ended on December 31st, 2023
NEW at NOMA: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art spotlights contemporary art recently purchased or gifted to the museum, focusing on works by BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and female-identifying artists. Read More
ended on November 26th, 2023
Take a broad look at fashion history with an emphasis on the spirit of innovation and the diversity of the United States’s fashion heritage. The exhibition spotlights over 100 American designers and brands with garments from the 19th century to present day. Read More
ended on September 10th, 2023
Presenting a selection of recent and promised gifts from collectors James and Cherye Pierce, Photogenic celebrates the monumental impact of the Pierces’ longtime support of the museum’s renowned photography collection as well as their dedication to collecting photography for almost 50 years. Read More
ended on July 30th, 2023
In the centuries following the arrival of Francis Xavier, a Catholic missionary, in 1542, the state of Goa in western India became the administrative and economic center of a Portuguese empire that extended west to Africa and east to Malaysia, China, and Japan. The vast trade networks established by the Portuguese and Spanish allowed not only for the spread of Christianity, but also an unprecedented artistic exchange within these colonial empires. This exhibition, from the collection of Dr. Siddharth Bhansali, reveals both the global influence of European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles, as well as the transformation of these styles in the hands of Indian artists creating a new visual tradition. Read More
ended on May 7th, 2023
Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club explores the connection between African American artist Jacob Lawrence and his contemporaries based in West Africa through the Nigerian publication Black Orpheus. The exhibition features over 125 objects, including Lawrence’s little-known 1964–65 Nigeria series, works by the artists featured in Black Orpheus, archival images, videos, and letters. Read More
ended on April 16th, 2023
Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans mines New Orleans archives and gathers oral histories in the first monographic review of an artist that was celebrated by the 1950s American craft world. NOMA’s exhibition is the first presentation of Choy’s extraordinary ceramics in New Orleans since the artist’s Louisiana friends mounted the Katherine Choy Memorial Show at the Orleans Gallery in fall 1959. Read More
ended on February 19th, 2023
Trained as a pilot, Anne Noggle’s fearless and adventurous spirit is also seen in her second career as a photographer, curator, and educator. As an artist, Noggle often turned her camera to herself to document and explore the aging process for women. Read More
ended on February 12th, 2023
Robert Polidori: Recollections presents a selection of photographs from the largest private collection of prints by Robert Polidori (Canadian-American, born 1951). Read More
ended on January 22nd, 2023
For more than three decades, Selwhyn Sthaddeus “Polo Silk” Terrell (American, born 1964) has been photographing Black New Orleans, creating a unique body of work that blends elements of portraiture, fashion, performance, and street photography. This exhibition explores how Polo Silk successfully blends all of those elements, while illustrating his role as an important part of photographic history. Read More
ended on January 8th, 2023
From photography’s beginnings in the United States, Black studio photographers operated on the developing edge of the medium to produce beautiful portraits for their clients, while also making a variety of other photographic work in keeping with important movements like pictorialism, modernism, and abstraction. Called to the Camera illustrates the artistic virtuosity, social significance, and political impact of Black photographers working in commercial portrait studios during photography’s first century. Read More
ended on December 31st, 2022
Louise Bourgeois: Paintings is the first comprehensive exhibition of paintings produced by the iconic French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) between her arrival in New York in 1938 and her turn to sculpture in the late 1940s. Read More
ended on October 9th, 2022
The Jain faith has been continuously practiced in India since at least the sixth century BCE. Nonviolence, a respect for all living beings, and the belief in the existence of a permanent soul whose true nature is obscured by accumulated karma are core principles of Jainism. Created over a period of more than fifteen hundred years — the second through nineteenth centuries — the sculptures, paintings, and manuscripts on view in this exhibition of works loaned from the collection of Dr. Siddharth Bhansali illuminate iconographic and stylistic change as well as regional variation. Read More
ended on October 9th, 2022
This exhibition, drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection, explores themes of retirement and reclusion in Edo-period Japanese painting. The works on view look to longstanding Chinese and Japanese artistic traditions of seclusion and exile to comment on larger social issues of the time. Read More
ended on July 17th, 2022
Queen Nefertari’s Egypt brings to life the role of Nefertari and other powerful women in ancient Egypt through 230 exceptional objects, including statues, jewelry, vases, papyrus, steles, wooden coffins, and stone sarcophagi, as well as tools and various items of daily life from the artisan village of Deir-el-Medina, home to those who created the royal tombs. Read More
ended on July 10th, 2022
A recently acquired akwanshi stone monolith from the Cross River region of Nigeria forms the centerpiece of a focus exhibition featuring stone as a material used in ancestral veneration among West African cultures. Read More
ended on April 17th, 2022
When chemists first successfully extracted aluminum from the earth in the mid-19th century, the raw element was as precious as gold. Today we take this ubiquitous material for granted, though aluminum allows for nearly every facet of modern life through its use in architecture, industry, and flight. This exhibition, drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection, explores the changing role of aluminum in twentieth-century design. Read More
ended on March 20th, 2022
While it may seem that the story of photography traces an inevitable arc from a unique material experience toward an infinitely reproducible phenomenon, it could be argued that one of the most important “histories” of photography is the history of deliberate efforts to improve how a photograph gets from “here” to “there.” While the stresses and realities of the present moment make the topic more relevant than ever, the portability of a photographic object or the transmission of its image has occupied the thoughts of photographic inventors, artists, and publishers throughout the past two hundred years. Read More
ended on March 20th, 2022
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ishimoto Yasuhiro (Japanese, born United States, 1921–2012), NOMA presents a selection of works from its collection that reveals the artist’s capacity for capturing humanity with both empathy and detachment, as well as his playful sense of humor and skill as a picture-maker. Read More
No Upcoming Exhibitions.
on view through January 4th, 2026
The photographs included in “The View From Here: Women Photographers of the American Landscape”—all of which are from NOMA’s permanent collection—illustrate some of the exceptional diversity of landscape photographs made by women artists working in the United States since the year 1900. Read More
Watch as Chief Bassey Nsa introduces himself to visitors of the “New African Masquerades” exhibition and honors Dr. Jordan A. Fenton, an Ekpe Society Chief and exhibition co-curator. Read More