COURTESY NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART
The New Orleans Museum of Art has received a gift of over 1,300 photographs from the collection of Tina Freeman, including pieces by Richard Avedon, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston, to name a few.
Twenty-three of the pieces will be on display at the museum through March 17 2019, in an exhibition titled “Past Present Future: Building Photography at the New Orleans Museum of Art.” As it happens, Freeman was involved in creating NOMA’s collection decades, having served as its photography curator from 1977 to 1982.
Susan Taylor, the museum’s director, stated in a release, “For years, Tina Freeman has had a profound impact on photography at NOMA. Her remarkably generous gift is a reflection of her knowledge and passion for photography and the great photographers that define the medium. It is a milestone moment in the history of NOMA.”
Among some of the acquisitions are several early photographs, such as Julia Margaret Cameron’s Julia Jackson, Margaret Bourke-White’s Chrysler Corporation, and Ilse Bing’s St. Christophe -Trees Silhouettes. Russell Lord, NOMA’s curator of photographs, added, “Tina Freeman began collecting in the early 1970s, at a time when many museums were not yet paying attention to photography. As a result of her prescient decision, her collection includes many priceless masterworks no longer available to museums and collectors today.”