Newcomb Art Museum — Tulane University

The world's largest collection of Newcomb pottery sits in a teaching museum on Tulane's Uptown campus, and the work earns that prominence. From 1895 until 1940, women at Newcomb College produced what has become some of the most collected American art pottery — pieces made by Sadie Irvine, Harriet Coulter Joor, and Marie de Hoa LeBlanc among them. The collection also includes embroidery, bound books, and metalwork from the Arts and Crafts Movement. H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College was founded in 1886 by Josephine Louise Newcomb in memory of her daughter Sophie — the first national coordinate college for women. Newcomb followed industrial trends offering intensive design training for decorative arts production. The museum also holds one-of-a-kind stained-glass windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, commissioned by Josephine Louise Newcomb and her confidant Frank Walter Callender between 1894 and 1896 for a chapel at Newcomb's original Washington Avenue campus in the Garden District. In 1996, the Newcomb Art Gallery became a reality when the Newcomb Art Department completed an expansion and renovation that included a 3,600-square-foot exhibition space. In July 2015, the gallery officially became the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University — a change made to distinguish it from a commercial gallery and to indicate its status as a collections-holding institution. Since 2014, the institution has increasingly focused on exhibitions and programs that explore socially engaged art, civic dialogue, and community transformation. The museum holds on average four exhibitions annually and has presented work by Mickalene Thomas, KAWS, Joan Mitchell, Nick Cave, and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as artists with Newcomb connections like Mark Rothko and Ida Kohlmeyer. Honoring the legacy of Newcomb College, the museum regularly presents work by women artists. In 2003, the museum commissioned a new work by Carrie Mae Weems that became known as her Louisiana Project. Admission is free.