The Helis Foundation Lecture: Regina Agu with Tia-Simone Gardner
2019-12-18 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Chicago)
Regina Agu’s installation of Passage in NOMA’s Great Hall marks the first museum show for the contemporary artist. In a lecture sponsored by The Helis Foundation, Agu will discuss the environmental and historical themes in her creation of panoramas with Tia Simone-Gardner. Admission is free to all Louisiana residents on Wednesdays courtesy of The Helis Foundation.
Passage was created in partnership with A Studio in the Woods, through an artist residency.
ABOUT REGINA AGU
Regina Agu’s recent work investigates the complex relationships between the landscape and communities of color, with a special focus on the U.S. Gulf Coast region. Her practice employs a variety of tactics and theories drawn from black geographies, critical geography, conceptual writing, and poetry. Her research often involves site exploration and working with and through archives. Agu produces texts, photographs, and drawings, in addition to installations, performances, and collaborative public projects. Her work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, and performances nationally. In 2018, Agu was a Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses fellow at the University of Houston, a Lawndale Artist Studio Program resident, and was awarded a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans through a partnership with For Freedoms. Agu received a 2017 Artadia Houston award and was a 2016-2017 Open Sessions participant at The Drawing Center. Agu was the co-director of Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run art space in Third Ward, Houston, which received a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Agu is the founder of the Houston-based WOC Reading Group, and her other collaborative projects include Friends of Angela Davis Park and the Houston-based independent small press paratext.
ABOUT TIA-SIMONE GARDNER
Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar from Birmingham, Alabama. Her practice is interested interdisciplinary strategies that activate ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. Gardner received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. Gardner participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Studio Fellow and has been an invited artist to a number of national and international artist residencies including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden. She has also been awarded a number of fellowships for her work including the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. She is currently working on a project on Blackness and the Mississippi River as well as a photographic/writing project with her mother that addresses questions of biopolitics, Black memory and Indigineity by looking at the houses that the women in her family lived in the post-bellum South. Gardner currently lives in Minneapolis.

Christmas Eve Holiday Hours
2019-12-24 10:00 - 15:00
The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden will be open on December 24 from 10 am to 3 pm.

Closed for Christmas
2019-12-25 10:00 - 18:00
NOMA and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden will be closed on Wednesday, December 25, in observance of Christmas.

New Year's Eve Special Holiday Hours
2019-12-31 11:00 - 17:00
The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden will be open on December 31st from 11 am to 5 pm.

New Year's Day Special Holiday Hours
2020-01-01 11:00 - 17:00
The museum and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden will be open on January 1 from 11 am to 5 pm.

Museum Highlights Tour
2020-01-02 13:00 - 14:00, 2020-02-01 13:00 - 14:00
NOMA docents guide visitors on hour-long tours of either the permanent collection or special exhibitions. Tours are free with NOMA admission. Meet in the Great Hall to join in.
Special group tours can be arranged with two-weeks advance notice. Call Tracy Kennan, Curator of Education, at 504.658.4113.

Besthoff Sculpture Garden Tour
2020-01-03 12:00 - 13:00
Join NOMA’s docents for a free guided tour of the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden on Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays, weather dependent, at noon. (Call 504.658.4153 to verify.) Sited on eleven acres adjacent to the museum, the garden contains more than ninety works by renowned sculptors placed among a picturesque mature grove of pine, magnolia, and moss-draped live oak trees bisected by a lagoon. Represented sculptors include Pierre Auguste Renoir, Rene Magritte, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, George Rodrigue, and Robert Indiana, among others. Meet at the gates to the garden, which offers free admission year-round.

Gallery Talk: Tina Freeman: Lamentations with Curator Russell Lord
2020-01-08 12:00 - 13:00
Gallery talks are casual conversations between artists, curators, and other special guests with NOMA visitors frequently scheduled throughout the year. Louisiana residents receive free admission to NOMA on Wednesdays courtesy of The Helis Foundation.
Join Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photography, for a discussion about the exhibition Tina Freeman: Lamentations, a seven-year photo-documentation of Louisiana’s wetlands and the glacial landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic by Tina Freeman.
Image: 20180402_Svalbard_103 Sea ice breaking up in late winter | 20170404_Wetland_Aerials_002 Louisiana wetlands southeast of New Orleans on the east side of the river, south of the Caernarvon diversion

NOMA Book Club Curatorial Program
2020-01-09 12:00 - 13:00
Join fellow book lovers as we read and discuss fiction and nonfiction books related to art, artists, art museums, NOMA’s collections and exhibitions. Our full 2020 schedule and reading list has been announced.
Organized by NOMA’s Felix J. Dreyfous Library, the Book Club is an informal group. You do not have to attend every meeting and we understand if you have to leave a discussion or program early. The book club offers several types of programs: a book discussion group that meets once a month (no reading in December), curatorial programs, field trips, and Meet the Author receptions. Most book club programs start promptly at noon, but please arrive at 11:30 a.m. if you wish to bring a sack lunch or meet beforehand. NOMA will provide water and soft drinks.
RSVP for the meetings you wish to attend so we can prepare the meeting space.
Please contact NOMA’s Education Department at 504.658.4128 or education@noma.org for information about joining the NOMA Book Club.
January 2020
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert Picador
Henry Holt & Comany, 2015, ISBN: 1250062187
Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. In prose that is frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Providing a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes, Kolbert shows how the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 12 – 1 pm | CURATORIAL PROGRAM with Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photography
THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 12 – 1 pm | BOOK DISCUSSION

Friday Nights at NOMA: Gallery Talks about Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana
2020-01-10 17:00 - 21:00
Friday Nights at NOMA features an exciting lineup of programs in 2020: 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 – 8:30 pm | Music by Susanne Ortner and Catherine Bent
6 pm | Exhibition walkthrough of Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana with Curator Katie Pfohl
7 pm | Gallery Talk about Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana with Curator Nic Aziz
7:30 pm | Gallery Talk about Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana with Project Coordinator Dorthy Ray of the 1811 Slave Rebellion Reenactment
ABOUT SUSANNE ORTNER AND CATHERINE BENT
The duo of Susanne Ortner on reeds and Catherine Bent on cello will perform in the Great Hall. New Orleans-based German clarinetist and saxophonist, and composer Susanne Ortner is equally conversant in jazz, classical, and a variety of ethnic music. Catherine Bent is a Berklee College of Music professor who found herself in Brazil, with no Portuguese to speak of available to her, but she quickly was embraced by the choro community in Rio de Janeiro. Choro is a string-based music genre, so even though Bent didn’t speak the language, her instrument did the communicating for her.
ABOUT INVENTING ACADIA: PAINTING AND PLACE IN LOUISIANA
A variety of tours and discussions related to Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana will be conducted, with particular emphasis on the portrayal of African Americans in nineteenth-century landscape paintings of the state. Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana is the first major exhibition featuring Louisiana landscape painting in more than forty years. Exploring the rise of landscape painting in Louisiana during the nineteenth century, the exhibition reveals Louisiana’s role in creating—and exporting—a new vision for American landscape painting that was vastly different from that found in the rest of the United States. The exhibition shows how landscape painters from across the globe came together in Louisiana to form a new school of landscape painting that rivaled all others in the country.
Friday Nights at NOMA is presented by The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate and 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.

Gallery Talk: Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana with Jeffery Darensbourg
2020-01-11 12:00 - 13:00
Gallery talks are casual conversations between artists, curators, and other special guests with NOMA visitors frequently scheduled throughout the year. Join writer Jeffery Darensbourg as he discusses works on view in Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana.
Jeffery Darensbourg is a resident artist at Studio in the Woods, an arts collective based in a forested area on the Westbank of Orleans Parish. Darensbourg is an enrolled member and tribal councilperson of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of mixed Native and Louisiana Creole ancestry. He is interested in the knowledge of flora, fauna, and people his ancestors carried with them and wishes to connect this sort of Louisiana-specific knowledge to the knowledge urban Natives such as himself have in negotiating indigeneity. His work explores the intersections of cultural studies and mixed ethnicity. He describes himself as an “Editor-Who’s-not-a-Chief” of the zine Bulbancha Is Still a Place: Indigenous Culture from New Orleans.

Gallery Talk: Curator Ndubuisi Ezeluomba on Ancestors in Stone
2020-01-15 12:00 - 13:00
Gallery talks are casual conversations between artists, curators, and other special guests with NOMA visitors frequently scheduled throughout the year. Louisiana residents receive free admission to NOMA on Wednesdays courtesy of The Helis Foundation.
Join Ndubuisi Ezeluomba, Françoise Billion Richardson Curator for African Art, for a discussion about the exhibition Ancestors in Stone.

The Helis Foundation Artist Talk: Teresita Fernández
2020-01-15 18:00 - 19:30
Join artist Teresita Fernández for a discussion about her work as part of The Helis Foundation Artist Talk series. Fernández’s 60-foot mosaic mural Viñales (Mayombe Mississippi) is among the works on view in the expansion of the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden.
Fernández’s work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, monumental works are often inspired by a rethinking of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Often referencing the natural world, Fernández’s practice emphasizes the connection between place and material by using gold, graphite, iron-ore, and other minerals that have loaded historical ties to colonization and the violence embedded in the landscape. She is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Fernández’s works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; among others. Fernández’s mid-career museum retrospective, Teresita Fernández: Elemental, is currently on view at Pérez Art Museum Miami and will tour throughout the United States. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Admission to NOMA is free for all Louisiana residents on Wednesdays courtesy of The Helis Foundation.

Friday Nights at NOMA: Arts & Letters Series with Nathaniel Rich discussing Losing Earth | Music by Shawn Williams Band
2020-01-17 17:00 - 21:00
Friday Nights at NOMA features an exciting lineup of programs in 2020: 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 – 8:30 pm | Music by Shawn Williams Band
6:30 pm | Arts & Letters Series: Nathaniel Rich discusses Losing Earth, joined in conversation with Mark Davis, founding director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy of Tulane University and former director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. A book signing will follow in the Museum Shop.
▶ READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
ABOUT SHAWN WILLIAMS BAND
New Orleans’ pioneering voice in “alt-rock countrybilly serial-killer blues,” Shawn Williams describes her sound as that “of a dirtier-minded Elvis deciding to get it on in the back of some roadhouse saloon with one of those sad-eyed cowboy types that would rather be drinking alone.”
Her debut album Shadow (2017) is a skillfully-mastered collection of originals that moves seamlessly from old-school R&B-inflected rockers to softer, wistful numbers. On recording as in live performance, she conveys a sense of rawness, a depth of feeling, and a lack of pretension that set her apart from the rest of the city’s pool of talented up-and-coming musicians. Aside from her own music, she is also the founder of the all-female Elvis tribute band, Pelvis Breastlies.
ABOUT NATHANIEL RICH
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change―including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. In Losing Earth, Rich chronicles their story, and ours.
The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon―the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight. Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.
Rich is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine; his essays on literature appear regularly in the Atlantic, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books. His reported pieces have appeared in various anthologies, including the Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is the author of three novels: King Zeno (2018); Odds Against Tomorrow (2013); and The Mayor’s Tongue (Riverhead, 2008).
ABOUT MARK DAVIS
A widely consulted and quoted authority on water law and management, Mark Davis joined Tulane Law School in 2007 as a senior research fellow and founding director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy. In 2017 he also became the director of Tulane’s ByWater Institute which is focused the interdisciplinary aspects of water stewardship and community resilience. He lectures widely on water resource management, is directly involved in helping Louisiana overhaul its long-term water planning and has testified frequently before Congress on the need for a focused and effective commitment to the viability of coastal Louisiana and other vital natural treasures.
Davis spent 14 years as executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, where he helped shape programs and policies at the state and federal level to improve the stewardship of the wetlands and waters of coastal Louisiana. He has practiced law in Indianapolis, the District of Columbia and Chicago and has taught at the Indiana University (Indianapolis) School of Business and the IIT-Chicago Kent School of Law in Chicago.
Friday Nights at NOMA is presented by The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate and 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.

Beyond Gee's Bend: A Community Quilting Workshop
2020-01-18 10:00 - 15:00
Join New Orleans community quiltmakers for a hand-quilting workshop inspired by The Quilts of Gee’s Bend exhibition. The program will include demonstrations and talks by textile artists and a music performance. Tulane Law School’s Dr. Elizabeth Townsend Gard will speak on copyright issues, her provenance workbook project, and her popular community podcast Just Wanna Quilt.
Just Wanna Quilt started as a research project at Tulane Law School. It is now a wide community of quilters learning about their art, copyright, and other intellectual property issues. The popular podcast includes interviews with more than 300 quilt-related people—makers, scholars, historians, inventors, and lawyers.
This workshop is sold out.
For additional information, contact the NOMA Education department at education@noma.org or 504.658.4128.

Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Special Hours
2020-01-20 12:00 - 17:00
The museum and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden will be open on January 20 for special holiday hours from noon to 5 pm.

Museum Selfie Day at NOMA
2020-01-21 10:00 - 18:00
Tuesday, January 21, 2020 is #MuseumSelfieDay! Post your selfie at NOMA for a chance to win a one-year Friends & Family membership to the museum.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE
• Follow NOMA on Instagram @neworleansmuseumofart
• Take your selfie* at NOMA
*Although selfie means a photo taken of oneself, photos taken by a friend are also allowed
• Geotag “New Orleans Museum of Art” or “NOMA’s Besthoff Sculpture Garden”
• Use the hashtags #explorenoma and #museumselfieday2020
• Post your selfie on Instagram by 6 PM on Tuesday, January 21
• NOMA will post the winning selfie on our Instagram Stories to announce the winner of the one-year individual museum membership!
• Any language that is sexist, racist, ableist, etc. will result in disqualification.
Photo courtesy of Instagram user @leighfresina

Gallery Talk: Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana with Assistant Curator Anne Roberts
2020-01-22 12:00 - 13:00
Gallery talks are casual conversations between artists, curators, and other special guests with NOMA visitors frequently scheduled throughout the year. Louisiana residents receive free admission to NOMA on Wednesdays courtesy of The Helis Foundation.
Join Assistant Curator Anne Roberts for a discussion about the exhibition Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana.
Image: Henry Chapman Ford, Water Lilies and Spanish Moss, 1874, Oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in., Collection of Fred and Jennifer Hebee

Friday Nights at NOMA: Inventing Acadia Artist Perspective with Hannah Chalew | Gallery Talk and book signing with Southerly Gold
2020-01-24 17:00 - 21:00
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 – 8:00 pm | Music by free feral
6 pm | Artist Perspective on Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana with Hannah Chalew
6:30 pm | Gallery Talk and book signing with Southerly Gold
READ MORE ABOUT THE ARTISTS
7 pm | Torkwase Dyson in conversation with Leronn Brooks with an introduction by Allison Young
READ MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST
8 – 8:30 pm | Performance by Serpentine Choir
ABOUT SOUTHERLY GOLD
In conjunction with the exhibition Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana, an ensemble of photographers known as Southerly Gold will present an installation in the Evelyn L. Burkenroad Creative Concept Studio that revisits many of the locations in south Louisiana painted by landscape artists in the 19th-century. Formed in 2011, Southerly Gold consists of Aubrey Edwards, Ariya Martin, and Elena Ricci. The three women will present contemporary photographs of Louisiana’s evolving terrain. The photographers will sign copies of God’s Country, a bound set of six visual guides to parishes that form the corner borders of Louisiana: Caddo, East and West Carroll, Washington, Cameron, the Felicianas, and Plaquemines. Publication of this work was made possible with funding from the Platforms Grant / The Andy Warhol Foundation.
ABOUT HANNAH CHALEW

Hannah Chalew is an artist raised and currently working in New Orleans. She received her BA from Brandeis University in 2009 and her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016. Chalew has exhibited widely around New Orleans and the nation. Her work is in the collections of the City of New Orleans and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and published in two creative atlases by writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, co-authored with Rebecca Snedeker, and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, co-authored with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. In 2018, she was an emerging artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She recently received a Platforms Grant: a regranting effort of Antenna Gallery, Ashe Cultural Arts Center and Pelican Bomb with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation and an Ideascity production grant, funded by the New Museum with support from the National Endowment for the Arts to incubate her work.

ABOUT TORKWASE DYSON
NOMA will host the solo exhibition Torkwase Dyson: Black Compositional Thought | 15 Paintings for the Plantationocene, on view from January 14 through April 19, 2020. Dyson was born in Chicago Illinois, and spent her developmental years between North Carolina and Mississippi. Traversing these regions helped develop a fundamental sensitivity towards urban development, southern landscape and black spatial justice. During her years at Tougaloo College where she majored in Sociology and double minored in Social Work and Fine Art, she began to examine the spatial dynamics of black history and how these histories where connected geographically. Over the next 10 years, Dyson traveled to Africa and South and Central America to strategize with communities of color on ways to attain resource equality. During this time she earned her Bachelors in Fine Arts in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and her Masters in Fine Arts in Painting from Yale School of Art. In 2016 Dyson designed and built Studio South Zero (SSZ) a solar-powered mobile studio where the context of nomadicity became the framework for learning and making art about the environment. It was traveling with SSZ that inspired her experimental project The Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Liberation where she explores contemporary theorizations of space, architecture and the infrastructure of extraction economies.

ABOUT FREE FERAL
free is a multi-disciplinary artist whose songwriting explores psychic landscapes thru blues and folk traditions using cello, viola, guitar, vocals & loops. They have collaborated with Leyla McCalla and Junebug Productions, among others. As a composer, they score film and radio projects, including Last Call, a queer oral history podcast, where they also serve as a producer, editor, and host. free also had the honor to be one of Found Sound Nation’s One Beat fellows for 2019 and is a member of the New Orleans based ensemble, Les Cenelles.
ABOUT SERPENTINE CHOIR
Serpentine is a queer and femme witch choir based out of Bulbancha/New Orleans, dedicated to healing personal and systemic trauma and rebuilding human connection with the earth. Their songs are stories of resiliency, joy, softness, vulnerability, transformation, survival, and deep love. The choir believes that songs change the shape of culture, that songs raise power to call forth change and justice.

Friday Nights at NOMA is presented by The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate and 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.

Torkwase Dyson in conversation with Leronn Brooks
2020-01-24 19:00 - 20:00
Join artist Torkwase Dyson in conversation with art scholar LeRonn P. Brooks, proceeding an introduction by Allison Young, during Friday Nights at NOMA. Dyson will discuss her exhibition Torkwase Dyson: Black Compositional Thought | 15 Paintings for the Plantationocene.
Produced for the New Orleans Museum of Art, a new series of fifteen paintings by Torkwase Dyson are inspired by the design systems of architecture, water infrastructure, the oil and gas industry, and the physical impact of global warming. This solo exhibition examines the legacy of plantation economies and their relationship to the environmental and infrastructural issues of our current age, which many characterize as the “plantationocene.”
ABOUT TORKWASE DYSON
Torkwase Dyson was born in Chicago Illinois, and spent her developmental years between North Carolina and Mississippi. Traversing these regions helped develop a fundamental sensitivity towards urban development, southern landscape and black spatial justice. During her years at Tougaloo College where she majored in Sociology and double minored in Social Work and Fine Art, she began to examine the spatial dynamics of black history and how these histories where connected geographically. Over the next 10 years, Dyson traveled to Africa and South and Central America to strategize with communities of color on ways to attain resource equality. During this time she earned her Bachelors in Fine Arts in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and her Masters in Fine Arts in Painting from Yale School of Art. In 2016, Dyson designed and built Studio South Zero (SSZ) a solar-powered mobile studio where the context of nomadicity became the framework for learning and making art about the environment. It was traveling with SSZ that inspired her experimental project The Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environmental Liberation where she explores contemporary theorizations of space, architecture and the infrastructure of extraction economies.
Though working through multiple mediums, Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter who uses distilled geometric abstraction to create an idiosyncratic language that is both diagrammatic and expressive. The works are deconstructions of natural and built environments that consider how individuals negotiate and negate various types of systems and spatial order. Dyson’s work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Drawing Center, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Dyson has been awarded the Graham Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, Visiting Artist grant to the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, and the Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practices. Fellowships include, Graham Foundation, Eyebeam Art,Technology Center Fellowship, and the FSP/Jerome Fellowship. Dyson’s work has also been supported by, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, The Laundromat Projects, the Green Festival of New York, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia, The Kitchen, and the Rebuild Foundation. In 2016 Dyson was elected to the board of the Architecture League of New York as Vice President of Visual Arts. Torkwase is now based in Jersey City, NJ
ABOUT LERONN P. BROOKS
Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks is the Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute. Prior to working at the Getty, he was an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Lehman College in The Bronx, New York. Dr. Brooks recently served as a curator for The Racial Imaginary Institute, which was founded by author/poet Claudia Rankine, and the Bronx Council on the Arts. At the Getty, Dr. Brooks is the lead-curator for the GRI’s new African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI). His interviews, essays on African American art, and poetry have appeared in publications for Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Spelman Museum of Art, Callaloo Journal, The International Review of African American Art as well as The Aperture Foundation, among others.
ABOUT ALLISON YOUNG
Allison Young is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at Louisiana State University. A specialist in postcolonial and contemporary art of the Global South, Young received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU in 2017. Her scholarly research and arts criticism has appeared in publications such as Art Journal, Artforum, Apollo International, ART AFRICA and the International Review of African American Art, and she has contributed writing to exhibition catalogues for numerous local, national, and international projects. Before joining LSU, Young was Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow for Modern and Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art from 2017 to 2019, where she curated and published an exhibition catalogue for Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred.

Studio KIDS!
2020-01-25 10:00 - 12:00
Get Creative with Studio KIDS
In 2020, Studio KIDS presents a dynamic series of children’s art classes exploring our southern Louisianan environments and homes: both real and imagined. Each week, participants will engage with different sources of inspiration in NOMA’s galleries or the Besthoff Sculpture Garden, starting with explorations of the landscape and its creatures, then shifting focus indoors to explore exquisite constructions in the interior.
Each class features different media and techniques. Register for one class or the entire series. Please register in advance to ensure your spot.
Call 504-658-4128 or email education@noma.org for more information.
Cost per class: $25 members | $30 nonmembers
January 25 | Waterways | Bend with the curves of the Mississippi River that wind through the Crescent City as we get inspired by Louisiana’s waterways using water-based paints.
SOLD OUT

Gallery Talk: Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana with Jeffery Darensbourg
2020-01-25 12:00 - 13:00
Gallery talks are casual conversations between artists, curators, and other special guests with NOMA visitors frequently scheduled throughout the year. Join writer Jeffery Darensbourg as he discusses works on view in Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana.
Jeffery Darensbourg is a resident artist at Studio in the Woods, an arts collective based in a forested area on the Westbank of Orleans Parish. Darensbourg is an enrolled member and tribal councilperson of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of mixed Native and Louisiana Creole ancestry. He is interested in the knowledge of flora, fauna, and people his ancestors carried with them and wishes to connect this sort of Louisiana-specific knowledge to the knowledge urban Natives such as himself have in negotiating indigeneity. His work explores the intersections of cultural studies and mixed ethnicity. He describes himself as an “Editor-Who’s-not-a-Chief” of the zine Bulbancha Is Still a Place: Indigenous Culture from New Orleans.
Photograph by Kimmie Tubre

Waterlogue: A Performance by Megan Easley | Gallery Talk with Regina Agu for Passage
2020-01-26 13:00 - 14:00
Pperformance artist Megan Easley will deliver a water-based audio performance in the Great Hall in tribute to Passage, a panoramic installation by Regina Agu, who will deliver a Gallery Talk at 1:30 pm.
Native Houstonian Megan Easely discovered her eternal love of music and the natural world at a very young age. She has since united both loves into one creative practice. In 2008, Easely began exploring experimental sound using water percussively. Driven by curiosity, Easely continues to expand her repertoire by investigating the possibilities of water sounds. She showcases her discoveries regularly through collaboration with other sound artists/musicians and debuting solo arrangements. She aspires to create an experience that speaks to both human and non-human audiences. Easely lives by the belief that “water is life.” Using water as an instrument, she seeks to give water a “voice” and hopes that those who listen will take away a deeper appreciation for water and all life forms that surround us.

Les Cenelles presents Nèj Nwa, a closing concert for Inventing Acadia
2020-01-26 18:00 - 20:00
As the exhibition Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana comes to a close, Les Cenelles will perform a concert titled Nèj Nwa in the Great Hall. Les Cenelles is a contemporary string ensemble who explore the Creole diaspora through melody and memory to honor cultural ancestors and preserve the plurality of their experiences through a prismatic and contemporary lens.
Ensemble members include the following: free feral, Sultana Isham, mun, Joseph Darensbourg, Peter J Bowling, and Denise Frazier.
General admission $20 | NOMA members $15
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Gallery Talk: Curator Mel Buchanan on the Greenwood Plantation parlor
2020-01-29 12:00 - 13:00
Gallery talks are casual conversations between artists, curators, and other special guests with NOMA visitors frequently scheduled throughout the year. Louisiana residents receive free admission to NOMA on Wednesdays courtesy of The Helis Foundation.
Join Mel Buchanan, RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, for a discussion about the recent installation of mid-nineteenth-century parlor furniture and furnishings from Greenwood Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana, and the lives of the property owners and the enslaved.

NOMA Book Club Discussion Program
2020-01-30 12:00 - 13:00

Friday Nights at NOMA: Robert Burns Night
2020-01-31 17:00 - 21:00
Friday Nights at NOMA features an exciting lineup of programs in 2020: live music, movies, activities for kids and families, 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 until 9 pm.
In partnership with The NOLA Project theater company, NOMA will present a fun and nontraditional Scottish celebration of poetry, music, food, and drink for the entire New Orleans community. Pull out your kilt and tartan and come be a Scotsman for the night we celebrate the life, times, and poetry of one of the world’s greatest wordsmiths, Robert Burns.
The evening will feature bagpipes and Scottish country dancers from the Caledonian Society of New Orleans, a parade and Ode to the Haggis, live music, singing, and a host of spoken poetry delivered by members of the theater company and special guests from the community. Come join the fun, learn about the legend of Robert Burns, sign up to read a poem, sing a song, and celebrate the Scottish way! Food and drink will be available for purchase from Café NOMA, including a special cock-a-leekie soup.
5 – 8 pm | Art on the Spot drop-in activity table
5:30 pm | Reading of “Immortal Memory,” a tribute to Robert Burns
6:30 to 7 pm | Folk dancing performance and visitor participation with the Caledonia Society of New Orleans
7 pm | Ceremonial entry of the Haggis in the Great Hall
The event will conclude with a singalong of Burns’s most famous song, “Auld Lang Syne.” Throughout the evening, actors from The NOLA Company will be reading Burns’s poems and visitors are encouraged to select from print handouts to read poems at the microphone.
Friday Nights at NOMA is presented by The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate and 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.

Studio KIDS!
2020-02-01 10:00 - 12:00
Get Creative with Studio KIDS
In 2020, Studio KIDS presents a dynamic series of children’s art classes exploring our southern Louisianan environments and homes: both real and imagined. Each week, participants will engage with different sources of inspiration in NOMA’s galleries or the Besthoff Sculpture Garden, starting with explorations of the landscape and its creatures, then shifting focus indoors to explore exquisite constructions in the interior.
Each class features different media and techniques. Register for one class or the entire series. Please register in advance to ensure your spot. Call 504-658-4128 or email education@noma.org for more information.
Cost per class: $25 members | $30 nonmembers
February 1 |Swamp Stories | Bottle caps become flowers and yarn becomes Spanish moss in this imaginative workshop. Craft a Louisiana-inspired landscape on cardboard and explore the endless possibilities of creative reuse and recyclable materials.
ENROLL NOW

Besthoff Sculpture Garden Tour
2020-02-01 12:00 - 13:00
Join NOMA’s docents for a free guided tour of the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden on Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays, weather dependent, at noon. (Call 504.658.4153 to verify.) Sited on twelve acres adjacent to the museum, the garden contains more than ninety works by renowned sculptors placed among a picturesque mature grove of pine, magnolia, and moss-draped live oak trees bisected by a lagoon. Represented sculptors include Pierre Auguste Renoir, Rene Magritte, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, George Rodrigue, and Robert Indiana, among others. Meet at the gates to the garden, which offers free admission year-round.
