Set at the end of a long allée of live oaks in City Park, the New Orleans Museum of Art is a Beaux-Arts building that has been the city's primary art institution since it opened in 1911, the oldest fine arts museum in the Gulf South. The museum was founded with a gift of philanthropist Isaac Delgado, a Jamaican-born sugar merchant who donated land and funds for a public art museum that he specified should be free to all residents regardless of race — a stipulation that was quietly ignored during the Jim Crow era and not fully honored for decades. The permanent collection numbers more than forty thousand objects spanning five thousand years and includes particularly strong holdings in French and American art, photography, African art, Japanese decorative arts, and Louisiana art from the colonial period through the present.
The Louisiana collection is uniquely valuable: it holds portraits of colonial Creole families, plantation landscapes, and works by the self-taught artists who produced the distinctive visual culture of Black Louisiana. The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, which opened in 2003 on the grounds adjacent to the museum, holds more than ninety sculptures by major twentieth and twenty-first century artists set among the lagoons and oaks of City Park. Works by Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeois, George Segal, and Rene Magritte coexist with the ancient trees in one of the most serene public art spaces in the country.
Admission to the sculpture garden is free.