NOMA Lands 40-Ton Noguchi Fountain After Six Decades on St. Charles Avenue

A 40-ton granite fountain that has towered over downtown New Orleans for more than six decades is about to get a new address in City Park. The New Orleans Museum of Art announced it has received Isamu Noguchi's Mississippi Fountain, an 18-foot sculpture donated by the Besthoff family, which will be installed at NOMA's main entrance this fall.

The sculpture has stood at K&B Plaza since the early 1960s, according to New Orleans CityBusiness, which first reported the donation. Moving it will be no small feat: as reported by The Art Newspaper, the fountain must be lifted 40 feet into the air by crane and secured inside a custom steel cage for the trip from the Central Business District to City Park, after which NOMA plans to restore its long-dormant water feature to full working order.

NOMA director Susan M. Taylor said the piece was designed in conversation with the architecture of Gordon Bunshaft's plaza and building, and that visitors will find new meaning in it as it transforms the museum's neoclassical façade. She added that the Besthoff family's gift ensures the work remains in New Orleans and publicly accessible for generations, per the CityBusiness report.

A Building Sale Set the Move in Motion

The relocation follows the October 2025 decision to list K&B Plaza, at 1055 St. Charles Avenue, for sale — a move that pushed the Besthoff family to find the sculpture a permanent public home, according to The Art Newspaper. K&B Plaza was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill along with local architects Nolan, Norman and Nolan, and it served as headquarters for the K&B drugstore chain that Sydney J. Besthoff and Gustave Katz founded in 1905. The chain, sold to Rite Aid in 1997, is remembered locally for the distinctive “K&B purple” brand color that, per New Orleans Historical, originated from a discounted batch of wrapping paper back in 1911 and still carries cultural weight in the city today.

The Art Newspaper also notes that the move is only the second time in history an architectural and sculptural collaboration between Noguchi and Bunshaft — the pair also worked together on Lever House and One Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York, along with Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library — has been separated from its original building site. Mississippi Fountain was originally designed for the plaza of the former John Hancock Insurance Co. headquarters, standing along Harmony Circle, formerly known as Lee Circle, where its fluted granite column was meant to visually echo nearby civic monuments close to the river.

The Fountain That Started a Collection

Sydney Besthoff III purchased the building in 1974, and according to NOMA, he credited the fountain — non-functional at the time he bought the property — with helping inspire his decades-long passion for collecting large-scale sculpture. Investigating the mechanical repairs needed to get the fountain running again reportedly sparked what became one of the South's most prominent outdoor art collections, an origin story detailed in research published by NOMA.

That collection, developed and expanded by Sydney Besthoff III and his wife Walda Besthoff, became the foundation for the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, which opened in 2003 and now includes nearly 100 sculptures and outdoor works spanning the 19th through 21st centuries. The garden grew to 12 acres by 2019 and was voted the best sculpture park in the United States by USA Today's 10Best in 2022, according to NOMA. It remains free and open to the public seven days a week.

Sydney Besthoff III died in February 2022 at age 94. He co-founded the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans in 1976 and, notably, personally supervised a sculpture installation at NOMA just two weeks before his death, according to The Times-Picayune. His daughters, Jane Steiner and Valerie Besthoff, said their father loved NOMA and believed in bringing great art to New Orleans, a sentiment that shaped the family's decision to donate the fountain in his honor.

A New Home Inside City Park

At NOMA, Mississippi Fountain — also known simply as “The Mississippi” — will replace Roy Lichtenstein's Five Brushstrokes (1983–84) at the museum's main Beaux Arts entrance. Lichtenstein's sculpture has stood there since 2013 and is scheduled to relocate into the Besthoff Sculpture Garden once the Noguchi piece is in place, per The Art Newspaper. Lee Ledbetter and Associates designed the installation plan guiding the fountain's new placement.

Noguchi, who lived from 1904 to 1988, was among the most prominent sculptors and designers of the 20th century, and the fountain reflects his enduring interest in the relationship between landscape, water and movement — in this case, his own interpretation of the Mississippi River itself. NOMA, founded on December 16, 1911 with just nine artworks, is the city's oldest fine arts institution and now holds a permanent collection of nearly 50,000 works. Once installed this fall, the fountain will give visitors a way to experience that history right at the museum's front door, inside NOMA's City Park campus.