Art and nature in harmony
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Admission is free. Donations are appreciated.
Open seven days a week
Summer Hours (April–September) 10 am–6 pm | Winter Hours (October–March) 10 am–5 pm
Wheelchairs may be used throughout our barrier-free property and are available upon request.
Image: Elyn Zimmerman’s Mississippi Meanders bridge is illuminated at dusk.
The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden occupies approximately eleven acres in City Park adjacent to the museum. Atypical of most sculpture gardens, this garden is located within a mature existing landscape of pines, magnolias, and live oaks surrounding two lagoons. The garden design creates outdoor viewing spaces within this picturesque landscape. Originally conceived in 2003, the Sculpture Garden doubled in size in 2019 and has grown to include more than 90 sculptures. READ MORE
Sydney and Walda Besthoff are the namesake visionary founders behind a world-renowned sculpture garden for New Orleans.
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Architects, landscape architects, lighting designers, and arborists were among the contractors who made it all possible.
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See highlights of the Sculpture Garden in a virtual tour produced in partnership with the Google Arts & Culture Initiative.
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You can play a role in the historic expansion of the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden by making a gift to support the project.
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Relive the excitement of the grand opening of the Besthoff Sculpture Garden expansion in May 2019.
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Bronze
Pablo Casals’s Obelisk, a towering accumulation of welded bronze cellos, dominates the waters of a lagoon in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden. Standing over twenty feet tall, the Obelisk, built in homage to the world-renowned Spanish-Puerto Rican cellist and human rights activist Pablo Casals, is an imposing example of monumental sculpture by French-born artist Arman.
The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art offers detailed entries on 64 artworks in the original 2003 garden, as well as a bibliography and overview of the garden’s founding. 192 pages, hardcover. Edited by Miranda Lash. $49.95
A throwback to the earliest days of "Afropolitan: Contemporary African Arts at NOMA" 🌍️🏛️🎨
The exhibition "Afropolitan" closes at @neworleansmuseumofart this Sunday, 9/13. Don`t miss your last chance to see this incredible display of works by pioneering African artists working across the 20th and 21st centuries.
🔗 Learn more about the exhibition at the link in our bio.
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Yesterday (9.9) marked American artist Sol LeWitt`s (1928-2007) birthday 🎂
LeWitt worked in a variety of mediums during his life, including "structures" (his preferred term for sculpture), printmaking, painting, drawing, and more.
Regarded as one of the most accomplished practitioners of Minimalism, LeWitt`s work often bridges Minimalism and Conceptual art through his manipulation of elemental shapes and colors, creating complex structures from fundamental forms.
In one example of this, LeWitt`s "Inverted Spiraling Tower" (in @neworleansmuseumofart`s permanent collection) forms a stalactite-like structure that hangs from the ceiling and hovers just above the ground.
The stark geometry of the artist`s work here illustrates how his practice often echoed generative and transformative natural processes, from the formation of crystals to the construction of DNA.
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🎨: Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007), "Inverted Spiraling Tower," 1987. Painted wood. Gift of Sydney and Walda Besthoff, 2012.12
📍: Second floor
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During the 17th century, international court artists including Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck revolutionized Flemish painting, using oil paint to create atmospheric turbulence and softer effects on flesh, alike.
Thomas Willeboirts-Bosschaert, who worked primarily in Antwerp, followed suit in works including "Venus Mourning the Death of Adonis," shown here. Derived from the myth told in Ovid`s "Metaphorphosis," Adonis is attacked by a wild boar while hunting. Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, hears the handsome Adonis`s cries for help but arrives on the scene too late to save him from his fate.
In Willeboirts-Bosschaert depiction of the scene, oil paints are used to both render the flesh of the painting`s titular subjects more delicately, grounding them in their human (and, in the case of Adonis, mortal) forms, while also creating a stormy, almost otherworldly appearance of the sky in the background. The work exemplifies the multifaceted function of oil paints in the Flemish tradition.
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🎨: Thomas Willeboirts-Bosschaert (Flemish, 1614-1654), “Venus Mourning the Death of Adonis,” n.d., oil on canvas. Museum purchase, Deaccessioned Art Fund, 2011.26
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@neworleansmuseumofart LABOR DAY HOURS
The New Orleans Museum of Art will be closed today, 9/7, in observance of Labor Day. The Besthoff Sculpture Garden will be open today from 10 AM to 3 PM.
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📸: @meganelizabethgallery
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Gordy composed this preliminary study for his "Senegal Series" over a decade before painting "Senegal" (part of @neworleansmuseumofart`s permanent collection).
The artist`s 1962 sketchbook, which is on view in the first gallery of the exhibition "Robert Gordy: Outside the Mainstream" at NOMA, contains several other sketches and mixed media renderings of what would later become this iconic series of works.
Looking to re-energize his artistic practice in the late 1970s, Gordy began to "look at [his] early work and to pick up some of the things that hadn`t loaned themselves to `[his] style" at that moment in his career and artistic practice.
Gordy first encountered African art through the lens of the French modernists, but his travels to Morocco (as well as his personal and professional connections with the owners of New Orleans`s Davis Gallery) led to a deeper engagement with the field, leading to works including "Senegal" and the development of Gordy`s own African art collection.
Learn more about this work and the development of Gordy`s artistic style with a visit to "Robert Gordy: Outside the Mainstream" this weekend.
🔗 More information about the exhibition can be found at the link in our bio.
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🎨: Robert Gordy, "Study for `Senegal Series,`" 1962. Mixed media on paper. Bequest of Robert Gordy, 88.250.
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OPENING 10/2 AT @neworleansmuseumofart: "Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection"
"Second Nature" offers new insights and perspectives into Rinpa, one of the most distinctive schools of painting from Japan’s Edo period (1615–1868). Rinpa artists combined specialized ink painting techniques with a shimmering, polychrome palette in compositions to create scenes from nature.
By using iconic signifiers of particular seasons as their subject matter, Rinpa artists participated in the creation of Japan’s “second nature”: a symbolic herbarium that evoked the flow of time and the range of human feeling. As a form of collective cultural memory, Japan’s second nature formed a set of motifs central to the Rinpa repertoire.
The exhibition features nearly 60 hanging scrolls, folding screens, fan paintings, and hand scrolls drawn from the collection of Alice Yelen Gitter and the late Dr. Kurt A. Gitter, as well as selections from NOMA’s collection. It also includes a selection of important works by artists including Kōrin, Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558-1637), Tawaraya Sōtatsu (ca. 1600-1640), and more.
The Patron & Member Preview for "Second Nature" will take place on Thursday, 10/1, from 5:30 to 8 PM.
🔗 Learn more and view all upcoming events related to the exhibition at the link in our bio.
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"Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection" is organized by NOMA and curated by Yukio Lippit, The Jeffrey T. Chambers and Andrea Okamura Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. The exhibition is sponsored by the Blakemore Foundation. Additional support is provided by Harvey and Marie Orth and E. John Bullard.
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🎨: Sakai Hōitsu (Japanese, 1761–1828), “Triptych of Flowers and the Rising Sun,” after 1824. Hanging scrolls, ink and color on silk, 104.4 x 40.9 cm. each. Gitter-Yelen Collection. Photo courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art.
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