NOMA Presents First In-Depth Presentation of Artist Robert Gordy in More than 40 Years

Robert Gordy, Rimbaud's Dream #2, 1971. Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 64 inches. Collection of New Orleans Museum of Art, 71.23. © The Estate of

Edited by Tribune Staff

This month, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) opens the first in-depth presentation of works by artist Robert Gordy in over 40 years. After settling in New Orleans at age 31, Gordy achieved national recognition for compositions that revealed a sophisticated and disciplined interplay of space, line, and color in a range of media. 

Though scholars and curators have associated Gordy’s work with a range of groups and styles across the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Gordy remained determinedly unaffiliated, preferring, he said, to work “outside the mainstream.”

Robert Gordy: Outside the Mainstream is now  through Oct. 11, at NOMA.

“Robert Gordy was one of New Orleans’s most celebrated artists, exhibiting around the world to great acclaim. In this presentation, Gordy's groundbreaking explorations of color, pattern, and form can be seen within the context of late 20th-century art history.” said Susan M. Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA. “We are thrilled to bring together this important selection of work, including loans from numerous New Orleans collectors and friends of the artist during his lifetime.”

Born in 1933 in New Iberia, Louisiana, Gordy received his MFA from the Louisiana State University in 1956 and continued his studies at Iowa State University and Yale University. He trained with Hans Hoffman in the summer of 1953.

For over a decade, he lived and worked all over the world, including Mexico, Florence, Ibiza, San Francisco, and New York before settling in New Orleans in 1964. Although best known today for his prints and late monotypes, Gordy worked in a variety of media throughout his career.

This exhibition is drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection, the archive of the Robert Gordy estate, and generous loans from private collections.

Visitors can expect to see more than a dozen paintings from the 1950s–80s demonstrating Gordy’s career-long exploration of color, form, and pattern; never-before-exhibited preparatory studies, drawings, and Gordy’s sketchbook, which demonstrate the artist’s process; and late monotypes and prints that show Gordy’s return to interest in bust-like portraits he first explored in drawings and paintings as a student.

During his lifetime, Gordy was one of New Orleans’s most influential and widely known artists, with a national and international profile. His works were shown at galleries in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans; in solo exhibitions across the United States and in Scotland; and in significant group exhibitions, including the 1973 Whitney Biennial and a 1980 exhibition at PS1 in New York.