This Mobile Art Museum Is Visiting Every Neighborhood in New Orleans

Whether a museum specializes in art, history, or giant shoes, it tends to have a fixed address. The New Orleans Museum of Art is challenging that norm. As Hyperallergic reports, NOMA is expanding its reach to new neighborhoods with help from a traveling art trailer.

The mobile museum, dubbed NOMA+, lacks many of the features museum-goers take for granted. Instead of a Greek facade complete with towering columns, the outside of the tiny museum takes the form of a plain white shipping trailer. When it's parked, the unit folds out to include a ramp and two decks with blue awnings, erasing the need for doors and walls.

The brick-and-mortar NOMA charges $12 admission for adults, and offers free admission for Louisiana residents on Wednesdays, but regardless of the ticket price, the museum isn't equally accessible to everyone. For some, the time and cost it takes to get there is more than they can afford. Others might be intimated by the building's imposing architecture, or more generally, the art world's history of catering to a largely white and wealthy crowd.

With NOMA+, the museum plans to make stops throughout the greater New Orleans area. The pop-up's first project, #EverydayNewOrleans, a collaboration with the nonprofit Everyday Projects and the New Orleans Photo Alliance, invites community members to participate in photography workshops and use disposable cameras and smartphones to snap photos of the city. Images selected from the workshops are displayed as part of Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories, an exhibition running at NOMA until September 16.

So far, NOMA+ has set up shop at schools, community centers, and service organizations in six New Orleans communities. NOMA hopes to eventually bring the roaming museum to all 72 neighborhoods in the greater metro area.

NOMA+ Time Lapse Open from New Orleans Museum of Art on Vimeo.