NOMA+ is Museum Inspiration on the Move

Many museums bump up against the public perception that they are not places for "average" citizens or are downright elitist or exclusionary. One way to address these concerns is to bring museum programming into local communities, rather than expecting communities to always visit the museum.

The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) decided to take a part of their museum programming into their local communities in the form of a mobile museum contained inside of a cleverly-designed storage container.  NOMA+ is towed to different host locations around New Orleans where an initial set of programs on photography is presented.

David Thompson, a machinist who has been tinkering in metalworking shops since the age of 7, was tasked with transforming a 17 by 8-foot trailer into an engaging community art space. “The museum staff came to me with a picture of what they wanted this to look like,” he said. “We started by ripping out a steel storage container and adding all the extra parts with aluminum since it’s much lighter. The wings and ramp are raised and lowered with a cable-winch system.” 

Congratulations to  The New Orleans Museum of Art for launching NOMA+ !  You can find out more about the NOMA+ project on the NOMA website, through this blog post by NOMA community outreach coordinator Nic Aziz, or through this time-lapse video featured on Vimeo (or embedded at the bottom of this post.)

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