Ogden Museum of Southern Art
925 Camp St
New Orleans, LA 70130
504.539.9650 | HOURS
925 Camp St
New Orleans, LA 70130
504.539.9650 | HOURS
Raven Halfmoon, Sunsets in the West, 2003, Glazed Ceramic, Courtesy of the Artist, Kouri+Corraro Gallery
Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition, presented by The Helis Foundation, is the South’s leading rotating public sculpture exhibition.
The Helis Foundation, Ogden Museum of Southern Art and The City of New Orleans Department of Parks and Parkways work together to bring interesting and inspiring sculptures to the citizens of and visitors to New Orleans.
Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition, presented by The Helis Foundation, has installed over 40 sculptures by artists of local and international acclaim on Poydras Street between Convention Center Boulevard and South Galvez. Prior to being installed on Poydras Street, the Design Advisory Committee of the City of New Orleans City Planning Commission reviews and approves the sculptures for content, location and safety, exercising its authority to request adjustments when necessary. The Helis Foundation funds every aspect of the exhibition, including the recent installation of lighting along the sculpture pads.
Many artists featured in the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition also have artwork on view at Ogden Museum. Stop by and See the South!
Learn More
Anastasia Pelias, ViVa (& the whole garden will bow), 2024, Polyurea, steel, polystyrene, powder coated aluminum, Courtesy of the Artist and Ferrara Showman Gallery
Anastasia Pelias was born in New Orleans to a Greek immigrant mother and a first-generation Greek-American father. Pelias creates art that is intimately rooted in the present and deeply evocative of the past. Her art draws from a vast well of Ancient Greek traditions, honors the timeless presence of the divine feminine, and serves as a conduit for healing. Throughout her practice, Pelias is known for weaving her New Orleans upbringing with her Greek heritage to create monumental artworks that transcend time and space and speak to universal truths about the feminine experience. ViVa (& the whole garden will bow) takes its name from a book of poetry by E. E. Cummings. The poem, “If there are any heavens,” elegantly acknowledges and celebrates the specific strength and courage that mothers possess. The monumental sculpture is a matriarchal beacon for those in search of respite and embodies female power.
Born in New Orleans in 1912, Kohlmeyer is one of Louisiana’s best-known modern artists. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from Newcomb College and went on to study in New York where she established herself as an abstract artist. Retrospectives of her work have been organized by Newcomb Museum, NOMA, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC and the High Museum in Atlanta. Examples of her work have been included in group exhibitions and are found in major museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Smithsonian Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Ida Kohlmeyer, Box of Artificial Flowers #6, 1985, Painted aluminum, This sculpture is part of The Helis Foundation Collection
Carmen Herrera, Untitled Estructura (Red), 1962/2018, Acrylic and aluminum, Courtesy of Lisson Gallery
Carmen Herrera was born in Havana, Cuba in 1915. She moved between France and Cuba throughout the 1930s and 1940s before settling in New York in 1954. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Hirschhorn Museum, Washington DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Walker Art Center, MN; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AR; Tate Collection, London.
Learn More about Herrera“New Orleans is the only city that I’ve been in that if you listen, the sidewalks will speak to you.” – John T. Scott, 2002
Black Butterfly is an abstract aluminum sculpture completed four years after John T. Scott was awarded the MacArthur Genius Award. Scott’s work frequently displays themes related to African-American life, particularly the rich Afro-Caribbean culture and musical heritage of New Orleans.
Learn More about Scott
John T. Scott, Black Butterfly, 1996, Aluminum, This sculpture is part of The Helis Foundation Collection
David Borgerding, Volpang, 2015, Forged silicon bronze, This sculpture is part of The Helis Foundation Collection
David Borgerding relocated to New Orleans in 2000 after obtaining his MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design. That year, he quickly found a studio and resumed his sculpture practice focusing on fabricated bronze and stainless steel. In 2008, Borgerding built his current studio on Chippewa Street in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans. He has been consistently active in the studio, working on large public and private sculpture commissions as well as smaller pedestal-sized works.
Learn more about BorgerdingBenglis was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1941. She earned a B.F.A. in 1964 from Newcomb College in New Orleans, where she studied ceramics and painting, and later went on to study painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.
Benglis resides in New York, Santa Fe and Ahmedabad, India. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Benglis’s work is in extensive public collections, including the Guggenheim, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Learn More about Benglis
Lynda Benglis, Power Tower, 2019, Bronze with high gloss gold patina, Courtesy of Pace Gallery, This sculpture is part of The Helis Foundation Collection
Wyatt Kahn, Parade, 2021, Corten steel
Kahn remarked that he is “humbled and stoked” to be a part of such an influential and important public art exhibition. He added, “I’m interested to see how New Orleans views the sculpture differently than other major cities like New York and Mexico where the piece previously resided.”
James Surls was born in East Texas in 1943. The state would be the site of his artistic development and success over several decades. Upon returning to Texas after receiving his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Surls began an extensive teaching career in Texas universities. While teaching at the University of Houston near his home and studio in Splendora, Surls founded the influential Lawndale Arts Center in Houston. His natural and organic sculptures have been exhibited and collected widely. Surls now resides in Carbondale, Colorado.
Learn more about Surls
James Surls, Standing Vase with Five Flowers, 2010, Bronze and stainless steel, This sculpture is part of The Helis Foundation Collection
Enrique Alférez, Gymnast, 1990-1991, Bronze, This sculpture is part of The Helis Foundation Collection
“After eleven years in the Mexican military during the revolution, I was tired of seeing man’s atrocities. I wanted to see and learn beautiful things… I wanted to study sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, after having gone to a lecture and demonstration of modeling a head, given by Lorado Taft. It’s not about inspiration, it is about hard work.” –Enrique Alférez
Learn more about Alférez“My sculpture is kinetic, meaning that it moves. The elements are derived from nature, and I borrow natural elements – wind, water, magnets – to set them in motion. The rhythms are influenced by infinite variables: the points of balance, the normal frequency of each form, the interruption of the counterpoise. I juggle, juxtapose, and adjust to achieve the dance or pantomime that I want. Then, the sculpture takes over and invents a fillip of its own.” –Lin Emery
Learn more about Emery
Lin Emery, Octet, 2014, Polished aluminum, This sculpture is part of The Helis Foundation Collection
George Dunbar, Monumental Deity XX
Dunbar, a native New Orleanian, heavily influenced the New Orleans arts community and generations of artists across the globe. A founder of the storied Orleans Gallery – New Orleans’ first contemporary art collective – Dunbar consistently drew inspiration from experimentation in his art. He strived to learn new techniques throughout his career while working intently across the mediums of paint and sculpture.
The recent subject of a documentary, George Dunbar: Mining the Surfaces, his work is in included in the collections of such esteemed museums as Whitney Museum of American Art, the British Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Dunbar received the Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 for his contributions to art and culture in Louisiana. In 2016, the New Orleans Museum of Art presented a career retrospective titled George Dunbar: Elements of Chance and, in 2022, Ogden Museum of Southern Art presented the artist with the Opus Lifetime Achievement Award.
Learn more about DunbarScobey lives and works in Marfa, Texas, where he participates in self-initiated projects exploring material, transmission, finish, site and scale. His studio practice generally results in stacked sculptural work in concrete, stone, wood and acrylic. Works often incorporate material that transmits and reflects natural light, so the experience of the work is determined by the position of the sun and viewer.
learn more about Scobey
Matt Scobey, Poydras Corridor Polyhedra, Aluminum, steel, and cast acrylic
Allison Janae Hamilton, Love is like the sea…., 2023, Bronze, This sculpture is part of The Helis Foundation Collection
Born in Kentucky, raised in Florida, and with family roots in rural Western Tennessee, Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984; Lexington, KY) draws on her upbringing in the American South throughout her practice, weaving themes of environmental justice, landscape, and mythology into sculpture, installation, photography, and film. In what she describes as “rural Black surrealism,” Hamilton is known for monumental artworks that blend the epic with the everyday in ways that are both haunting and breathtaking. Love is like the sea…(2023) takes its title from Zora Neal Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, set against the backdrop of the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, which devastated the state of Florida. The monumental sculpture—three columns of stacked tambourine forms cast in bronze—addresses the intersection of environmental crisis and cultural history.
Learn more about HamiltonRaven Halfmoon (b. 1991) is an artist and sculptor from Norman, Oklahoma. She is a citizen of the Caddo Nation and also Choctaw, Delaware, and Otoe Missouria.
Sunsets in the West reflects the colors and concepts of Western life through an Indigenous experience. The vibrant colors of the sunsets in Halfmoon’s home state of Oklahoma painted a luminous backdrop for her life there. Oklahoma has long been known as the place of “Cowboys and Indians,” and she informs that narrative with her experiences. She has also spent significant amounts of time in Montana and California building ceramic pieces that were influenced by her understanding and portrayal of the West.
Learn more about Halfmoon
Raven Halfmoon, Sunsets in the West, 2003, Glazed Ceramic, Courtesy of the Artist, Kouri+Corraro Gallery