NEW ORLEANS (press release) – The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) announces the museum’s exhibition schedule for 2022. Opening with Queen Nefertari’s Egypt, NOMA’s upcoming exhibitions also feature the work of two extraordinary women in the visual arts, and the important story of Black American studio photographers and their role in the history of photography.
Queen Nefertari’s Egypt, on view March 18–July 17, 2022, highlights the first royal wife of Pharaoh Ramesses II (reigned 1279–13 BCE), who is linked to some of the most magnificent monuments of ancient Egypt. The 230 objects exhibited showcase the legacy of the royal wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers of pharaohs—as well as the pharaohs themselves.
“The many exceptional objects in Queen Nefertari’s Egypt, drawn from the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, will bring to life the role of Nefertari and other powerful women in ancient Egypt,” said Susan Taylor, Montine McDaniel Freeman Director. “NOMA is delighted to be able to present some of the priceless creations from Queen Nefertari’s tomb, where visitors can appreciate their great history up close.”
Katherine Choy (American, b. China, 1927–1958), head of ceramics at Tulane University’s Newcomb College in the 1950s, was one of the first ceramicists to bridge Asian traditions into Modern abstract art. Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans, on view May 6, 2022–April 23, 2023, mines New Orleans archives and gathers oral histories in the first monographic review of an artist who was celebrated by the 1950s American craft world, but has nonetheless been nearly forgotten. NOMA’s exhibition will be the first presentation of Choy’s extraordinary ceramics in New Orleans since the artist’s Louisiana friends mounted the Katherine Choy Memorial Show at the Orleans Gallery in fall 1959.
Louise Bourgeois: Paintings, on view September 9, 2022–January 1, 2023, is the first comprehensive exhibition of paintings produced by the iconic French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) between her arrival in New York in 1938 and her turn to sculpture in the late 1940s. The exhibition presents a core of artistic themes that Bourgeois began to explore early in her career, and continued to develop throughout her life. NOMA will be the only additional venue for this exhibition, organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
From photography’s beginnings in the United States, Black studio photographers operated on the developing edge of photographic media to produce beautiful portraits for their clients, while also making a variety of other kinds of photography that aligned with important artistic movements like Pictorialism and Modernism. Focusing exclusively on a national cohort of professional Black studio photographers, Black American Studio Photography—on view September 16, 2022–January 8, 2023—illustrates the artistic virtuosity, social significance, and political impact of African American photographers working in commercial portrait studios during photography’s first century.
“This project will illustrate a more robust history of photography that accounts for the ways that African Americans made and used photographs from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century,” said Brian Piper, Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Photographs. “It is a chance to celebrate the work of Black American portrait photographers and subjects and to deepen the scholarship that surrounds their works.”
For more information about NOMA, visit www.noma.org.
