NEW ORLEANS, LA.- In honor of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) hosts a weekend of events, all of which are free and open to the public.

American photographer Richard Misrach will premiere an exhibition: UNTITLED [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 2005]: Photographs by Richard Misrach. The exhibition will be open to the public starting on Saturday, August 28, at 10 a.m. in NOMA's first floor Bay Gallery. Saturday evening is a members-only reception with the artist. The exhibition will be on display until October 24, 2010.

Sunday, August 29, Misrach will host a public lecture on his exhibition in the Stern Auditorium at 2 p.m. After the event, he will be signing his catalogues in the Museum Shop.

HBO's Grammy-nominated series Treme will screen in the Stern Auditorium on Saturday and Sunday.

Untitled (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 2005) Exhibition
Misrach's 69 photographs focus on the graffiti left by New Orleans evacuees, revealing a range of individual reactions and giving a human face to the wreckage. Among them are: "Don't Try - I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman and two shotguns ..." "Hey Katrina!! That's all you got? We will be back!!" and "Destroy this memory."

Misrach shot the photographs between October and December 2005 with a 4 MP pocket camera. Four other museums are exhibiting Misrach's Katrina photographs, including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Misrach is credited with helping to pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation in the 1970s. For over three decades, he has been chronicling human intervention in landscape, and is most well known for the Desert Cantos series exhibited at his 1996 mid-career retrospective at MFAH. His work is in the permanent collections of the MFAH and other institutions, such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago.