The Museumgoer podcast

“The First Piano Professors and Lost Music of Early New Orleans”

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 system for popular music. New Orleans, and Canal Street especially, was a vortex of music publishers in the 19th century. The classical music they distributed, composed and performed by a mix of émigrés from Europe and Louisiana-born Creoles, was mostly lost to time. Excavated from various archives over decades by Davis, the music is resurrected in the exhibit.  The first room introduces the musicians and the venues where they performed. The second room features the sheet music itself, both in glass cases and projected onto the walls. The soundtrack is by Davis, performing the works seen on the walls.  The exhibit is a fascinating trip to the New Orleans before the 20th-century breakthroughs of jazz and R&B. I visited with Kunian in the space pre-opening, and later via Zoom with Davis.  More: themuseumgoer.com.

“Amongst Ourselves: Resisting Slavery at Whitney Plantation”

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 French-speaking 14-year-olds, it took the form of escape. We know because of a classified advertisement, placed in a New Orleans newspaper by plantation owner J.J. Haydel, offering a $50 reward for their capture. The ad is reproduced at the start of the exhibit, which continues on panel displays throughout the property. I walked the grounds of the plantation with Mary Niall Mitchell, director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans and a UNO history professor. The project, which incorporates wonderful graphic illustrations by Langston Allston, is a collaboration between the Whitney and Midlo Center faculty, students, and graduate students. “Amongst Ourselves” also draws on “Freedom on the Move,” a digital database of fugitives from North American slavery maintained by Cornell University. Later in our walk, I got to spend a few minutes with Ashley Rogers, the Whitney’s executive director.

“Holocaust Survivors in a New Land: The New Americans Social Club of New Orleans”

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 self-sufficiency, and the close social ties established within their “chosen family.” The exhibit is drawn from a trove of photos, documents and oral histories assembled by John Menszer, a local attorney who has been interviewing local Holocaust survivors since the 1990s. His mother, Elaine, had been doing so since the 1970s. I recently visited the exhibit with Michael Jacobs, the museum’s collections and exhibits curator.  More at themuseumgoer.com.

"Come Back Fighting: USS New Orleans at War"

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 Mississippi River, the ship’s interwar duties took her to Europe, South America and the US territories of Alaska and Hawaii. Undergoing repairs at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, it survived (while providing one of the war’s signature soundtrack songs) and went on to fight at the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, and the Solomon Islands. Losing her bow and more than 180 of her crew in a battle off Guadalcanal, she limped toward repairs and then was returned to action. In 1946, a victory lap brought her to New Orleans for the first postwar Mardi Gras Photo courtesy of the National WWII Museum. Images accompanying the conversation are on the blog at themuseumgoer.com. Also, new to the Historic Hotels portion of the site is a page devoted to the Rubenstein Hotel.

"American Revolution: The Augmented Exhibition"

“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, are triggered at pedestals placed in front of several large-scale lightboxes that introduce each sequence, colonial Virginia to Boston to Philadelphia to Yorktown and so on.   The exhibit will feel familiar to anyone who visited the Histovery exhibit “Notre-Dame de Paris” when it visited HNOC a couple of years ago.  This is the exhibit’s US debut engagement, and it will tour for many years to many states.  I recently visited the exhibit with Jason Wiese, HNOC’s chief curator, who discussed the overall show and went into some detail about HNOC’s contribution, a concluding sequence about Spanish Governor Bernardo de Gálvez and his multicultural militia of free men of color, Acadians, Indigenous volunteers, and Spanish regulars which won a series of victories against the British along the Gulf Coast.  “American Revolution: The Augmented Exhibition” is free, but timed tickets are required.  Read more and view some photos that accompany the conversation on the blog at themuseumgoer.com.