Friday Nights at NOMA features an exciting lineup of programs in 2019: 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, the Museum Shop, and Café NOMA remain open till 9 pm.

• 5 – 8 pm | Art on the Spot drop-in activity table
• 5:30 pm | Gallery Talk with Curator Katie Pfohl on Bodies of Knowledge
• 6:30 pm | Artist lecture with Wilmer Wilson
• 7:30 pm | Activation of Brève braises with artist Manon Bellet and musician Justin Peake

ABOUT WILMER WILSON

Wilmer Wilson IV is among the eleven international artists represented in Bodies of Knowledge. In his 2012 film Black Mask, shown on continuous loop in the exhibition, Wilson slowly obscures his face with black Post-it notes, asking us to consider the paradoxical ways in which black bodies are both hyper-visible and at the same time erased from dominant histories and narratives. At the end of the video, the artist peels off all of the sticky notes, save one, envisioning how we might make more visible bodies that are often marked by absence. The video is placed into conversation with book publications that document the artist’s self-designed Running Tour performances. Created as a subtle parody of a tourist guidebook, Wilson snaps photographs without halting his stride along routes that include well-known sightseeing spots as well as indistinct, ostensibly unremarkable locations. Filled with blurred, disorienting images, these books make tangible the tension between traditional forms of historic preservation and the lived experience of contemporary cities. Taken together, Black Maskand Wilson’s running tours present the body not as a vehicle for self-portraiture, but rather as a social site able to adapt to and shape the environment it inhabits, imagining how we might reconfigure the collective spaces, histories, and experiences of places such as New Orleans.

ABOUT BRÉVE BRAISES

In the installation Brève braises, artist Manon Bellet affixes the charred remains of burned paper on the walls of the gallery in the exhibition Bodies of Knowledge. From these tattered remains, she creates a script or musical score that runs across an entire length of a long white wall. Created in collaboration with musicians that Bellet invites to compose an accompanying musical score, these burned fragments of paper have a graphic dynamism and rhythm that resembles that of improvisational music or impromptu speech. Over the course of her installation, she allows these papers gradually drop to the floor, encouraged by movement of air generated by the improvisational energy of bodies and instruments as their movement and vibrations activate the installation.

Musician Justin Peake will participate in this activation. He is a New Orleans-based drummer, composer,  technologist, visual artist, researcher, and educator.

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.