Exhibitions and Collections

The New Orleans Museum of Art’s curatorial initiatives in exhibitions, acquisitions and programming provided our visitors a range of opportunities to engage with art.

• Through the presentation of fourteen exhibitions at NOMA, three of which were accompanied by scholarly catalogues, and four that traveled to regional and national partners, curators examined topics both timely and timeless—touching upon issues of land loss, climate change, and marginalized communities, among others. Nine of the exhibitions were inspired by works in the permanent collection.
• Three exhibition catalogues were published, including Blue Muse: Timothy Duffy’s Southern Photographs (UNC Press), Tina Freeman: Lamentations (ULL Press) and Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana (Yale University Press).
• A highlight of the year was the opening of the 6 ½ acre expansion of the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden on May 15, 2019. Twenty-seven new works were added, bringing the total number of sculptures in the 11 ½ acre site to more than 90, including three commissions: Mississippi Meanders by Elyn Zimmerman, Teresita Fernández Viñales (Mayombe Mississippi) by Teresita Fernández, and Folding the Mississippi by Maya Lin, the latter installed within the Sculpture Garden Pavilion.
• Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana marked the first time in more than forty years that the state was the focus of a landscape exhibition. New scholarship brought insight into the environmental issues of the nineteenth century and the subject of slavery and colonialism.
• NOMA received a generous bequest from the estate of H. Russell Albright, which will support the museum’s photography department. Dr. Albright also bequeathed to NOMA his significant collection of photographs and decorative arts objects, which will enhance two important areas of the museum’s permanent collection.
• Regional exhibitions included Abstract Thoughts| A NOMA/Newman Collaboration at Isidore Newman School from January 31–March 12, 2019, and Noel Rockmore: Portraits and Passions from the New Orleans Museum of Art  at the  Slidell Cultural Center from April 6–May 26, 2019.
• National touring exhibitions of works from NOMA’s permanent collection included Edward Burtynsky: Water at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Trout Gallery at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
• NOMA was among museums selected for a remarkable gift of ninety-three works of industrial design from the collection of broadcasting executive George R. Kravis II, transforming the museum’s twentieth-century design collection.
• More than one hundred portrait miniatures in the Latter-Schlesinger Collection, dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, were displayed  in a new, specially-designed cabinet in the Decorative Arts Galleries. A digital tablet details stories behind these celebrities of their day, the highly-skilled craft of miniature painting, and the Latter family’s interest in portrait miniatures.
• Photographer Tina Freeman paired images of the wetlands of Louisiana and the glacial landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctica in an exhibition titled Lamentations that examined the peril of both ecosystems.
• Keith Sonnier: Until Today was the first retrospective to consider the full arc of the Louisiana-born contemporary artist’s six-decade career.