A towering sculpture by one of the world’s leading modernists will soon be placed in a premier location near the entrance to the New Orleans Museum of Art. The 18-foot-tall, 40-ton granite piece titled “Mississippi Fountain” by the late Isamu Noguchi will rise in the museum’s traffic circle where a sculpture by pop master Roy Lichtenstein now rests in a reflecting pool.
The 65-year-old sculpture is not just an important artwork, it was a foundation for what would become NOMA’s outstanding sculpture collection.
Born in 1904, an American of Japanese descent, Noguchi was among the generation of artists that popularized modernism in the United States. The spare, elegant sculptures he began creating in the 1930s harmonized perfectly with the rise of geometric, mid-century architecture.
Early in World War II, many Japanese-Americans were placed in internment camps in the western states. Though Noguchi was not forcibly incarcerated, he volunteered to live in such a camp for several months in solidarity with other Japanese-Americans.
Despite the interruption, in the 1950s Noguchi’s artistic career soared, with major museum exhibits, public art commissions and furniture designs. In 1961, Noguchi was sought out to create a fountain to accent the severely modern, seven-story John Hancock Insurance Company headquarters building that was under construction on St. Charles Avenue at what was then called Lee Circle — now Harmony Circle.
It was a stark, tapered column surmounted by an upturned crescent, from which a cascade of water splashed onto the plaza surrounding the building. At the unveiling, the celebrated artist was given the key to the city.
Sculptor Isamu Noguchi receives the key to the city in 1961 from an unidentified man, as New Orleans artist Lin Emery looks on
(Photo courtest the New Orleans Museum of Art)
In 1974, the late businessman Sydney Besthoff III purchased the office building and surrounding property, which was known thereafter as K&B Plaza, after Besthoff’s popular drugstore chain. According to an announcement provided by NOMA spokesman Charlie Tatum, “Besthoff credited Noguchi’s ‘Mississippi Fountain’ with inspiring the beginnings of his own collection of large-scale sculpture.”
That collection became the basis of NOMA’s Besthoff Sculpture Garden, a major New Orleans tourist attraction, which was established in 2003 and expanded in 2019. The K&B headquarters building was offered for sale in 2025 for $11.4 million.
Lee Ledbetter & Associates architects rendering of the future installation of Isamu Noguchi’s 1961 ‘Mississippi Fountain’ sculpture at the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park
(Illustration courtesy the New Orleans Museum of Art)
The Noguchi will be placed upon a granite base where the museum’s reflecting pool now lies. It will flow with water as it originally did. The colorful Lichtenstein sculpture will be relocated to a spot in the Besthoff Sculpture Garden beside the museum.
Tatum said that the transfer is expected to take place this fall. Just moving the monumental piece from St. Charles Avenue to City Park will be “quite a large endeavor,” he said.
The late businessman Sydney Besthoff III with Isamu Noguchi’s 1961 ‘Mississippi Fountain’, which inspired his interest in large-scale sculpture
(Photo courtesy the New Orleans Museum of Art)