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2025 Bienvenu Lecture Series: Art, Nature, and Identity: The Newcomb Pottery Legacy
The Legacy of the Newcomb Arts Movement: Lecture by Elyse D. Gerstencker, PhD, Curator of Decorative Arts at Telfair Museums
5 p.m. Reception
5:30 p.m. Lecture
Join the Hilliard Art Museum for the 2025 John B. Bienvenu Lecture with Elyse D. Gerstenecker, PhD, Curator of Decorative Arts at Telfair Museums. Gerstenecker explores how Louisiana’s celebrated Newcomb Pottery transformed regional flora into internationally recognized art and made vital contributions to the 20th century Arts & Crafts movement.
This presentation coincides with the Hilliard’s exhibition Fragile Matter, featuring works by Newcomb artist Harriet Joor, who taught at UL and was among the museum’s first collection contributors. The evening will also debut a presentation of Joor ceramics generously loaned from the Haynie Family Collection.
Learn more about this innovative program that championed women, the Arts & Crafts movement, and produced exceptional pottery works at the turn of the twentieth century in New Orleans. Newcomb Pottery is considered one of the most significant American art potteries of the first half of the twentieth century.
The Newcomb Pottery Company (sometimes referred to as Newcomb College Pottery) grew out of the pottery program at H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, a women’s college founded expressly to instruct young Southern women in liberal arts. A radical idea at the time, it became a hotbed of innovation and provided unprecedented access to learning, agency, and resources for that generation of women. The art school opened in 1886 and began producing pottery on a for-profit basis beginning in 1895, introducing the work to an expanding art market. This meant the women-designers were paid for creative work and being exhibited on the world stage, with institutional backing.
