Last Updated on June 17, 2023
I didn’t even like New Orleans before leaving Bourbon Street. Once I did, I fell in love.
Defining New Orleans by the absurd drunkenness along Bourbon Street would be no more accurate than defining New York by the maddening crowds of Times Square. It’s part of the story, but not the whole story, and certainly not the best story.
I don’t drink to excess and rarely find myself out after 10 PM. It’s the arts wonderland awaiting visitors in The Big Easy willing to leave Rue Bourbon I keep coming back for. Add this to the city’s world class music, cuisine, festivals and architecture, and you’ll soon see NOLA as a capital of culture, not just cocktails, although no one’s forcing you to choose.
Royal Street
Just one block towards the Mississippi River from Bourbon Street, booze and beads are replaced by fine art and antique galleries along one of the most interestingly browsable avenues in America: Royal Street. In the distance of a few hundred feet, New Orleans transforms from sloppy to sophisticated.
Royal’s crown jewel for over a century has been M.S. Rau, one of the nation’s leading purveyors of fine art, antiques and jewelry since 1912 and my favorite retail store in America. If European aristocracy combined with American robber barons to hold an estate sale, it would look something like the interior of M.S. Rau.
A dazzling assortment of diamonds and historic decorative items straining belief greet guests, along with a welcoming staff putting off none of the snobby condescension you might expect from the highest of high-end retailers. How high end? Eight-figures high end for some of the jewelry and paintings, the most astonishing of which is a Rene Magritté nude that could hang on any wall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and turn heads.
See if you can talk them down to $8 million for it.
If not, there’s a dramatic original oil on canvas portrait recalling his famed The Potato Eaters by van Gogh on display not far away for half the price. It would be prized at any art museum in the world.
Vincent freaking Van Gogh original oil on canvas paintings one block from hurricanes by the yard.
That’s New Orleans, a stupefying mix of high and low, often within arm’s reach.
M.S. Rau’s original Monet’s are museum quality as well, all free and open for public viewing inside the gallery’s spectacularly renovated building.
Windsor Court hotel
Speaking of European royalty, the art collection inside Windsor Court hotel befits a duke or duchess. Inspired by England’s Windsor Castle, Windsor Court exhibits British refinement just across Canal Street from the French Quarter.
Take special notice of the Thomas Gainsborough landscape between the concierge desk and elevators.
NOLA’s premiere five-star accommodation welcomes guests not staying in the hotel for afternoon tea on the first floor (Friday through Sunday, 11 AM–2 PM, reservations required) and cocktails with live jazz accompaniment (Fridays and Saturdays from 9 PM to Midnight are a highlight) on the second along with fine dining for breakfast, lunch, dinner and Sunday brunch at The Grill Room.
John Scott Center
Enough Europeans. It’s time to highlight New Orleans’ own and there’s no better place to start than The Helis Foundation John Scott Center. Scott resides at that unusual intersection of local hero, art world famous in certain quarters, and otherwise completely anonymous.
A 6,000-square-foot, ground floor gallery inside the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ historic building in the central business and arts district presents over 50 works of art spanning Scott’s career from monumental kinetic sculptures to intimate glass engravings. Born and raised in NOLA’s Ninth Ward, Scott taught art at Xavier University three miles from the John Scott Center for more than 40 years. Along the way, he earned a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for his practice which eclipsed mere fine art passing into the realm of humanism.
Scott’s sculptures are found across New Orleans and the Scott Center provides a map listing locations. Be sure to go around back of the building to see the mural painted by his son.
In the opposite direction of the John Scott Center from the French Quarter, Baldwin & Co. bookstore takes its name from brilliant author and thinker James Baldwin. Baldwin was Black and Baldwin & Co. specializes in Black authors and Black stories.
Coffee and pastries are served, there’s couches and tables for working and hanging, a podcasting studio is available for rent, and a trust fund isn’t required to actually buy something.
Algiers Folk Art Zone and Blues Museum
Windsor Court, the John Scott Center and Baldwin & Co. nudge visitors outside the French Quarter; travelers looking to separate from it entirely can do so in Algiers, the city’s second oldest neighborhood and its only one sited on the west bank of the Mississippi River.
This is where the enslaved from Africa were landed and stored before being taken across the river for sale in New Orleans. Little acknowledgement of that barbaric history can be found there today.
Algiers is best accessed by ferry, the terminal for which can be found adjacent to the Audubon Aquarium. Three dollars provides individuals with roundtrip passage.
A word of caution. Algiers is a neighborhood, not a highly developed tourist destination. Taxis and rideshares are scarce. That means you’re going to walk. In New Orleans, that means you’re going to sweat.
Shade and benches can be hard to find, let alone air conditioning or public restrooms. There are a few shops and restaurants, Rose Tree Blown Glass Studio and Barracuda for Mexican stand out, but Algiers doesn’t exist for the pleasure of tourists.
That being said, anyone looking for the opposite of Bourbon Street, anyone deeply interested in folk art, the blues or a picture of New Orleans 99% of visitors will never see, then a visit to the Algiers Folk Art Zone and Blues Museum founded by NOLA native son Charles Gillam is a must.
Outside is Gillam’s folk art environment. The self-taught painter, sculptor, tinkerer and assemblage artist has filled his yard with uniquely creative objects. The real magic occurs inside, however, with his Blues Museum. Here, Gillam has sculpted and painted the heads of Blues music legends in concrete and affixed them to the walls.
Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Huddy Ledbetter; the women of the Blues: Ma Rainey, Etta James, Billie Holliday and Algiers’ own Memphis Minnie. On by-appointment-only tours, Gillam shares the fascinating stories of these musicians, and his as well.
“I wanted to make a statement,” Gillam told me about his museum. “Something that would be everlasting, that people could come and learn about these characters.”
Learn you will as Gillam regales guests with stories of Robert Johnson selling his sole to the devil in exchange for becoming the greatest guitar player in the world. The Blues man who murdered three people, but was let out of prison by the warden so taken with his playing. The Blues lady who lost an arm in a car accident and then lost her life because the whites-only hospital nearest the accident refused to treat her.
A Bourbon Street buzz may last a couple hours, a visit with Gillam will last a lifetime.
Tours are free and can be scheduled through his website; donations are greatly appreciated.
Back across the river, drop in to Vue Orleans right where the ferry docks to cool off, use the restroom, and ride up all the way to the 34th floor for panoramic views of New Orleans unlike any other in the city from the open-air observation deck. Vue Orleans opened in 2022 and is must-see.
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
Directly across the street from NOLA’s No. 1 tourist attraction, the World War II Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art is the only museum in America dedicated to artistic production from this region. Within its walls, Benny Andrews, Clementine Hunter, Dusti Bongé and others prove themselves equal, if not superior, to their better-known New York contemporaries.
“This is the last frontier of art scholarship,” Ogden Museum Curator of the Collection Bradley Sumrall told me. “There weren’t that many people focusing on art of the American South as a field of study, so it’s an exciting place to be as a young museum defining the canon because not many people have done it before us.”
Opened in 2003 to display the collection of Louisianan Roger H. Ogden which began with artwork purchased as birthday gifts for his mother before evolving into an all-consuming passion, the Ogden possesses many of the genre’s crown jewels.
One example would be Richmond Barthé’s plaster portrait bust of Booker T. Washington. Barthé was a Black, gay sculptor from the Mississippi Gulf Coast born in 1901 who ended up in Harlem during the Renaissanc; the bronze cast of this piece ended up in the National Portrait Gallery.
On the Ogden’s largest exterior wall, a massive mural was painted as part of Arts New Orleans UNFRAMED project. Enlisting local artists along with the biggest figures in global contemporary art, UNFRAMED has worked to place murals throughout the Warehouse Arts District and around downtown.
Another prominent public art venture downtown, this one a partnership between The Helis Foundation and the Ogden, the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition is the South’s leading rotating public sculpture exhibit. If you travel by car from the airport to the French Quarter, chances are you’ll drive directly along Poydras; keep your eyes peeled on the median as you pass the Superdome.
On your way to or from the Ogden, check out the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans across the street for its schedule of temporary exhibitions. Across the street on the corner is Spillman I Blackwell Fine Art gallery which presented a show of paintings by funkmaster George Clinton in spring of 2023.
Julia Street
Julia Street on the next block has most of the neighborhood’s galleries. Take time at LeMieux Galleries for NOLA native Bernard Mattox’ mixed media paintings and sculpture, and Arthur Roger Gallery which shows rising contemporary art superstar Fahamu Pecou and a roster of profound artistic voices from Louisiana and the world.
NOMA Sculpture Garden
Trolly service takes visitors from the French Quarter to fabulous New Orleans City Park, home of the New Orleans Museum of Art among other attractions. NOMA offers an exceptional schedule of temporary exhibitions, but the highlight is outdoors in its sculpture garden. Expanded in 2019, the sculpture garden is open daily and free to the public.
Here you’ll find nearly 100 examples from modern masters including Robert Indiana (LOVE), Louise Bourgeois (giant spider), Lichtenstein, Renoir and Rodin, to leading global contemporary artists like Wangechi Mutu, Yinka Shonibare and Hank Willis Thomas.
Arts New Orleans organizes a local arts market adjacent to the sculpture gardens on the second Saturday of every month.
Bye-bye Bourbon Street, hello New Orleans.
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