A 40-Ton Noguchi Sculpture Is Heading Across New Orleans — by Crane and Truck
A roughly 40-ton granite sculpture by Isamu Noguchi is about to make a slow, carefully engineered journey across New Orleans this autumn, leaving the Central Business District for a new home at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) in City Park.
The work, Mississippi Fountain (1961–62), will be lifted around 40 feet by crane, secured in a custom steel cage and transported on a large truck to NOMA's Beaux Arts entrance, according to The Art Newspaper. The water feature, dormant for years, will be restored to working order once installed.
The Besthoff family donated the sculpture to NOMA in honour of Sydney Besthoff III, the longtime K&B drugstore executive and arts patron who spearheaded the museum's sculpture garden and died in 2022 at age 94, according to NOLA.com. The connection runs deep: the Besthoffs once kept much of their art collection in the very building the sculpture has sat atop since the early 1960s.
Noguchi, the Japanese-American artist whose career spanned sculpture, landscape design and stage sets, created Mississippi Fountain as part of a nearly 20-year collaboration with architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The pair worked together on several projects between 1951 and 1968, including The Garden at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Sunken Garden at 28 Liberty Street in Manhattan.
The New Orleans sculpture is a large granite column topped by a crescent capital — minimalist in form, though its title ties it to the Mississippi River, which flows several blocks east of its original site. It was designed for the building that first housed the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company at Harmony Circle in downtown New Orleans.
The drugstore chain K&B (Katz & Besthoff) bought the property at 1055 St. Charles Avenue in 1973 and made it their corporate headquarters. That office closed after K&B was sold to Rite Aid in 1997. The building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, was put up for sale in October 2025.
Noguchi and Bunshaft believed sculpture and architecture belonged together. In a 1968 essay in Studio International, Noguchi argued that "the sculptor is not merely a decorator of buildings but a serious collaborator with the architect in the creation of significant" works. Separating the two, as the NOMA move will do, is rare.
Only once before has a Noguchi-Bunshaft collaboration been split from its architectural setting. The Family (1956–57), a triad of granite sculptures in Bloomfield, Connecticut, was designed to be viewed from the Wilde Building at the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company headquarters. When developers razed the neighbouring Emhart Building in 2003, Noguchi Museum curator Matthew Kirsch wrote that the work was left "adrift and isolated from its intended relationship with the campus buildings." Insurer Cigna initially pledged not to sell The Family, but it went to Sotheby's in 2023 and sold for US$12.3 million — an auction record for the artist.
The difference this time is intention. Mississippi Fountain is not going to auction. It is going to a public museum, where the water will run again and visitors will be able to stand in front of it — a gift, not a sale.
