Ogden Museum of Southern Art first launched Louisiana Contemporary, presented by The Helis Foundation in 2012, to establish a vehicle that would bring to the fore the work of artists living in Louisiana and highlight the dynamism of art practice throughout the state. This year’s juror, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, has selected 51 works by 49 artists from a total of 1,036 submissions. Read More about Louisiana Contemporary 2022 Presented by The Helis Foundation

Leaving Appalachia: The Art of Gregory B. Saunders is the first major museum survey of the artist’s career, bringing forth rarely-seen works from private and public collections to show the depth of breadth of the artist’s practice. This exhibition illustrates a life spent in contemplation of process and place. It is a meditation on personal narrative and regional identity. Read More about Leaving Appalachia: The Art of Gregory B. Saunders

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925 – 1972) was a visionary photographer known for making haunting black and white photographs of his children in masks, portraits of literary friends and experiments in abstract photography.

Opening October 1, 2022 at Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Read More about The Photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

This portrait captures the complex relationship between an enslaved boy and the children of his master – growing up in the same French Quarter mansion, where there existed simultaneously a sort of intimacy alongside the psychological trauma of forced bondage. At some point, likely in the late 19th or early 20th century, the figure of Bélizaire was intentionally painted over; effectively erasing him from the portrait. In 2005 the painting was sold to a private collector and underwent conservation, revealing Bélizaire’s image oncemore. Read More about Bélizaire and the Frey Children

This portrait of New Orleans’ chef and “Queen of Creole Cuisine,” Leah Chase, is appropriately larger than life as is Chase’s legacy as an advocate for both Creole cooking and African-American art. Her restaurant, Dooky Chase, became central to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, providing a safe place for meetings with leading figures of the movement including A.P. Tureaud, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Freedom Riders. Over the years, she fed scores of luminaries – such as Sarah Vaughn, Nat King Cole, James Baldwin, Ray Charles and two US Presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She would often say, “In my dining room, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken.” Read More about Focus: Leah Chase by Aron Belka

In 1987, Ida Kohlmeyer received a commission to design a major installation for the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas located in Woldenberg Park near the Mississippi River in downtown New Orleans. The installation, Aquatic Colonnade, was completed in 1990 and consisted of 20 brightly-colored abstracted sculptures representing sea creatures. While designing the installation, Kohlmeyer created small maquettes from soda cans, using these diminutive sculptures as preliminary sketches for the larger installation. These maquettes, now on view at Ogden Museum, were used as reference material in that process. Read More about Aquatic Colonnade Maquettes The Sculptures of Ida Kohlmeyer

Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition, presented by The Helis Foundation, is the South’s leading rotating public sculpture exhibition. Read More about Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition Presented by The Helis Foundation

Drawing from the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s premier collection of works by Benny Andrews, this ongoing exhibition celebrates one of the South’s greatest voices in the visual arts. Read More about Benny Andrews Permanent Collection Exhibition