Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Roger H. Ogden donated more than 600 works from his private collection in 1999, the founding gift for what became the largest and most significant collection of Southern art in the world. The museum opened in 2003 at 925 Camp Street in two joined buildings: the Patrick F. Taylor Library, built in 1889 and designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, and the new Stephen Goldring Hall, a five-story glass and stone structure designed by Errol Barron and Michael Toups. The collection has grown to more than 4,000 works — paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, wood, and crafts — from artists from or associated with fifteen Southern states and the District of Columbia. New Orleans was the largest port in the South throughout the nineteenth century, exporting most of the nation's cotton and other farm products to Western Europe and New England. The city was a place of many tongues long before that — Bulbancha, the Choctaw name meaning "place of many tongues," was an important trading hub for thousands of years before French settlers arrived. The Ogden holds work from that long sweep of Southern experience: folk art and shadowy bayou paintings, haunting old photographs and bright modern abstractions. Artists include Clementine Hunter, George Rodrigue, George Dureau, Ida Kohlmeyer, Walter Anderson, and George Ohr. When the museum opened, the New York Times observed there is no easily identifiable Southern art style in the collection. What emerged were themes of place, history, and memory. The self-taught art collection — work by artists with no formal training, often from rural and African American communities — is the most significant in any museum. Ogden After Hours on Thursday nights pairs live music with open galleries. Louisiana residents get in free on the first Thursday of the month.