The following letter was recently sent to NOPA members by member Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art, in seeking support for a major, upcoming NOMA exhibit, “Photography.”
The exhibit, which opens Sunday, Nov. 10, is to highlight the museum’s massive photography collection, which includes some 10,000 works. The exhibit is to demonstrate New Orleans’ role in the history of photography, and feature masterpieces by photographers such as William Fox Talbot, André Kertész, and Edward Weston:
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| Lewis Wickes Hine – Mechanic and Steam Pump, circa 1930. New Orleans Museum of Art |
Letter from Russell Lord
New Orleans Museum of Art is proud to announce that we will be presenting “Photography” at NOMA this coming fall. Opening November 10, this exhibition will be the first major installation of the museum’s renowned photography collection since 1979, and will become one of the most significant photography projects in NOMA’s history.
As you may know from your work in the field, NOMA began collecting photographs in earnest in the early 1970s, when photography was not commonly found on the walls of art museums. This resulted in what is now one of the finest collections of photography in the United States, encompassing almost 10,000 works, spanning the entire history and scope of photography.
This project is as much about our future as it is our past, returning our collection to the international stage and setting the course for meaningful work in the years to come. We would very much like your support in this project, which we firmly believe will help bring photography in general to the forefront of the artistic conversation in New Orleans in the coming months.
This exhibition will mirror the cultural ambitions of photography in its range and scope, including photographs made as works of art, as well as advertising images, social documents and more. It will also demonstrate that New Orleans as a city has been central to the history of photography; it was one of only a handful of cities that were requisite sites for photographic exploration throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
As a member of the NOLA Photo Alliance, we would like to invite you to support this seminal project. In acknowledgment of our contribution, we would be delighted to include the NOLA Photo Alliance among the sponsors of this year’s exhibition and accompanying publication.
Please click here or copy and paste this link into your browser to make your contribution:
http://www.noma.org/pages/detail/257
Or send your donations to:
New Orleans Museum of Art
Attn: Development Department, Photography at NOMA
PO Box 19123
New Orleans, LA 70179-0123
With warmest regards,
Russell Lord