The Museumgoer podcast

There are a couple of important things to see in the exhibit “Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection,” on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art through Feb. 14, 2027.See as in observe, understand, imagine, take away.  One big thing is the artwork itself, about 60 Rinpa school scrolls, folding screens and fan paintings dating back to Japan’s Edo period (1615-1868). Largely meditative scenes of nature, the works are sometimes accompanied by poetry.The other big thing is the symbiosis taking place in the exhibit between private art collectors and a public institution. Most of the works on view are from the collection of the late Dr. Kurt A. Gitter and his wife, Alice Yelen Gitter.I had a great talk with Lisa Rotondo-McCord, NOMA’s deputy director and curator of NOMA’s fantastic collection of Asian art. Don’t miss this beautiful, delicate, history-filled, and artfully staged exhibit and its accompanying exhibit of Japanese art from NOMA’s collection on view elsewhere in the building.  Thanks to Lisa, and thanks to you for listening.

This time, we travel upriver from New Orleans to Vacherie, Louisiana, to visit the Laura Plantation and learn about a new tour offered there that tells the stories of the nine enslaved men on the plantation who joined the Union forces during the Civil War. I took the tour, led by guide Mark Pernosky, who co-developed the tour, and spoke to him afterward. There’s an excerpt of the tour, which travels the grounds to introduce visitors to the men. Later, I spoke with Sand Marmillion, a cultural anthropologist and historian who, with her late husband, Norman “Johnny” Marmillion Jr., restored the plantation and stewarded it to life as an educational destination.We’ll start with Sand, then talk to Mark.  Thanks to Sand and Mark, and thanks to you for listening. 

I’ve got a melancholy episode for you this time, a recording of my July 2026 visit to The LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana Queer History Exhibit Space at 311 Burgundy Street. I met there with Frank Perez, executive director of the Archives Project. Perez, who died of cancer a few weeks after my visit, was an author, historian, and all-around great New Orleanian. We talked about the archives project and the city’s “very rich, deep and long queer history that has been generally neglected in most historical narratives,” he said. The gallery is also the starting point for walking tours of French Quarter queer history. Operating hours and tour information can be found at lgbtarchiveslouisiana.org.  There are links to coverage of Frank’s life and death, as well as photos of the gallery, on the blog at themuseumgoer.com. Thanks to Frank – for his work in the community, and for sharing his time with me. And thanks to you for listening. 

“Woke” teachers, librarians, park rangers, and museum curators are under political fire for the histories they teach. Gains made in recent years to expand the stories told in museums to incorporate more diverse communities have been threatened, as have efforts by museums to ensure their staff composition represents the diverse communities they serve.So, why would current and rising museum professionals of all backgrounds believe there’s a future where their skills and experience are again honored and respected, not derided and devalued?It’s a question that Haitham Eid eed, director of the Southern University at New Orleans master of arts in museum studies program, often fields from prospective students.I spoke with Dr. Eed, as well as a few of his current and former students, to discuss the program, its benefits to those interested in careers in museum work, and the challenges now facing the field’s professionals. After my conversation with him, I speak with: Current student Lauren Porras, Museum Education Coordinator at the Gilb Museum of Arcadia Heritage in Arcadia, California. Nakeya Palmer (Class of 2025), Higher Education Program Coordinator at the University of Central Arkansas. And Caroline Bozier (Class of 2024), collections manager at the New Orleans Museum of Art. 

Today’s episode is for map people, who should navigate to the Nous Foundation Gallery at 602 Toulouse St. to catch the exhibit “Becoming Louisiana: Borders in Motion, 1683-1814” while you can.The free exhibit, which closes Sept. 30, uses wall-sized line drawings derived from historic maps of the region (from the holdings of the Historic New Orleans Collection and the Library of Congress) made during the title time span. The idea is to demonstrate how the concept of “Louisiana” changed during the decades leading to statehood, and how it “was represented, contested, and transformed over time,” says the introductory wall text, by mapmakers charting the regional reigns of France, Spain and upstart colonists, as well as the indigenous originals who preceded them all.I visited the gallery to talk with Rudy Bazenet-Tilton, head curator, and Scott Bazenet-Tilton, executive director, who is the first voice you’ll here. More: themuseumgoer.com

“Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin and the Art of War” is a traveling exhibit on view through April 18, 2027, at the National WWII Museum. A combat cartoonist, Mauldin was Ernie Pyle’s contemporary in covering World War II from the perspective of the soldiers doing the fighting. A quote from Pyle about Mauldin in the exhibit sums it up: “Mauldin’s cartoons aren’t about training camp life. They are about the men in the line – the tiny percentage of our vast army who are actually doing the dying.” The exhibit spans Mauldin’s full life, from a Depression-era childhood in New Mexico to big-city newspaper politcal cartoonist. Life-size renditions of his Willie and Joe cartoon characters from the war, who captured the frustrations of front-line fighters and transmitted through syndication an unvarnished look at the war back to the home front, greet visitors at the entrance of the exhibit, which originated at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library in Kenosha, Wis.The exhibit’s opening wall demonstrates the challenge the exhibit presented to the National WWII Museum team, who had to expand the presentation from mostly two-dimensional cartoons and a few objects (including Mauldin’s Purple Heart) to fill the expansive Alario Special Exhibition Hall.On the evening of the exhibit’s opening, I walked through the galleries with WWII Museum Curator Chase Tomlin and historian Todd DePastino. Bill Mauldin’s son, Nat, joins us about halfway through. Chase’s voice is the first you’ll hear. 

The lobby of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans’ headquarters, in the Leeds-Davis Building at 923 Tchoupitoulas St., is devoted to a museum-style exhibit explaining, according to the title wall, “the greatest architecture museum of all – the streets of New Orleans.”From the colonial era to midcentury modern, creole cottages through shotguns to American townhouses and ranch houses, the lessons on how to “read” a New Orleans home explore the historic origins and organic utility of each design.Actually, the lessons start in the precolonial era. Also on the exhibit’s title wall, the indigenous populations that predated the first colonists are credited with pioneering the concept of raised dwellings, a centuries-old practice still relevant this week.  The exhibit’s detail beyond the major dwelling styles – down to window and door designs, roof shapes, cladding styles, and the fact that several “types” can be present in one building – makes for a great standing read.The text for the exhibit was written by MaryNell Nolan-Wheatley and Michelle Shoriak; Susan Langenhennig Granger was project editor. The designers were David Jack Browning and Liz Jurey.Here’s my walk-and-talk in the exhibit with Kristin Gisleson Palmer, the PRC’s executive director. More: themuseumgoer.com

This episode begins with a few words about my recent sponsored visit to the Hotel Pompadour in New Orleans,  a boutique hotel that is the vision of New Orleans artist James Michalopoulos, whose paintings fill the property with quavering, paint-heavy, color-rich, dreamy, dramatic images.Then it's on to the interview. The royal porcelain factory on the outskirts of Paris has been producing beautiful works of breakable art for nearly three centuries. Because a New Orleans collector took special interest in a specific period of the factory’s output, 75 pieces made for France’s doomed royal family between 1758 and 1766 are now on view in “Sèvres Magnifique: French Porcelain from the Collection of Thomas B. Lemann” at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Here’s my visit to the exhibit with Mel Buchanan, NOMA’s RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts & Design. We discuss the works on view, as well as Lemann’s remarkable gift to the museum. The exhibit is on view through January 3. More on both at themuseumgoer.com.

The exhibit “The First Piano Professors and Lost Music of Early New Orleans” is now on view at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. Co-curated by musician and archivist John Davis and the museum’s music curator David Kunian, the exhibit fills two big rooms with a story driven largely by sheet music. In the days before recorded sound, sheet music largely performed on home pianos was the distribution system for popular music. New Orleans, and Canal Street especially, was a vortex of music publishers in the 19th century. The classical music they distributed, composed and performed by a mix of émigrés from Europe and Louisiana-born Creoles, was mostly lost to time. Excavated from various archives over decades by Davis, the music is resurrected in the exhibit. The first room introduces the musicians and the venues where they performed. The second room features the sheet music itself, both in glass cases and projected onto the walls. The soundtrack is by Davis, performing the works seen on the walls. The exhibit is a fascinating trip to the New Orleans before the 20th-century breakthroughs of jazz and R&B. I visited with Kunian in the space pre-opening, and later via Zoom with Davis.  More: themuseumgoer.com.

This new exhibit tracks the many ways the enslalved there navigated the perilous course toward survival. As the exhibit shows, it involved worship, maintaining blood or acquired kinship, education (especially literacy, the teaching of which to the enslaved was a crime in most Southern states), sharing folktales and foodways, even cultivating herbal remedies. In the case of Prince and Alex, two French-speaking 14-year-olds, it took the form of escape. We know because of a classified advertisement, placed in a New Orleans newspaper by plantation owner J.J. Haydel, offering a $50 reward for their capture. The ad is reproduced at the start of the exhibit, which continues on panel displays throughout the property.I walked the grounds of the plantation with Mary Niall Mitchell, director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans and a UNO history professor. The project, which incorporates wonderful graphic illustrations by Langston Allston, is a collaboration between the Whitney and Midlo Center faculty, students, and graduate students. “Amongst Ourselves” also draws on “Freedom on the Move,” a digital database of fugitives from North American slavery maintained by Cornell University.Later in our walk, I got to spend a few minutes with Ashley Rogers, the Whitney’s executive director.