How the New Orleans Museum of Art Expands Its Reach and Impact

It’s a good case study in attracting and educating more people.

I n my last story on the New Orleans Museum of Art, I examined the evolution of its collection from a series of empty rooms — the museum started with very little art — to an appealing, broad-based collection of 40,000 objects.

For much of its history, now more than 100 years, directors, curators, and trustees prized edification, establishment taste, and connoisseurship. All of these are good. For years, its best museum practices aimed squarely and, by and large, exclusively at these priorities.

I enjoyed seeing how the museum shifted and expanded over time, as have all good, perceptive museums. It’s done well in stretching beyond the boundaries of old-fashioned practices, using raw material specific to this particular museum. For instance, it’s a park museum, surrounded by a pretty, spacious landscape.

One of the joys of being there is NOMA’s lovely and new sculpture garden. The Besthoffs, a local couple keen on philanthropy and outdoor art, paid for the sculpture garden, which moves the museum beyond its four walls and the realm of the intimate to the outdoors and nature. New Orleans isn’t an outdoor place like, say, San Diego, but it’s an atmospheric walking city with a unique and dramatic ecology. Even if you’re walking only from jazz club to jazz club, it’s nice to be outdoors — except in the summer.

The sculpture garden is large and full of crowd pleasers such as Robert Indiana’s LOVE, Jeppe Hein’s Mirror Labyrinth, and Sean Scully’s Colored Stacked Frames, the latter two from 2017. One is cryptic and contemplative, the other is bold, colorful, and fun. Trails, old oak trees, flowers, a copious pond, and benches join the art in making any museum visit more attractive for families, certainly, but also for people who find their soul food in impressive outdoor art seen in the round and in the context of nature. Right now, there are 90 sculptures in the park, so it’s an expansive, generous space.

The museum has a good and growing photography collection, and this is also new in New Orleans and in many other museums. That museums collect photography now is, in itself, a broadening of what art is and a response to changes in the public’s taste. In museums, photography’s biggest audience skews younger. Not that I’m the muse of any demographic, but usually I’m the loner in the Old Masters gallery. Photography is the medium of the here and now, the street, everyday life in all its peculiarities, and, above all, spontaneity. The Old Masters privileged martyrs, aristocrats, and slow time.

The collection is mostly American and stewarded by two photography curators. I enjoyed the small shows running when I was there. A Brief History of Photography and Transmission is, I think, the umbrella under which are boutiques that look at, for instance, war, portraits, and loss, as one gallery was themed. It all seemed airy and vague to me, but I’m perfectly fine with ignoring wall texts, unless they’re outstandingly bad, and simply looking at the art. The museum owns a set of Edward Steichen’s World War I aerial trench photographs. These are quirky and great, as is Scott Orr’s Destruction of a Zeppelin Near London. Walker Evans, Robert Polidori, and Clarence John Laughlin have New Orleans roots, so it’s no surprise to see so much of their best work.

I didn’t like the museum’s anchor exhibition, which was a retrospective of the work of Dawn DeDeaux. She’s a multimedia artist from New Orleans, and I’m all for museums spotlighting local talent made good. I’m sure she’s a very good artist, but her subject is the apocalypse. The end of the world is a meaty topic, and I’m not beyond a dive into the Book of Revelations, artists such as John Martin, Dürer, Blake, or Bosch, or a good Mad Max movie. However, I think her work is one-dimensional — “Gosh, what a mess we’ve made of the world” — and overwrought, as well as predictable.

There’s overincarceration, which she treats with rows of doors with bars. She starts with the proposition that we’d all agree America has an overincarceration problem. I don’t think the grieving people of Waukesha, Wis., would agree, considering how many young and old died after a guy with a rap sheet as long as the Mississippi ran amok. There’s the climate. There’s overpopulation. “If you had to leave the Earth,” one display asks, “what would you take with you?”

It’s a silly question. I think she deserves a one-gallery show, or a space dedicated to a single body of work, like the dreamy, even haunting digital drawings lining the museum’s Great Hall. Too much apocalypse hardens the heart. “If flood and fire don’t kill you, who gets a seat on the last spaceship?” the show asks. Well, we know Jeff Bezos isn’t inviting his ex-wife on his rocket to the stars, but, otherwise, the question is abstract in the extreme. Rule No. 1 in mounting a show is “Don’t scare the horses,” or, in this case, the impressionable and the faint of heart. Don’t give children bad dreams. There’s too much cheap sentiment, received wisdom, and hopelessness in the show for me.

I loved Pursuit of Salvation: Jain Art from India, an exhibition of superb sculptures, paintings, and manuscripts from a private New Orleans collection. The museum has a very strong collection of Asian and Oceanic art augmented by a show that covers Jainism, a spirituality older than Christianity, and includes visualizations of karma, nonviolence, and the permanent soul. Interpretation was crystal clear, a neat trick when the subject encompasses both art and a faith most of us don’t know.

Exhibitions, of course, bring new people to the museum, broadening and deepening its educational mission. The New Orleans museum started its exhibition program in the 1970s with the mother of all blockbusters: the King Tut show. That’s spunk that’s almost Texan. Its next big exhibition is Queen Nefertari’s Egypt, which I saw at the Kimbell in Fort Worth and didn’t much enjoy, mostly because there’s not much left from Nefertari’s tomb. It’s also doing a monographic show on Katherine Choy, a New Orleans ceramicist from the 1950s who merged Asian ceramics tradition with Modernist design. In the hands of the museum’s obviously talented decorative arts department, this will be a hit. It’ll be the best instance of a civic museum mining local art history.

Art by the best blue-chip African-American artists such as Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, Mark Bradford, and Glenn Ligon is overpriced because many buyers, some institutional, are chasing few works. These artists are very much à la mode, all are top artists, and museums feel compelled to integrate their collections with big names. Basquiat, egregiously overrated, is beyond almost all museum price points. Kehinde Wiley is famous and expensive but decorative and about as deep intellectually as a layer of varnish. Still, museums buy his work.

I don’t think New Orleans can afford to spend a million bucks for a work of art. It still wants to buy African-American art, and it should. It’s shopping wisely, though. The museum has partnered with the Soul Runs Deep Foundation in acquiring African-American art. It knows it needs to do a lot more. Museums in its position — a regional museum, not flush but not broke — can buy great things by supporting local artists; young, under-the-radar artists; and good mid-career artists who’ve labored inventively in the vineyards for a while but don’t do kitsch like Wiley or, like Ligon, have hotshot New York representation.

I didn’t know Jonathan Lyndon Chase so NOMA’s They got a crush on him was a surprise. He’s a young Philadelphia artist. Shack Town is an impressive Thornton Dial sculpture the museum acquired in 2016. I also saw a great Purvis Young mural, too, in an exhibition on contemporary art acquisitions.  It seems to me, having learned a great deal about New Orleans, that diversity isn’t a uniquely African-American topic. The region’s artists, art history, and audiences are more polyglot than most places in America.

Last year, the New Orleans museum, like many others, faced the wrath of aggrieved staff — in its case, former staff — over what they called, in an open letter, a toxic work environment and institutional racism. Dozens of these open letters crackled the airwaves in dozens of museums, and some seemed ranty, some petty, some with the whiff of truth here and there, and some — Indianapolis comes to mind — rang peels of truth.

I can’t judge the New Orleans open letter since lots of it is hearsay, clichés, he-said-she-said stuff, and petty fusses over things such as dreadlocks. It seems the museum lagged in diversity training for staff from the top down. That’s been the case throughout the country. I looked at NOMA’s exhibition history over the last ten years, and it has mounted good shows of the work of African-American artists.

Hiring more African-American curators and senior museum staff is easier said than done. From everything I hear, the pool of good art historians wanting to work as curators is a shallow one. It’s in everyone’s interests to hire the best qualified and most talented. There are four new African-American trustees, and they all sound like positive additions. First and foremost, trustees, of course, need to give money and network for the museum with a passion, and neither has much, if anything, to do with race.

Complainers want a permanent, new museum department enforcing equity, diversity, accessibility, and inclusion standards. More and more museums, businesses, and colleges have these departments now, and it’s a terrible idea. They’re parallel HR offices, so they promote, not reduce, racism. These departments exist to mediate racial tension, which means, I’m sorry to say, their staffs are constantly seeking new frontiers in aggrievement. Without grievance and injustice, they’re out of business. NOMA has a new HR director, an African-American woman who seems highly qualified. The museum should let her run her department by treating everyone fairly, with no favors and no double standards. Of course, the museum needs to address imbalances in pay, evaluation, and promotion opportunities.

Traditionally, museums do their best at connoisseurship and scholarship. Education aimed at nonspecialists, whether adults or children, wasn’t a big part of a museum’s portfolio when I started as a curator. I think the New Orleans museum is starting to aim at a higher profile and a broader audience with its special exhibitions, but it’s gotten into the trenches in long-term work with schools.

I read every museum press release for the last two years. Since it’s in New Orleans, it makes sense that it has a splendid music program. The museum’s got dozens of collaborations with New Orleans schools, and these take years to develop. Little things, such as the museum’s collaboration with a local independent bookshop, show care and attention to detail. Every month, the museum and the book dealer prepare a reading list driven by new exhibitions or new art.

When I became a curator, it was possible to spend a career in the vault, the office, and the library, and in the galleries installing art. That was the museum standard. A distinguished curator could go years without saying boo to a member of the public, and certainly not to a kid in school. Directors concerned themselves with scholarship and donors. Knowing John Bullard, who was the director at New Orleans for 30 years until he retired about a decade ago, I’d say he was more public-oriented than most. Now, the director’s job is outreach, marketing, fundraising, and friend-raising. Susan Taylor has been the director since Bullard’s retirement, and she’s led a vastly expanded exhibitions and acquisitions program and shepherded new initiatives such as the Besthoff sculpture garden.

The museum is financially stable. It’s not loaded, but it does serious local fundraising. A chunk of its $60 million endowment is dedicated to acquisitions. There’s not much walkin’-around money. Judging from its press releases, it’s got devoted donors, and over the years, directors and the board have cultivated local collectors. As New Orleans’s economy has diversified, so have its collectors. That means a promising future.