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A Crescent City cultural exploration in the great outdoors

BY JENNY ADAMS

While there are many great, visit-worthy museums in New Orleans, you don’t need to pay a penny—or to even step inside—to see some of the best art the city has to offer. Simply grab your sunglasses, camera and a friend, and set out on a daylong outdoor art safari.

Much like the Champs-Élysées in Paris and Las Ramblas in Barcelona, Jackson Square has long drawn creatives. In the 1950s, following World War II, a few artists began gathering in Pirate’s Alley, the tiny laneway adjacent to St. Louis Cathedral. There was an artistic appeal to the location, with notes of live jazz and the aromas of coffee and gin wafting through the air, the time of day depending. Artists set up here, painting on easels, sketching in notebooks and hawking their creations to passersby. It remains a steady art scene to this day, swelling in the high season and calming in the low. On any given afternoon, you might find as many as 20 artists working along its fence, with offerings ranging from fast, spray-paint pieces to more in-depth, fine art paintings.

Most weekends you’ll spot Victor Nenko on the eastern corner of the fence, swiftly applying strokes to canvas. He captures what’s around him—the centuries-old Pontalba Buildings, a saxophone player, scenes playing out at al fresco cafés—painting New Orleans in abstract realism; blurred but raw, colorful and full of life. Just down the fence toward Café Du Monde, Bob Clift has been a staple on the open-air art scene for more than 50 years. “I work in pastels,” he says,

Jackson Square regular Victor Nenko (left), one of many artists you’ll find creating and displaying works along its black iron fence. “and prefer customers sit for portraits.” Commit to around 40 minutes for a black-and-white drawing or an hour and a half for color. It’s a rare and wonderful thing to have a portrait done by someone with so much talent.

Along with hundreds of ancient live oaks and dozens of works by Mexican-born WPA-era artist Enrique Alferez, City Park is home to the New Orleans Museum of Art, which offers six centuries of fine art inside, as well as its free Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden. The garden opened in 2003 with more than 60 sculptures, the majority from the 19th and 20th centuries (including pieces by Renoir, Rodin and Henry Moore), spread over five lushly landscaped acres. A 2019 expansion added another 6.5 acres and 30 more pieces, three of which are site-specific commissions. The expansion primarily features contemporary artists (Maya Lin, Frank Gehry, Elyn Zimmerman, Hank Willis Thomas) working in multiple mediums and materials, from bronze and glass to steel and ceramics.

On the southern edge of the park is the Louisiana Children’s Museum, which is accessed via Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculpture, her first in the American South and second in the nation. Walking toward the entrance, you cross a low, long footbridge from which a rolling fog sweeps the landscape every 30 minutes. The experience is otherworldly, enveloping visitors in an ethereal mist that blankets their feet and the surrounding marshland. The installation was made possible by the Helis Foundation, a private, familyfunded group that underwrites major outdoor art initiatives around the city.

Another Helis project is the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition, a public art program stretching from the intersection of Poydras Street and S. Claiborne Avenue all

(FROM LEFT) ©LOUISIANA CHILDREN’S MUSEUM; ©RICHARD SEXTON/NOMA (2) the way to Convention Center Boulevard. Placards dot the sidewalks, offering background information on each artist and sculpture, as well as the meaning behind them. The revolving series, which has featured more than 30 works since its inception in 2013, recently placed five new pieces, including a massive, red acrylic and aluminum cantilevered sculpture by 106-year-old Cuban artist Carmen Herrera at Loyola Avenue and acclaimed local artist Dawn DeDeaux’s “Free Form” series of columns inscribed with poetry across from the Superdome.

“Public art is a hallmark of every international art city and reflects the value our community places on art and the individuals who make it,” says William Pittman Andrews, executive director of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and curator of the Poydras project. “The art serves to activate our environment, and in this setting, anyone passing by can interact with and be inspired by these sculptures. It’s another way to celebrate New Orleans.”

In partnership with Arts Council New Orleans, the Helis Foundation also helped mount “Unframed,” a collection of massive murals in and around the Central Business and Warehouse Arts districts. The two neighborhoods are positioned back-to-back, so it’s easy to explore these pieces on foot. Among the must-sees are local standout Brandan Odums’ uplifting depiction of a father and son swimming on the side of 636 Baronne Street, and, at 315 Julia Street on the façade of the Embassy Suites Hotel, the project’s largest mural to date, a 14-story work by Canadian artist Danaé Brissonnet that incorporates a giant pelican and fantastical alligator with a mermaid’s tail. For comprehensive, easy-tofollow maps of all the Unframed pieces and Poydras Corridor sculptures, visit thehelisfoundation.org.

Fujiko Nakaya’s fog installation at the LA Children’s Museum (top left) and the New Orleans Museum of Art’s Besthoff Sculpture Garden.