The Museumgoer podcast

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 trav...

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 pr...

“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 profess...

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 dur...

“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 ab...

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, th...

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...