Image: New Orleans Museum of Art
The New Orleans Museum of Art has received ‘Mississippi Fountain’, a monumental sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, as a gift from the Besthoff family in honor of Sydney Besthoff III. The museum announced the donation on August 27, 2026, saying it will install the work in front of the museum this fall.
Also known as ‘The Mississippi’, the sculpture was created for K&B Plaza, a midcentury modern building designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft for Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Constructed in 1961–62, the building is one of New Orleans’s prominent examples of midcentury modern architecture. ‘Mississippi Fountain’ has stood at the plaza since the building’s construction, when the site served as the headquarters of the John Hancock Insurance Company.
NOMA describes the work as Noguchi’s poetic distillation of the Mississippi River as a symbol of a vast American landscape, its elemental power, and the relationships among earth, water, movement, and culture. The sculpture is also a significant example of the long professional relationship between Noguchi (1904–88) and Bunshaft (1909–90), whose unrealized plans for Lever House in New York in 1951–52 led to further collaborations.
Their later projects included the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company headquarters in Bloomfield, Connecticut; One Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven; and 140 Broadway, formerly known as the Marine Midland Building, in New York. ‘Mississippi Fountain’ was designed in conversation with Bunshaft’s plaza and building, and its relocation will place it against NOMA’s neoclassical façade.
NOMA Director Susan M. Taylor said the gift will ensure that the sculpture remains in New Orleans and is publicly accessible for generations. Lee Ledbetter and Associates have designed the installation plan. The museum has not announced a specific installation date beyond its plan to place the work in front of the building this fall.
The donation links Noguchi’s sculpture to the history of the Besthoff family’s involvement with NOMA. Sydney Besthoff III purchased the K&B Plaza building in 1974 to serve as the headquarters of K&B, the Gulf South pharmacy chain founded in 1905 by his grandfather Sydney J. Besthoff and Gustave Katz. According to the museum, Besthoff credited ‘Mississippi Fountain’ with inspiring the beginnings of his collection of large-scale sculpture, which became the basis of the Besthoff Sculpture Garden.
The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden opened in 2003 and expanded to its current 12-acre footprint in 2019. It is free and open to the public seven days a week, with nearly 100 sculptures and outdoor works spanning the 19th to the 21st centuries. NOMA, located in New Orleans City Park, stewards a collection of nearly 50,000 works and is open Tuesday through Sunday, with extended Wednesday hours.
