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 – 8 pm | Music by the Susanne Ortner Trio
• 6 pm | Gallery Talk with Curatorial Fellow Brian Piper on You Are Here: A Brief History of Photography and Place
• 6:30 pm | Gallery Talk with Curatorial Fellow Allison Young on Keith Sonnier: Until Today

ABOUT THE SUSANNE ORTNER TRIO

Clarinetist/saxaphonist Susanne Ortner will join guitarist Nahum Zdybel and bass player James Singleton for a performance titled “Last Stop Sehnsucht,” featuring acoustic music from disparate traditions. Driven by an “addictive yearning” for deep connection, this stellar trio explores often overlooked twentieth-century repertoire from disparate traditions in an inside/outside kind of way – and with great sensitivity, communication, and fire.

For Susanne Ortner, a desire to find the similar in the different has lead to an exploration of a myriad of musical traditions, as well as collaborations and international concert tours with numerous musicians — mostly in the intimate duo or trio format — such as Belgian Gypsy icon Tcha Limberger, accordionist/pianist Alan Bern, multi-instrumentalist Vince Giordano, pianist Tom Roberts and many others. She was the founder of the German klezmer quartet Sing Your Soul, and collaborates with American klezmer and jazz musicians, mostly in the intimate duo and trio format.

Nahum Thelonious Zdybel is a New Orleans-based guitarist, improviser, and composer who restlessly shifts roles between innovative explorer of improvised music, creative indie rock sideman, and ardent revivalist of early jazz styles and repertoire. Attracted to musical settings that are intimate and sincere, Nahum deploys a playful, hyper-sensitive approach to re-imagine material from disparate musical traditions as baffling combustions of spontaneity and subtle cleverness. Correspondingly at home amongst jazz tunes, free improvisations, original works, and early twentieth-century American music, Nahum is an inventive musician who regards with equal fondness and irreverence his relationship with early jazz, hardcore punk, and unstructured improvisation.

Composer/Double bassist/bandleader James Singleton has been ubiquitous on the New Orleans music scene for more than forty years. He has performed, toured, and recorded in many styles from the earliest New Orleans traditions to R&B, blues, and all imagined types of jazz to punk rock and the avant-garde. The New Orleans traditions he most adheres to are invention, making it new, and making it deep.

ABOUT YOU ARE HERE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND PLACE

You Are Here: A Brief History of Photography and Place both embraces and challenges the photograph’s role as a faithful record of place, examining photography’s successes and failures in rendering, and sharing, fragments of the world. Drawn almost exclusively from NOMA’s permanent collection, the exhibition traces a history of photography from the origins of the medium to the present. Throughout, You Are Here explores photographs of place, photographs in place, and photographs about place, in the hopes of leading us to think more deeply about how photography mediates our experience of the world and other people in it.

ABOUT KEITH SONNIER: UNTIL TODAY

Now in its final days, closing Sunday, June 2, NOMA hosts the first comprehensive museum survey for Keith Sonnier, a pioneering figure in conceptual, post-minimal, video and performance art of the late 1960s. Born in Grand Mamou, Louisiana, in 1941, Sonnier was one of the first artists to incorporate light into sculpture: an innovation that forms the foundation of his subsequent work.

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.