PLANNING A SCHOOL VISIT
Self-guided Visits
Self-guided visits enable you to design and lead your own school visit to NOMA. Art, language arts, history, science and math can be explored using NOMA’s extensive permanent collection, compelling temporary exhibitions, and outdoor Sculpture Garden. Use the Teacher’s Guide to the Collection to find information on many works of art, maps of the museum, and suggestions for gallery discussions and activities during your visit. The Teacher’s Guide to the Collection is free to any teacher planning a visit to NOMA.
Guided Visits
Spark your students’ imaginations with a guided visit to NOMA. Knowledgeable docents engage students in grade-appropriate discussions, encouraging creative and critical thinking while addressing a variety of learning styles. Tours are interactive and conversational, and are aligned with state and national educational standards and benchmarks in the visual arts, language arts and social studies.
Select your Tour Topic
School visits at NOMA are categorized by subject and introduce students to a variety of highlights from NOMA’s permanent collection of 40,000 objects. You can customize the experience for your class. Choose from a selection of tours that approach art from a visual art, language arts, or social studies perspective, or select a tour of our featured temporary exhibition.
TOUR TOPICS
Art Approach
Elements of Art What are the ABCs of art? Introduce students to the elements of art: line, color, shape, form, texture, space, and value. This tour explores how artists engage these basic elements to create a boundless visual language.
Methods & Materials How did the artist make that? Explore the relationship between an artist’s ideas and techniques. This tour will compare and contrast at least three different media, such as painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking or textiles.
Language Arts Approach
What’s the Story? Construct the elements of a story in this English Language Arts-based tour of NOMA’s permanent collection. Characters, setting, and plot will be identified throughout the galleries as students determine the story in each artwork.
Describe it! A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how can we describe what we see? This tour focuses on developing descriptive language as students are encouraged to use descriptive words, synonyms and adjectives to describe the artwork in front of them.
Social Studies Approach
History Detectives Follow the clues as you sleuth through the ages exploring art objects from NOMA’s permanent collection. The history detectives will discover what it was like to live in a different era by exploring the costumes, objects, and backgrounds in works of art.
My Country, My State Explore the development of the United States and Louisiana. Our rich artistic heritage will be highlighted as students learn how artists represent place by examining artwork from different eras of our nation’s history.
Featured Exhibition Tours
Is It Real? Available November 21 – January 25 in conjunction with the exhibition Lifelike. A towering milk carton and a trash bag made from marble are just two of the real-looking objects you will encounter on this tour. Lifelike features works by a group of international artists working from the 1960s to the present who created ordinary objects in extraordinary ways. By manipulating scale and incorporating luxurious materials, artists offer surprising interpretations of commonplace objects that will leave you wondering, “Is it real?”
Meet Me at the World Fair Available April 16 – May 24 in conjunction with the exhibition Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs 1851 – 1939. Discover innovation in design and the application of new technologies on a tour of spectacular objects first displayed at World’s Fairs. Before the invention of TV and the internet, visitors from all over the globe flocked to World’s Fairs to see the latest and greatest creations. They came to “See the future!”
Bus Reimbursement
Schools located in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes qualify for busing reimbursement, generously underwritten by the GPOA Foundation. Download the Bus Reimbursement Application for conditions and instructions.
Admission
Admission to NOMA is FREE for scheduled school groups, including students, teachers, and one adult per 10 students.
Making Your Reservation
School group visits to NOMA are available Tuesday – Friday. Contact the Department of Interpretation & Audience Engagement at education@noma.org or (504) 658-4100 to schedule your Guided or Self-guided visit. Please have the following information ready:
- Group leader’s cell phone number
- Group leader’s email address
- School’s name, address, and phone number
- Number of students
- Grade level of students
- Preferred date and time
- Tour topic
