively explore this vivid chapter of America's photographic history through 130 photographs and a handful of paintings from the 1840s to the 1890s.

Media Contact:
Allison Gouaux
(504) 658-4106
agouaux@noma.org
www.noma.org