Image: New Orleans Museum of Art
A conservation and installation project at the New Orleans Museum of Art has revealed an unexpected archive inside the museum’s own walls. Louise Neal and Travis Keene, senior preparators at NOMA, have been stripping layers of paint from the modular wall panels in the Ella West Freeman Gallery as they ready the space for the upcoming exhibition 'Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection'. Over more than five decades, the panels accumulated an estimated 12,000 pounds of old paint, exposing a dense record of past exhibitions and display decisions.
The work has focused on a system that is central to the gallery’s flexibility. The Ella West Freeman Gallery uses 72 movable wall panels, each 5 feet wide and 12 feet tall, set within a 6,240-square-foot space. NOMA’s web materials describe the museum as one that presents exhibitions across three floors, while the gallery itself is designed to be completely rearranged from one installation to the next. The ceiling grid, installed in 1971, and the terrazzo floor below it both follow a 5-foot-square pattern that helps curators plan installations and preparators build new rooms.
According to the NOLA.com report, the panel system has not been stripped clean in 55 years. Neal and Keene removed the paint in giant sheets, revealing successive layers in colors including gray, brown, black, orange, green, burgundy and chartreuse. The article describes the exposed cross-section as resembling a canyon wall, with one installation history laid over another. The top layer came from the 'Hayward Oubre' exhibition, followed by 'African Masquerades' and then 'Dawoud Bey', before the chronology became less certain as the museum’s memory faded.
The installation process depends on a piece of equipment the pair call the wall mover, a 55-year-old machine with no manufacturer’s plate and only an old tin tag reading Property of City of New Orleans. The report says the machine appears to have been built specifically for the task and may have been overhauled for the first time this summer. Neal and Keene use it to shift the heavy panels one by one, with Neal saying she can move 18 to 20 panels on a good day. The bare panels now weigh 280 pounds each, and the removed paint had added roughly another 150 pounds to each panel before the stripping began.
The new exhibition is scheduled to open on Oct. 2, and the panels are to go back up the week of Aug. 24. 'Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection' is described in the article as presenting scrolls and other works from an influential school of Japan’s Edo period. Lisa Rotondo-McCord, NOMA’s deputy director and curator of Asian art, is overseeing a six-week installation and has narrowed the wall color to a few candidates. Neal and Keene said they are hoping for a beautiful shade of blue.
The museum’s own account of the gallery reinforces how much of the display is built from movable architecture rather than fixed walls. NOMA says the modular installation system allows the space to be reconfigured for each exhibition, while the museum’s public calendar also places the gallery project alongside upcoming programs including 'NOMA at Night Gets Surreal' on July 31. For the wall restoration, though, the focus remains on the stripped panels, the old machine and the layers of paint that had accumulated unseen for 55 years.
