My Dear Friends,

The wait for the coming of our Lord continues and I feel so hurried. This weekend alone I am attending two plays, three church concerts, a tree decoration reveal, two nights of caroling, Christmas in the Oaks, and there are hundreds of cookies I’m delinquent in baking. The second weekend before Christmas is always a pivotal one, perhaps the most significant two days of the secular Christmas season. The world tells us to make haste, to tell Santa quickly our gift list, to shop, to eat, to wrap, to clean, to get our foods ready. It’s no wonder Moore named Santa’s reindeer Dasher, Comet, Vixen (as in the shifty fox), Prancer, and Dancer. This season is a bolide.

It is Advent's third weekend. Have I best used this time to reflect and be patient? Have I been still and contemplated God? Have I waited in the quiet and the dark and know that God is God? Church tradition teaches this season is the season of waiting and preparation for the coming of the Lord. Have I? The vicissitude of the two seasons -- the holy waiting and the impatient mundane rush -- is no more apparent than this weekend.

Jon Ham, the ballyhooed and ascendent star in the fine art photography world, recently shared with us one of this century’s most relevant and urgent expositions. To view it for the first time was a revelation; one may be transported into the boots of Neil Armstrong as he descended the lunar ladder, such was its unique, once in a generation vantage. It filled me with a burning desire for more.

So I headed to America’s greatest park, my favorite postage stamp on this letter named Earth, City Park, which houses NOMA. If you grew up in the New Orleans Metro, you’ve been to NOMA, either on a field trip or with your family or both. How many countless memories I have of City Park and NOMA, and I have little doubt, that if you think about it, you too will be flooded with memories of this place.

It wasn’t Wednesday, and I am skint, so security prevented my entrance to NOMA. They directed me to the NOMA Sculpture Gardens. These gardens technically were christened with benefactor names, but I find it indecorous to attach individuals’ names to our public park. I will, thus, always call it NOMA Sculpture Gardens. I continued this pilgrimage by walking and contemplating the gardens. I was testing Tillich’s assertion that “all art is religious.”

INTERLUDE: Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

TulaneLSU’s Top 10 Sculptures NOMA Sculpture Gardens

10. Lin Emery’s “Wave” (1988)

Emery is the best sculpture artist of New Orleans, although she’s not from here. I’ve always enjoyed her pieces and their graceful movements which highlight the spirit of wind. I cannot but think of the Spirit, moving in the deep at creation and in me, when I gaze on her pieces. On very windy days, to watch the lighter, top segments move is harrowing, as they pinwheel with great force. “Wave” certainly is one of her best pieces and to sit in one of those thick granite chairs while contemplating the movement of the world and the wind is a great pleasure open to you.

9. Migrant Workers, “Bridge” (2019)

To my disappointment, the curators of the Gardens did not give the architect or the builders of this amazing piece any credit. I watched as migrant workers worked on parts of the new garden and they were very pleasant and have given us generational gift. One of their best works is the “Bridge” which connects the older sculpture garden to the newer one opened this year.

For some, this piece, like the weir in the garden’s addition, will have a purely utilitarian function -- it provides me a path from Point A to B. But if one examines it, it’s clear that the artist(s) involved want us to think of our place in the subterranean city. The solid concrete wall approximates the I-wall levees that failed the city during Katrina. One needn’t worry, though, as closer inspection reveals that the wall very gradually expands as it approaches the soils. While we live in a city so separated from water due to our manmade structures, we often forget water’s role and omnipresence in our lives. This functional piece reminds us.

In much the same way as the Vietnam Memorial does, the “Bridge” leads us to descend and ascend. As we go below and enter the realm of the dead, we may reflect on the nearly 2000 who died in Katrina. It is a far more fitting memorial than the uninspired blocks at the end of Canal.

8. Teresita Fernandez, “Vinales” (2019)

The artist wants us to look at the connection of New Orleans to slavery and the efforts to make the Americas an empire in the last two centuries. While important, I stood in awe of its colors, standing for an hour, much like Henri Nouwen stood before Rembrandt’s “Prodigal Son.” I see echoes of Michaelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.” Perhaps Fernandez is telling us through vague imagery and brilliant colors that the creation of New Orleans is not a clear, story book creation. Is it mired in sin, blood, torture and death. All sin can be traced to Adam’s sin of distrust in God’s plan. We have dissociated and distanced ourselves from Adam’s sin, as though it were mythic symbolism, and thus are able to make images depicting it. The sin of slavery and imperialism pervades our society in such a way we still cannot clearly see it. We see dimly and can produce opaque representations of it in our art.

7. Rene Magritte, “The Labors of Alexander” (1967)

Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue asks us, “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” Do we jettison the foundation of our culture and follow ideas that are new and ungrounded, ideas that make the individual the center of all? Or do we paddle within the stream of tradition, free to find our way, but maintaining our buoyance from those who came before us?

America, in its new spirit of individualism seems to have chosen Nietzsche. In doing so, we have cut down the tree. We are the dead log, in repose, waiting for the wood rot fungi to consume us. We are cut off from our roots. We chose the gross individualism, the axe, the silvicide. Will the roots survive to shoot forth a new trunk?

6. Do-Hu Suh “Karma” (2011)

Perhaps the most photographed work in the Gardens before the recent addition of “Mirror Labyrinth,” Suh’s oddly titled caudal tower of man upon man fascinates me. In my view, it’s actually a shallow piece with little meaning behind. At least, I haven’t been able to pinpoint its meaning. It surely has something deeper to it than I currently can grasp, as it does cause me to focus on its vertebrae-like cornerstones. I tried counting how many men compose this piece, but at the top, they become so little, I couldn’t keep track. Has anyone counted them all?

This post was edited on 12/14/19 at 1:48 pm