More Than $82 Million Awarded for Arts Projects Nationwide
NEW ORLEANS, LA—National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu has approved more than $82 million to fund local arts projects and partnerships in the NEA’s second major funding announcement for fiscal year 2016. Included in this announcement is an Art Works award of $25,000 to the New Orleans Museum of Art to further research for NOMA’s upcoming exhibition Louisiana Landscapes in the Wider World. The Art Works category supports the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing work, lifelong learning in the arts, and public engagement with the arts through 13 arts disciplines or fields.
“The arts are all around us, enhancing our lives in ways both subtle and obvious, expected and unexpected,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “Supporting projects like the one from NOMA offers more opportunities to engage in the arts every day.”
“Louisiana Landscapes in the Wider World will be the first major exhibition of this subject in over thirty years, and the only exhibition that places Louisiana landscape painting in a national and international context,” said Susan M. Taylor, NOMA’s Montine McDaniel Freeman Director. “This upcoming presentation offers a new global vision of American landscape painting and shows the connections not just between North and South, but between the United States, Europe, and Central and South America.
The exhibition, slated to open in 2018, will bring together over 70 works of art from public and private collections across Louisiana, the United States, Europe, and Central America to reveal Louisiana’s role in a global narrative about the emergence of landscape painting. Drawing from a range of media including painting, photography, natural history illustration, and the decorative arts, the exhibition will include iconic American landscape paintings by Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, and Frederic Edwin Church shown alongside those by the Louisiana painters they influenced and inspired. Several large-scale murals completed by the experimental early 20th century Louisiana landscape painter Alexander John Drysdale will also be put on public view for the first time in decades.
About NOMA and the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden
The New Orleans Museum of Art, founded in 1910 by Isaac Delgado, houses nearly 40,000 art objects encompassing 5,000 years of world art. Works from the permanent collection, along with continuously changing special exhibitions, are on view in the museum’s 46 galleries Fridays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The adjoining Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden features work by over 60 artists, including several of the 20th century’s master sculptors. The Sculpture Garden is open seven days a week: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden are fully accessible to handicapped visitors and wheelchairs are available from the front desk. For more information about NOMA, call (504) 658-4100 or visit www.noma.org. Wednesdays are free admission days for Louisiana residents, courtesy of The Helis Foundation. (May not include special exhibitions.) Teenagers (ages 13-19) receive free admission every day through the end of 2016, courtesy of The Helis Foundation.
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