Friday Nights at NOMA opens the museum’s doors for many interesting activities throughout the year: live music, movies, children’s activities, and more. Regular admission prices apply—NOMA members are FREE—but there is no extra charge for programs or films. All galleries and Café NOMA remain open till 9 pm.

• 5 – 8 pm: Art on the Spot family activity table
• 5:30 – 8:30 pm: Music by Kettle Black
• 6 pm: Besthoff Sculpture Garden Expansion Presentation by Susan Taylor, NOMA’s Montine McDaniel Freeman Director
• 7 pm: Gallery Talk with E. John Bullard, Personalities in Clay: American Studio Ceramics from the E. John Bullard Collection
• 8 pm: Collect-O-Mania Film Series: Adele’s Wish 

ABOUT KETTLE BLACK

The band Kettle Black describes itself as “a quiet dance, a tiny explosion expanding exponentially; it is funky, heartfelt, and unmistakably New Orleans.” The brainchild of Keith Bernstein, alum of the Mumbles, along with members of Toubab Krewe and Antibalas, the band is a double percussion discussion that fans out the African and Cuban influences found in New Orleans music to create a new American songbook.

ABOUT THE BESTHOFF SCULPTURE GARDEN EXPANSION

Join NOMA’s Director, Susan Taylor, as she discusses the 2018 expansion of the Besthoff Sculpture Garden. The privately funded expansion will allow the museum to increase offerings for public programming and the display of sculpture in an environmentally sustainable setting. The six-acre site will house twenty-two new sculptures by twenty-first-century artists. A public Q&A session will follow the presentation. Attendees only present for the Sculpture Garden Expansion presentation and Q&A will receive a free admission wristband upon museum entry after 5 pm.

ABOUT E. JOHN BULLARD

For thirty-seven years, E. John Bullard served as the director of the New Orleans Museum of Art. Since his retirement in 2010, he has actively collected American studio pottery, a portion of which is on view in the exhibition Personalities in Clay: American Studio Ceramics from the E. John Bullard Collection. Bullard will discuss how he has assembled more than 500 ceramic works within a three-year period and the story behind many of the artists represented in his collection. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color, 104-page catalogue, published by NOMA. The catalogue highlights significant work with a two-page spread for each of thirty-two artists in the exhibition, features an essay by John Bullard on his approach to collecting, and is anchored by an essay by Mel Buchanan, NOMA’s RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts and Design that situates the context of the studio ceramics movement.

ABOUT ADELE’S WISH

What inspires a collector and when do personal collections become something more? Join us on select Fridays and Saturdays in January and December for a series of documentaries that tell the stories of passionate collectors who have helped shape the twenty-first-century art museum landscape.

Adele’s Wish chronicles Jewish World War II refugee Maria Altman’s attempts to recover Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I from the Republic of Austria decades after the painting was stolen by Nazi leaders from her family’s home in Vienna. (Not rated | 2009 | 1 hour, 41 minutes) Watch the trailer.

Friday Nights at NOMA is supported in part by grant funds from the Azby Fund; Ruby K. Worner Charitable Trust; New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation; and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council as administered by the Arts Council of New Orleans.