The Sunday, October 20, Museumgoer column in the New Orleans Advocate | The Times-Picayune is a brisk and bodacious tip sheet for the Swifties coming to town for Taylor Swift’s multi-concert stand at Caesars Superdome. Read it online here.
In it, I recommend specific exhibits and whole museums that can provide an introductory overview to local history, culture, and issues.
The links that print can’t handle:
- The “Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond” and “Mardi Gras: It’s Carnival Time in Louisiana” exhibits at the Presbytère
- The Backstreet Cultural Museum
- The “A Vanishing Bounty: Louisiana’s Coastal Environment and Culture” exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection
- The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden
- The “Drumsville: Evolution of the New Orleans Beat” exhibit at the New Orleans Jazz Museum
- The Southern Food and Beverage Museum
- The National WWII Museum
Other Swift-adjacent links:
Visit this Historic New Orleans Collection virtual exhibition to learn more about the Boswell Sisters, a New Orleans-born family musical sensation from another century.
Also on HNOC’s website, an enchanting story of an even earlier century’s star songbird and her visit to New Orleans.
If your curiosity about New Orleans music history has been piqued, spend some time on the “A Closer Walk Nola” website, an essential block-by-block survey of sound.
And if you’re looking for more site-specific information about New Orleans history, download HNOC’s French Quarter Tours app.
The special purpose of this blog post, however, is to share some video and images that accompany the current Museumgoer Podcast, available on multiple platforms, including this one. Start with this First Draft blog post by Nina Bozak, curator of rare books at HNOC.
In the podcast, the action briefly moves into the “A Vanishing Bounty” exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection. There, listeners can listen to the quarterly page-turning of the rare second edition of John James Audubon’s double-elephant folio The Birds of America. Here, readers can watch video of that event, which is better than the audio by a lot:
The podcast then moves on to conversations with HNOC staffers about the folio and crazy-cool accompanying interactive display that allows visitors to flip through the book and hear birdcalls.
Thanks to Nina Bozak and Candy Ellison of HNOC for talking to me.
And thanks as always for reading and maybe listening.
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