For those of us with the good fortune to have a place to hang our things, a closet is a magical container, a collection of materials, arranged by each of us that at a glance can reveal our values, desires, cares, and even our deepest secrets. Time itself is frozen inside a closet in contrasting meters and time-lines, fragmented in things accumulated and arranged in juxtaposed order, stacked and aligned, quickly thrown or casually dropped there to be taken care of later. The scene is set, and the narratives that blossom come alive whenever the doors swing open, giving us a reading, a reminder, an understanding of who we are and where we have been, secrets and dreams we hold. Boxes concealing our heart’s contours, scribbled messages scratched on folded notes and cards, photos, records, files, all the stuff worth saving for the reason that each thing signifies, all these choices contained in the holding space: the closet.

Artist Jim Hodges’s Craig’s closet is installed to the right of the museum’s entrance on Collins C. Diboll Circle, easily accessible by all visitors to New Orleans City Park. The sculpture was originally commissioned as part of the NYC Parks’s Art in the Parks program for the New York City AIDS Memorial. The presentation of Craig’s closet in New Orleans is supported by UOVO.
About the Artist

Through his work, Jim Hodges addresses issues such as memory, love, and existential struggles through photography, screen printing, and sculpture. Major public installations by Hodges include I dreamed a world and called it Love, Grand Central Station, New York (2021); Unearthed, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco (2019); and With Liberty and Justice For All, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2015). His works are included in prominent collections internationally, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

This exhibition details a history of the extensive overlap between photography and writing. If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, photographers – and users of photography – have routinely found reasons to add a few more words into the mix for good measure. The exhibition includes straight-forward pictures of signs, deconstructions of letters into lines and shapes, conceptual artworks, photos of people reading and writing, inscriptions made directly onto the surface of photographs, and a variety of approaches to choosing a title.

Show & Tell considers the ways in which photography’s capacity to visually represent – or show – our world, has been enhanced, manipulated, and sometimes limited by the inclusion of written text – to tell us something else. The exhibition reflects on how those two modes of communication can work in tandem, whether a union of photography and writing might lead to a richer kind of expression or, conversely, can distort our understanding. As the artists included in Show & Tell have enthusiastically engaged written texts as a central part of making photographs, the works in this exhibition encourage us to approach photography, text, and their myriad combinations, with a more critical eye.

Show & Tell: A Brief History of Photography and text is organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and is supported by the Del and Ginger Hall Photography Fund, James and Cherye Pierce, and the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Mann Pailet Endowment.

One of the most important artists in the history of New Orleans, John T. Scott is renowned globally for his brightly colored and precisely balanced kinetic sculptures that draw from African American, African, and European traditions. Scott worked in a variety of media, including monumental prints like those on display here from the artist’s series Blues Poem for the Urban Landscape. Several of these prints were included in Scott’s 2005 retrospective exhibition at NOMA, and all are now part of the museum’s permanent collection.

While the series title suggests that these could be visions of any unnamed city, Scott’s imagery locates them very specifically in New Orleans, where he graduated from, practiced, and taught at Xavier University of Louisiana. To represent the visual cacophony of the city, Scott packs each print from edge-to-edge with churches, corner stores, street signs, power lines, plants, and car parts wedged around elements of New Orleans’s distinctive architecture—each a reference in itself to the generations of African American artisans that built the city. Without a distinct horizon line, the tightly organized compositions are as immersive as they can be disorienting.

To make each print Scott carved into the surface of large sheets of plywood with a power saw and routing tools, creating lines and forms that are impressionistic but also visually imposing. The composite nature of these prints exemplifies Scott’s jazz-inspired explorations of what he called “spherical thinking,” or a non-linear way of simultaneously looking at the past, present, and future.
Here, in two dimensions, Scott uses the landscape to visualize the history of New Orleans, the vibrant city he saw before him, and provide some signposts to guide us towards the future.

In early 2024, Kurt Gitter and Alice Yelen Gitter gifted over fifty works of Japanese art to NOMA. This remarkable donation includes major works by Edo-period painters (1615-1868), as well as significant works of ceramic art from the late 20th century to the present day. This exhibition, the first in a series, celebrates these gifts and honors more than five decades of philanthropy by the Gitters, who have donated nearly 350 works to NOMA, helping to establish and develop the museum’s Japanese art collection.

The present exhibition pays homage to the 1976 show Zenga and Nanga: Paintings by Japanese Monks and Scholars. This was the first NOMA exhibition to highlight the Gitters’ collection, and after its premiere in New Orleans, the presentation traveled to five other museums in the United States. Both exhibitions focus on paintings by Zen and literati artists, two of the primary artistic currents of the Edo period.

Among the painting traditions to flourish during the Edo period, the Nanga, or literati, style was among the most significant. Fueled by the new Tokugawa Shogunate’s embrace of Confucianism, Japanese artists studied Chinese Ming and Qing Chinese painting subjects and styles (largely through reproductions in woodblock-print painting manuals), as well as embraced the values of a Chinese gentleman scholar. While largely professional painters, unlike their Chinese counterparts, Japanese Nanga artists were musicians, poets, historians, calligraphers, art historians, and more. Their rich cultural knowledge and practice simultaneously infused their paintings with a deep reverence for tradition, and reflected their engagement with the present.

Zen painting underwent a significant revival in the Edo period, due in part to the increasing importance of the tea ceremony. Using only black ink and paper, Zen monks communicated spiritual truths and guidance to their followers. The fall of the Chinese Ming government in 1644 led to a number of monks emigrating to Japan, where they came to be known as the Obaku sect. These monks exerted great influence on painters of all traditions, bringing with them contemporary works of Chinese art and practicing a distinctive style of calligraphy. The most important reviver of Zen painting was Hakuin Ekaku, who broadened its scope and audience, inventing new subjects and themes, an approach perpetuated by generations of followers.

There were direct connections between these seemingly distinct approaches to art and communities of artists. Literati painters, such as Ike Taiga studied Zen with both Hakuin and the Obaku monks. The Zen monk Gocho Kankai wrote inscriptions on paintings by both literati artists and his fellow Zen monks. Envisioning Japan draws together recent and prior donations from the Gitters, gifts they facilitated, and museum acquisitions, to illuminate the distinct, yet interrelated strands of this remarkably diverse period of artistic production.

The contemporary artist Wang Qingsong (Chinese, b. 1966) creates elaborately staged large-format photographs that focus on the dramatic social, political, and cultural changes in China in the post-Mao era. A native of Heilongjiang province in the far northeast of China, Qingsong studied painting at the Sichuan Art Academy, turning to photography in the 1990s, garnering almost immediate international acclaim. Born at the onset of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Qingsong has said that his image-making has its source in the propaganda images of his youth.

Qingsong’s 2005 triptych Come! Come! Come!, on view in the Stafford Gallery this spring, both documents and comments upon the embrace of capitalism and the rapid Westernization of China in the 1990s through the early 2000s. Banners emblazoned with contemporary and historic slogans from Chinese politics and history (on the left) are mirrored by those from Western and Chinese businesses such as FedEx, McDonald’s, and China Mobile (on the right). At the center is the detritus left behind by these mass “demonstrations,” the environmental cost of economic progress.

Much like the producer of a movie spectacular, Wang Qingsong coordinated the actions of the approximately 800 models featured in the work, transporting them and the props (painted by Qingsong himself) to a site on the outskirts of Beijing, where the photographs were taken during the course of a single day. A video documenting the photo shoot is included in the exhibition.

Afropolitan: Contemporary African Arts at NOMA highlights some of the most pioneering African artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in NOMA’s collection. New mediums and expressions added to the African art collection are juxtaposed with significant artists of the pre- and post-independence period, and reflect important art schools or workshops on the continent. Together these works of art can be viewed through the lens of Afropolitanism, wherein artists are not simply cosmopolitan citizens, but also Africans of the world. As such, the works featured were made in or reflect the vibrancy, diverse influences, and contradictions of contemporary urban life in African cities.

To reflect this truly global nature, works by African artists are presented throughout the museum, in the third-floor African art gallery, the McDermott International, Inc. Elevator Lobby, and outside in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden.

After more than 50 years of vigorous debate led by a religious Temperance Movement, the 18th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1919, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcohol in the United States. Though it would only last 14 years, the period of Prohibition radically altered the relationship between Americans and alcohol. Rebellious Spirits: Prohibition and Resistance in the South presents a variety of objects ranging from 18th-century porcelain to 20th-century photography to capture the traditions in design and culture that were altered during this tumultuous period of history. Looking closely at the craftsmanship of cocktail shakers, liquor jugs, and cocktail glasses from the period reveals a vibrant story of resilience as Americans improvised methods to continue the production, distribution, and enjoyment of illicit spirits.

The material culture of Prohibition in the South, exemplified by the experiences in New Orleans where intoxicating beverages were never truly underground, underscores the human tendency to adapt and preserve cultural traditions, even during times of strict prohibition. Objects demonstrate how legislation can shape not only consumption patterns but also local economies and social interactions. Featuring collection objects from NOMA and other New Orleans collections and including music from the period, Rebellious Spirits takes you back to a time of innovation and rampant liquor consumption, despite the law.