Displaying items by tag: new orleans museum of art

Opening this summer at the New Orleans Museum of Art, A Louisiana Parlor: Antebellum Taste & Context is an exhibition featuring the Butler-Greenwood Plantation parlor furnishings acquired by the museum from descendants of the family in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The 1850s/60s parlor suite has survived with original textiles and rich documentation, making it one of the South’s best preserved examples of a pre-Civil War Louisiana interior.

The exhibition explores the relationship between this refined interior and its layered historical context through family portraits on loan from The Historic New Orleans Collection and through documents housed in the Mathews family archives of letters, receipts, and bills of sale held at LSU Library Special Collections.

The late pop art master Roy Lichtenstein's sculpture "Five Brushstrokes" has been in place in front of The New Orleans Museum of Art for exactly a year. But at 6 p.m. Wednesday (Dec. 10), NOMA officially welcomed the 20-foot-tall painted aluminum landmark with a ceremony in front of the museum at 1 Collins Diboll Circle.

Art benefactors Sydney and Walda Besthoff, who bought the sculpture for the museum, spoke, as did NOMA Director Susan Taylor and Jack Cowart, executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

The Speed Art Museum continues to add to its curatorial staff in preparation for re-opening in 2016. Erika Holmquist-Wall, a specialist in 19th and 20th century Nordic art and design, joins the museum next month as the Mary and Barry Bingham Sr. Curator of European and American Painting and Sculpture.

The Speed announced the hire of contemporary art curator Miranda Lash, formerly of the New Orleans Museum of Art, in July.

Rosewood parlor furniture that has scarcely been moved for more than 150 years is about to be shipped across Louisiana.

The New Orleans Museum of Art has bought the parlor contents (for an unspecified price) from the owners of Butler Greenwood Plantation, a 1790s property along the Mississippi River in St. Francisville. It will go on view at the museum in a year or so, after minor repairs.

Descendants of the original owners live at Butler Greenwood, which also has a bed-and-breakfast on the grounds. (Rentable quarters include a dovecote and an original kitchen.)

Louisville's Speed Art Museum has hired a veteran curator from New Orleans to manage its contemporary art collection when it re-opens in spring 2016. Miranda Lash, who currently works as the curator of contemporary works at the New Orleans Museum of Art, will start her new job next month, according to the Speed Art Museum.

The Speed is currently undergoing a $60 million renovation and expansion project, which has closed the main museum building for construction until 2016.

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation announced that six American museums have acquired works by Robert Rauschenberg thank to its Gift/Purchase Program. The program was designed to expand public access to and awareness of Rauschenberg’s work by offering institutions the opportunity to acquire artworks from the foundation’s collection through equal parts gift and purchase.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired “Bande de Surete/Twin City/Nipples (Cardboard)” and “Vow (Jammers);” The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota gained “Park/ROCI MEXICO;” the Museum of Modern Art in New York obtained “Nabisco Shredded Wheat (Cardboard),” “Gull (Jammer),” and “Stop Side Early Winter (Glut);” The New Orleans Museum of Art in Louisiana acquired “Melic Meeting (Spread);” The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California gained “Rosalie/Red Cheek/Temporary Letter/Stock (Cardboard);” and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York obtained “Untitled (Venetian).”

The works, which were created across two decades, are from some of Rauschenberg’s most important series. His Cardboards explore the aesthetic potential of everyday materials; the Venetians are sculptural works reminiscent of the Italian city’s atmosphere; Jammers, which were inspired by a trip to India, celebrate the sensual qualities of fabric; Spreads are large-scale works that combine printed imagery and found objects; Gluts touch on socioeconomic issues; and the artist’s ROCI series was created as part of a humanitarian project that promoted world peace through artistic dialogue with local cultures.

Rauschenberg, who helped bridge the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, was a pioneering figure in 20th century art. He is best known for his “Combines,” which are part painting and part sculpture. Rauschenberg often used found objects and non-traditional materials in these works.