Nowhere in the United States is Southern visual art presented more comprehensively than at the Ogden Museum, a collection that gives the art of the American South — long underrepresented in the major museums of the Northeast and Midwest — the seriousness and depth it deserves. The Ogden Museum was founded on the collection of New Orleans businessman and collector Roger H. Ogden, who spent decades acquiring paintings, sculpture, photography, and folk art created by Southern artists from the colonial period to the present. The collection now numbers more than four thousand works and spans every medium: the nineteenth-century landscapes and portraits of the antebellum South, the Modernist paintings that emerged from the Southern art schools and ateliers of the early twentieth century, the outsider art and self-taught tradition that produced some of the South's most distinctive visual voices, and the contemporary artists who are reexamining Southern history and identity with new tools.
The museum is particularly strong in Louisiana art and in the work of African American Southern artists whose contributions were largely invisible to mainstream American art history until late in the twentieth century. The building itself — a striking contemporary addition to a historic nineteenth-century structure — is one of the more successful pieces of architectural design in the Warehouse District. The Thursday evening music series, Ogden After Hours, brings live Louisiana music into the museum galleries.