Art in New Orleans
A guide to and history of New Orleans's expansive and diverse visual arts scene
Beyond its world-renowned music and culinary landscapes, New Orleans has also long been host to a vibrant world of the visual arts all its own. Bolstered by its historic role as a port city bringing in famed European painters, New Orleans’s art scene has experienced a post-Katrina surge of revitalization and inspiration in the contemporary art sphere, and to many has earned an oft-overlooked place as one of America’s visual arts capitals.
History of the New Orleans Art Scene
From New Orleans’s earliest days, the city has been deeply connected to the fine arts world of Europe. The French survey painter Jean Pierre Lassus completed his “Veue et Perspective de la Nouvelle Orléans” depicting the young colony in 1726, which today hangs at the French National Archives in Paris. Any French art created in New Orleans in subsequent years was likely lost in the fires that leveled the vast majority of the Vieux Carre at the end of the 18th century. Painters of French as well as Spanish descent continued to produce portraits and landscapes through the early 1800s, and portraiture particularly experienced a surge of interest around the 1830s, when French artist Jean Joseph Vaudechamp was painting New Orleans’s most notable citizens. Many of his portraits remain in the collections of the Louisiana State Museum and local private collectors today.
One of the most significant moments in New Orleans’s arts history came in 1873, when Edgar Degas completed one of his earliest impressionist paintings of his uncle Michel Musson’s cotton exchange. This work, completed during Degas’ Reconstruction-era visit to the city made him the only member of the French Impressionist movement to paint in the United States.
Interest in art gained momentum in New Orleans, and in 1880 the Southern Art Union was formed by local artists, quickly amassing hundreds of members. After that organization splintered, the Artists’ Association of New Orleans was formed in its wake in 1886. Besides founding an art school, the Artists’ Association of New Orleans would develop and bolster the city’s first true community of professional artists. In 1884, New Orleans hosted one of the earliest international art exhibitions as part of the World Cotton Centennial.
"New Orleans's art scene is so vibrant because it is a network of many different types of artists and organizations—from large museums to DIY spaces and artist-run galleries, from creators who went to art school to culture bearers who are building on artistic traditions passed down over generations. Each of these components supports a dynamic ecosystem that is motivating, inspiring, and crucial for artists." —Charlie Tatum, Director of Marketing and Communications, New Orleans Museum of Art
In 1887, The H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College was founded as the first coordinate college for women in the United States, and not long after, The Newcomb Art College was established by artists and brothers William and Ellsworth Woodward with the help of Gertrude Roberts Smith. This seminal arts education institution instructed women artists in mediums and topics from ceramics, to mechanical and architectural drawing, to woodcarving. Just before the turn of the 20th century, faculty members launched Newcomb Pottery, which quickly became popular with collectors and museums across the country. Today, Newcomb continues its legacy of instructing young artists as part of Tulane University.
The New Orleans Arts and Crafts Club was established in 1922, and helped usher in what has been called the “French Quarter Renaissance,” which was characterized by a unique relationship between younger avant garde French Quarter artists and wealthy Uptown and Garden District collectors and patrons. Despite hosting a highly successful artist costume ball each year, the Depression greatly slowed the action of the club in the 1930s, and by 1951 the group had ceased to operate.
In 1980, Dorothy Jurisich Coleman and Auseklis Ozols opened the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts (NOAFA) on Magazine Street, which provided training in classical visual arts traditions. Today, more contemporary mediums including photography, abstraction, and mixed media are exhibited and taught at the NOAFA, too.
As more galleries began to crop up in the then somewhat-neglected New Orleans Warehouse District, the non-profit Arts District of New Orleans Association (ADNO) was founded in 1990 to help organize gallery leadership and unify promotional efforts with the intent of drawing more art lovers to the area. ADNO still hosts free “First Saturday” opening receptions across its member galleries each month, and sponsors Jammin’ on Julia, White Linen Night, and Art for Arts’ Sake each year to generate further appreciation for the arts among locals and visitors.
One of the largest and most important developments for New Orleans’s contemporary art scene is the establishment of the only triennial arts exhibition of its kind in the United States: Prospect New Orleans. Inspired by the Venice Biennale that started in 1895 to exhibit art from across the globe, Dan Cameron—former curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art as well as artistic director/organizer of Istanbul and Taipei Biennales—was struck by the United States’ lack of a large-scale biennial or triennial. When he visited New Orleans in 2006 just months after Hurricane Katrina, Cameron realized the city’s need for economic recovery, along with its long cultural legacy as an international port city made it the perfect location for such an ambitious exhibition. Prospect.1 brought artists from across the globe to New Orleans for the first iteration of the triennial in 2008, which remains one of the most influential art exhibitions to ever be held in New Orleans.
Prospect’s recently-formed Artists for Public Memory Commission turned to local artists, asking them to rethink the ways in which we view public monuments by creating public art installations in community spaces. These include kai lumumba barrow’s “Abolition Playground” at Norman C. Francis and Bienville, an intertribal collective’s “Nanih Bvlbancha” mound on the Lafitte Greenway, and Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun’s “Memoirs of the Lower 9th Ward,” a collaborative documentary photo exhibition on the neutral ground of Claiborne Avenue between St. Andry and Flood Streets.
2024 is a Prospect year, meaning that P.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home opens across the city on November 2 and runs through February 2, 2025. Curated by Artistic Directors Ebony G. Patterson and Miranda Lash, P.6 features more local artists than previous Prospects (Hannah Cha lew, Ruth Owens, L. Kasimu Harris, Thomas Deaton, and Christian Dinh among them), and also will continue its legacy of bringing in countless artists and art enthusiasts from around the globe for the international, city-wide event.
Beyond its larger arts institutions and museums (more on those linked below), New Orleans’s visual art is intricately woven throughout the city in the form of a vibrant gallery scene centered around the Warehouse Arts District on Julia Street and countless smaller galleries dotting Magazine and Royal Streets, plus an eclectic community of street vendors surrounding Jackson Square in the French Quarter and ample opportunities for arts markets and other events, too.