The New Orleans Museum of Art’s Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden opened to the public on November 23, 2003. Located adjacent to the Museum (NOMA) in historic City Park, the five acre garden is one of the premier sculpture gardens in America. The garden opens with fifty sculptures by major twentieth-century European, American, Israeli and Japanese artists.

 

Henry Moore:

 

 Jacques Lipchitz:

 

 

 

Barbara Hepworth:

 

 

George Rickey:

 

 

Louis Bourgeois:

 

 

and George Segal:

 

 

are among the world-class artists whose work is included in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Foundation of modern (Modern Art: General name given to the succession of cutting edge styles in art and architecture which have dominated Western culture almost throughout the 20th century) and contemporary art (Contemporary Art: Art of this time usually implies that the artist is still alive or the work was completed within the past twenty-five years). Sculptures from the Besthoff Foundation were recently moved from their former home on Lee Circle and make up the majority of sculptures in the Sculpture Garden. The new location amongst the lush backdrop of City Park will be a tremendous addition to the cultural life of New Orleans and the Gulf South. The garden will be open during regular museum hours and is free and open to the public.

 

Situated on a beautifully landscaped site, the garden incorporates an existing landscape of mature trees and lagoons with the addition of meandering footpaths, pedestrian bridges and new plantings. The garden was designed by the design team of Lee Ledbetter Architects of New Orleans and Sawyer/Berson Architecture and Landscape Architecture of New York. There is a gated main entrance:

 

 

flanked by two pavilions located next to NOMA at Dueling Oaks Drive:

 

 

Secondary entrances face City Park’s Timkin Center (formerly the Casino) and the Pavilion of the Two Sister’s at the New Orleans Botanical Garden.

 

Special care has been made to preserve the beauty of the natural environment in every stage of the Garden’s design. The root patterns of the live oaks have been preserved in the design of the walkways. A re-configured lagoon bisects the site and creates two distinct halves: a mature pine and magnolia grove adjacent to the Museum and a more open area of two-hundred year old, Spanish moss laden live oaks across the lagoon near the New Orleans Botanical Gardens. The lagoon has been reshaped to provide two basins, each of which contains one sculpture. There is also a small cascading Garden Pool which encourages visitors to interact with the environment as they carefully make their way over the stepping stones. The pine grove and the oak grove provide lush settings for the sculptures, creating viewing areas, or “galleries,” within the garden. Visitors who stroll through the garden will find themselves in awe of the beautiful setting and the incredible collection of modern sculpture.

Forty-one of the fifty works on view in the Sculpture Garden may appear familiar to New Orleanians, as they were originally part of the Besthoff Foundation formerly on view at K&B Plaza on Lee Circle:

 

 

For nearly three decades Sydney and Walda Besthoff have been collecting modern and contemporary sculpture. Their interest in collecting began in 1975 with the purchase of an office building in downtown New Orleans to serve as headquarters for K&B Incorporated, the family-owned retail drug store chain. Located on historic St. Charles Avenue at Lee Circle, the building was designed in 1960 - 62 by the architectural firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill for John Hancock Insurance. For the large plaza surrounding the building, the architects commissioned an eighteen foot high granite sculptural fountain by Isamu Noguchi. The piece, named The Mississippi, evokes its placement near the river while the soaring fluted column recalls the sculpture of Robert E. Lee, towering in nearby Lee Circle. Prompted by the acquistion, the Besthoffs began looking for other sculptures.