New Orleans Museum of Art Besthoff Sculpture Garden

The Besthoff Sculpture Garden Expansion at the New Orleans Museum of Art exemplifies a shifting paradigm for sculpture garden design and elevates the critical dialogue between art, landscape, and human experience. The expanded sculpture garden embraces the dynamic qualities of this watery landscape as both a subject for art and model of high-performing resiliency. This Garden proclaims the beauty of the unique regional landscape, provides a bold framework in which new artworks can be commissioned, and stimulates observers to reimagine their relationships with art, their community, and their changing environment.  

Within the garden, exemplifying the resiliency of the native landscape, sculpture remains the primary purpose. The collection features work from a diverse group of artists. Each piece is carefully sited to create a series of relationships between art, environment, and observer. Two commissioned works (Elyn Zimmerman's Mississippi Meanders and Terrisita Fernandez's Mayombe Mississippi)) integrate artistic expression into essential garden infrastructure, strengthening a sense of place as artist and landscape architect collaborated on siting and detailing of the works.   

Reimagined the Regional Palette

In contrast to the earlier phase of the sculpture garden, which is characterized by a traditional cultivated and enclosed understory and a series of gallery-like rooms, we sought a more indigenous character for the expansion, one inspired by Louisiana’s bayou and lowland ecologies. The Garden emphasizes the spatial characteristics of the delta as found in nature and long represented in regional art: sweeping horizontal spaces with blurred edges that evoke the drenched heat of the swampland. The regional character of the landscape helps break down barriers as a message of welcome to all.   

Over, Under, Through

The circulation weaves over, under, and through the site; bending the paths around branches and roots as if they grew there naturally among the trees. The lagoon was carefully sculpted to exaggerate the expansiveness of the delta, visually connect the upper and lower lagoons, and maximize land for sculpture and a new gallery pavilion. Select moments dramatize the dynamic aspects of the resilient and functioning ecosystem. The most evident of these is the canal bridge, which connects the original 2003 first phase to the expansion, and provides a novel experience of stepping into the lagoon. The thin edge wall evokes the city’s relationship to water, a reminder of climate risk.