Friday Nights at NOMA opens the museum’s doors for many interesting activities: live music, movies, children’s activities, and more.

• 5 to 8pm: Art On the Spot
• 6 to 8pm: Music: New Orleans Opera Association.
• 6:30pm: Lecture: Professor Rachael DeLue of Princeton University: Seeing Nature, Knowing the World: Landscape in Europe & American, 1600 to Now

About Seeing Nature, Knowing the World: Landscape in Europe and America, 1600 to Now

Why paint a landscape? In this lecture, Dr. Rachael DeLue considers this question, characterizing the manner in which European and American artists from various time periods and regions approached the representation of nature as a unique way of seeing and understanding the world. Focusing on works from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection, Dr. DeLue discusses how translating nature in all its vastness and complexity into pictorial form through paint and canvas—as a geographer would with topographic surveys and maps—provided these artists and their audiences with a way of deriving profound meaning from nature’s infinitely varied phenomena and forms.

About Rachael Z. DeLue

Rachael Z. DeLue is Associate Professor of art history at Princeton University.  She specializes in the history of American art and visual culture, with particular focus on intersections among art, science, and the history and theory of knowledge.  She is currently at work on a study of Charles Darwin’s diagram of evolution in On the Origin of Species as well as a book about impossible images.  She serves as the editor-in-chief of the Terra Foundation Essays, and she edited Picturing (2016), the first volume in the series.  Publications include George Inness and the Science of Landscape (2004), Landscape Theory (2008, co-edited with James Elkins), and Arthur Dove: Always Connect (2016).