The Historic New Orleans Collection will celebrate the city’s 300th birthday next year with an exhibit covering New Orleans’ earliest years, a free symposium exploring the city’s diversity and an exhibit of contemporary local art that will inaugurate a massively renovated French Quarter building, said the organization’s executive director, Priscilla Lawrence, on Monday (July 24).
New Orleans’ tricentennial, she said during a news conference, “is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us, and you’d better believe we’re going to take advantage of it.”
The collection will launch its observance of the city’s milestone with “New Orleans, the Founding Era,” which will feature artifacts from the organization’s holdings and from museums in the United States and Europe, “many of which rarely travel outside their home institutions,” said Gregor Trumel, France’s consul general…