The Museumgoer podcast

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 beau...

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 syste...

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 Fr...

The new changing exhibit “Holocaust Survivors in a New Land: The New Americans Social Club of New Orleans” is on view through the end of the year at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience.  The exhibit tells the story of the social organization that formed to assist European Holocaust survivors who relocated to New Orleans.  The exhibit tells their assimilation stories, their strides toward...

In this episode, we’ll step inside the new changing exhibit at the National WWII Museum, and chat with Cory Graff, Museum Curator and Restoration Manager. The exhibit, “Come Back Fighting: USS New Orleans at War” tells the story of a decorated heavy cruiser that served in almost every major Pacific theater battle of World War II.  Christened at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1933 with water from the Mi...

“American Revolution: The Augmented Exhibition” has opened at the Historic New Orleans Collection and will remain on view through January 17, 2027. From the French technology company Histovery, the exhibition uses hand-held tablet computers to open up 360-degree views of the sites, events and historical figures who fought for America’s independence 250 years ago.  The HistoPads, as they’re called,...

Our guest is Stephen Kling, guest curator of “Gálvez and Louisiana in the American Revolution,” a new exhibit at the Cabildo that offers a heretofore largely obstructed Gulf Coast view of how bayou-based colonists prosecuted the quest for liberty. Told through text, multimedia screens, re-created period garments, old and newly rendered artwork, and historical objects such as maps, documents and gu...

Two new exhibits at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art spotlight the art-collecting interests – and generosity – of Stacey and Michael Burke.  One is a collection of “self taught,” “outsider” or “vernacular” work by Southern artists. “Burke’s Delight: The Stacey and Michael Burke Collection” will remain on view through January 10, 2027.  The other, “Herman Leonard: Images of Jazz,” features portrait...

There is subtle history to see in some of the ball photos on view in the new exhibit “Origins of New Orleans Black Carnival Society: The Story of the Illinois Clubs,” now on view at the Presbytere. Basketball court markings are visible in several of them because the clubs – the Original Illinois Club, born in 1895, and the Young Men Illinois Club, a 1926 offshoot – for most of their history had to...

The exhibit “Cut from a Different Cloth: Fashion Selections from Tulane Special Collections” is on view through May 29. Its story is a century-plus of New Orleans apparel, winding through many levels of the community, from Carnival royalty to Black Masking Indians, college students and titans of world couture. I visited the exhibit to interview co-curators Faye Daigle and Kevin Williams. He’s coor...

A conversation with David Kunian, music curator at the New Orleans Jazz Museum about the exhibit “The District: Music and Musicians in Storyville.” The District, as it was known to musicians, was nicknamed Storyville by its patrons for Sidney Story, the New Orleans politician whose 1897 ordinance established the District’s boundaries in an attempt to consolidate the city’s vice into one neighborho...

Open since May, this exhibit tells the more than century-long story of half the local population’s efforts to seize their share of our rites of Carnival. Wayne Phillips, Louisiana State Museum curator of costumes and textiles and Carnival collections, talks us through the exhibit's many stories, including a visit with one very special shoe. Images accompanying the conversation are on the blog...

On view through May 16, 2027, the exhibit's 14 pieces, assembled from HNOC’s permanent holdings, focus primarily on traditional New Orleans jazz musicians, captured decades ago. There are outliers in the show, which Jason Wiese and I discuss in the podcast. Jason is the Collection’s chief curator and curated the exhibit, which features a soundtrack of selections created by people depicted on t...

A pre-opening conversation with artist James Michalopoulos, whose new exhibition takes place only a few steps and decades away from the artist’s start in New Orleans, painting on French Quarter streets. For a prelude, a few memories of a recent stay at the Higgins Hotel & Conference Center, which is part of the huge National WWII Museum complex in New Orleans. A full report can be found on the...

Conceived as a fundraising event for the St. Louis Cathedral restoration, "Sunday Best" became a more comprehensive look at the churchgoing finery of both parishioners and clergy -- and a showcase for curatorial imagination. Here’s a conversation in the galleries with co-curator Sarah Waits and Christopher Wiseman, executive director of the Catholic Cultural Center of New Orleans, which...

The traveling exhibit “Indigeaux: Yes, Spirit. I’ll go …” recently arrived at the Whitney Plantation in Wallace. Created by Leia Lewis, an educator, artist, and self-described “light-bringer” and “cultural architect,” the exhibit features hand-dyed textiles and original artwork conceived as “an offering to the enslaved women whose hands were stained blue with indigo,” she says. In this episode, th...

Brian Piper, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings at the New Orleans Museum of Art, discusses the photography exhibit on view through January 4, 2026. Note: Piper asked for an addendum to the conversation, which is included at the end of the interview. Images accompanying the podcast are on the blog at themuseumgoer.com.

September is National Library Card Sign-Up Month, a promotion by the American Library Association. In addition to all the free learning and entertainment a library card unlocks, there’s a pathway at your local branch -- almost everywhere you might be in Louisiana -- to free admission at some of the state’s best museums. In addition to all the learning that those programs unlock, the opportunity re...

This time, the Museumgoer Podcast guest is Sarah Waits, research archivist for the Office of Archives and Records at the Archdiocese of New Orleans, who discusses her research into sacramental records to build the family tree and documents that make up "Rooted in Faith" exhibit at the Old Ursuline Convent Museum. The exhibit explores the Creole 7th Ward roots of Robert Francis Prevost, P...

Since its opening in 2010, the Presbytere exhibition “Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond” has occupied some of the most valuable real estate in the Louisiana State Museum system and has arguably been the most important permanent museum exhibition in town.   Steps from the tourist magnet of Jackson Square, it’s been anengaging learning machine for visitors who only know the storm and its fa...

New Orleans Museum Month is an annual promotion by New Orleans & Co. that runs throughout August, offering members of participating institutions two free admissions at all of the nearly 30 other institutions for the month. In this episode, four local museum leaders discuss the benefits of museum membership beyond Museum Month. Links to other Museum Month coverage can be found on the blog at th...

New Orleans had the first purpose-built Jewish orphanage inAmerica because New Orleans had Yellow Fever, an indiscriminate orphan-maker. On view at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience through January 25, 2026,the changing exhibit “Most Fortunate Unfortunates: The Jewish Orphans’ Home of New Orleans” travels through a near-century of history. Our guest this time is Michael Jacobs, MSJE’s c...

An in-gallery interview with Brian Piper, the New Orleans Museum of Art's Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints and Drawings. We discuss the photography exhibit, on view through February 22, 2026, that explores life on -- and in -- the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Images to accompany the conversation are on the blog at themuseumgoer.com.

A survey of some of the participants in the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th century, "The Trail They Blazed" started its life as a series of oral histories, then became a traveling exhibit. It's on view at 520 Royal Street through early June 2026. Admission is free. Images accompanying the conversation are on the blog at themuseumgoer.com.

In his new book "Preserving the Legacy: Creating theNational WWII Museum," Gordon H. “Nick” Mueller, cofounder of the museum with historian Stephen E. Ambrose and now its president and CEO emeritus, recounts in great detail how the road to today’s massive museum campus waspocked with craters. The decade-plus quest by Ambrose and Mueller to navigate the National D-Day Museum, an inaugural incarnati...