Shows of Support

Three local arts institutions have recently announced significant gifts or grants that will underwrite new initiatives and deepen existing programs:

• The New Orleans Museum of Art recently announced the most significant gift of photographs in the institution’s history. Tina Freeman, a photographer and collector who served as the museum’s curator of photographs from 1977 to 1982, has promised a bequest of over 1300 photographs by some 350 photographers, with the oldest images dating from the 1840s. Work by Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Stieglitz, and other well-known artists will enrich NOMA’s holdings, especially adding to its collection of work by female photographers. The gift is timed to coincide not only with the city’s tricentennial, but also with the hundredth anniversary of the institution’s first photography exhibition.

A selection of works from Freeman’s promised gift will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Past Present Future: Building Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art, on view through March 17, 2019. NOMA plans to produce a catalogue of the full collection in the coming years. noma.org.

• Local philanthropists and opera lovers John Turner and Jerry Fischer have gifted $4 million to the LSU College of Music & Dramatic Arts’ renowned opera program and on-campus recital hall. LSU’s opera program was established in 1931 as one of the first major university opera programs in the United States; still going strong today, it’s now poised, thanks to this gift and previous contributions from both Fischer and Turner and other benefactors, to grow and retain its position among top American incubators for fledgling opera stars. The gift will allow LSU Opera unrestricted funds to use as it needs, and will also renovate the LSU School of Music Recital Hall, the university’s most-used performance space and allow for the installation there of the Paula G. Manship Concert Organ. lsu.edu/cmda.

• The Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson has received a $275,000 National Endowment of the Humanities grant to reinstall the museum’s permanent collection. The permanent collection was de-installed in 2017 to make way for a special Mississippi bicentennial exhibit; now, the permanent collection exhibit can be reimagined to reflect the museum’s growing emphasis on inclusion and the complexities of Mississippi’s identity, drawing from the work of the museum’s new Center for Art & Public Exchange. The MMA’s permanent collection contains over 5500 objects, with especially strong holdings in American art from 1865 and work by Mississippi artists. msmuseumart.org.