The 1920s through 1950s was a time of vibrant artistic connection between Louisiana and Mexico. During this period, a series of acclaimed Mexican art exhibitions brought the culture of modern Mexico to Louisiana. By 1928, the New Orleans Times-Picayune had proclaimed Mexican artist Diego Rivera ""the greatest painter on the North American continent"" and encouraged Louisiana artists to take counsel from modern Mexican art. Louisianan artists such as William Spratling, Caroline Durieux, Alberta Kinsey, and Conrad A. Albrizio began traveling to Mexico to learn from Mexican artists such as Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, Ruffino Tamayo, and Carlos Orozco Romero, with whom they became friends, colleagues, and frequent collaborators. In spring of 2015, the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, LA presented Mexico in New Orleans: A Tale of Two Americas, the first major museum exhibition to explore this artistic exchange. The exhibition featured more than 80 works, drawn from the LSU Museum of Art's collection, by Diego Rivera and Caroline Durieux, as well as paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, furniture, and decorative objects by artists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, Boyd Cruise, Elizabeth Catlett, and William Spratling borrowed from public and private collections, including the Historic New Orleans Collection and the Latin American Library at Tulane University. The richly illustrated bilingual exhibition catalog tells the story of a decades-long dialogue between Mexican and Louisianan artists that has generated artistic affinities that persist into the present.

A wide-ranging study of Louisiana landscape painting that places art from the region into a broader national and global context With its dense forests and swamps, Louisiana captured the imagination of writers and painters who viewed its landscape as a fascinating, untamed wilderness. Starting in the 1820s when French emigres brought the Barbizon school to New Orleans, the state attracted artists from Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the greater United States who shared ideas and experimented with approaches to the enigmatic scenery. Although Louisiana was in many ways an artists' paradise, the land also bore the scars of colonialism and the forced migrations of slavery. Inventing Acadia explores this complex history, following the rise of Louisiana landscape art and situating it amid the cultural shifts of the 19th century. The authors engage not only with artworks but also with the issues that informed them-representations of race and industry, international trade, and climate change. These issues are then carried into the present with a look at the work of contemporary artist Regina Agu. Inventing Acadia establishes Louisiana's role in creating a new vision for American art and highlights the continued relevance of landscape and representation. Distributed for the New Orleans Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: New Orleans Museum of Art (November 16, 2019-January 26, 2020)