I Visited Another City's Art Museum & You Know What That Means.....

......it's High Museum bashin' time!

Yes folks, I trolleyed it up to City Park to visit the New Orleans Museum of Art and once again was reminded why the High Museum is so very irritating on so many levels. 
In the Museum's contemporary galleries, along side works by Chuck Close, Shirin Neshat and Jackson Pollack were a number of artworks, many of them recent acquisitions, by Louisiana artists.  The museum even has a special symbol noting them as such.  NOMA recognizes that it is a regional museum (as is the High) and (unlike the High) celebrates this fact.  The High instead rents artwork from the Louvre in a futile effort to present a world class collection which it will never have.  Further, NOMA presented a retrospective by living New Orleans artist John Scott.  Here is a museum that is completely committed to recognizing and celebrating artists of the region.

Also on view was a photography exhibit (in its entirety on-line) entitled "64 Degrees of Separation".  The exhibit, meant to be viewed sequentially, contained sixty-four photographs. Each photograph was tied thematically to the one next to it and snaked through three galleries so the viewer ended he began with the last photograph tied thematically to the first one as well.  This was not heady stuff, but it was a joy to walk through and discover connections between very different photographs and to see how the theme changed during the exhibition.  It was really a clever way to display many of the museums strongest photographic holdings in a way that was very accessible.  The exhibition took up about 1750 sq. ft. (I measured) of space which is  about 45% more than the High will be devoting to photography once the expansion opens.  NOMA had a number of other photographs on display as well including many by a New Orleans photographer whose name I forgot to note.

All in all, NOMA is a perfect fit for New Orleans: a special museum in a unique city that is not trying to be anything more than it is.  Oddly enough it has made me realize how well the High fits Atlanta: a city that is striving to be a major international city with a museum that is futilely striving for the same.

Comments

[Robert]

With New Orleans' origin in France and Spain, it's no surprise that it feels entitled to culture and art and manages well in providing that.

12 years ago I worked at NOMA and Steven Maklansky was putting on great photo shows then. Wirth your interest in prints and drawings, Daniel Piersol is an aproachable and genuinely great man at NOMA.

Surprisingly enought, the Atomic Testing Museum has a gorgeous Harold Edgerton exhibition.

[Baxter Jones]

Go to the 4th floor of the Richard Meier building, and check out the installation of the folk art collection. Nellie Mae Rowe, Howard Finster, Thornton Dial, Mattie Lou O'Kelley, Lonnie Holley, Bill Traylor...it doesn't get more regional than that.

And I hear that in the contemporary art galleries, we're going to see work by local artists alongside the internationally known ones. So the above post strikes me as unfair.

[Erik Schneider]

Yeah, this post was a bit of a low blow; the High does a very good job of presenting work by Southern "outsider" artists. This round goes to you Baxter Jones. But no fair giving the High credit for what they are promising to do...I'll believe it when I see it.

[Baxter Jones]

Thanks. I hope you're looking forward to the November opening as much as I am. I have my criticisms of certain decisions the High has made, but overall I'm pretty optimistic about it. We'll see.