Loyola University New Orleans

6363 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, USA
Phone Office of Admissions: 504-865-3240 or 1-800-4-LOYOLA
University Closings: 504-865-2186
Directory Information: 504-865-2011

New Orleans -Loyola has received the life work of Frere Joseph-Aurélien Cornet, one of the foremost experts on the art of the Congo. Cornet studied indigenous art, music, and ethnography in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Included in the archives are as many as 150 field notebooks and 20,000 photographs. Cornet's work is considered on of the most important African visual archives in the world. Members of the African Studies Association, which will meet in New Orleans Nov. 11-14, 2004, may visit Loyola to view the archives. 

Cornet’s work will be housed in the new Visual Arts Center and Gallery located on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar and Louise S. Monroe Library

Cornet’s important scholarship is primarily field work, historical in nature and impossible to replicate. 

The collection is as important to Congolese art as the Fagg Collection at the British Museum is to Nigerian art and Gebauer Collection at the Met and Smithsonian is to Cameroonian art.

Cornet chose Loyola as the recipient both because of New Orleans’ distinctive heritage as an African city and because he felt that this visual archive would be a great compliment to Tulane’s Amistad’s Center Literary Archive and the New Orleans Museum of Art’s Collection of African Art.

Cornet’s archives are a definitive addition to the Loyola Collection, the university’s permanent collection of art.

The Loyola Collection, guided by Charles Davis of the Davis Gallery, seeks to emphasize the art scholarship of members of religious orders who were in many cases the first art historians in both the developed and the developing world.

This week Loyola received the first group of field notebooks from Cornet. Cornet’s work will be housed in the new Visual Arts Center and Gallery located on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar and Louise S. Monroe Library which is currently under construction. Funding for the Visual Arts Center and Gallery has provided by the Ella West Freeman Foundation, the J. Aron Foundation and the Zemurray Foundation.

Buy some Joseph CORNET BOOKS:

• Art of Africa: Treasures from the Congo
  Joseph Cornet; 365 pages; Publisher: Phaidon [distributed by Praeger Publishers, New York (1971)
• A survey of Zairian art: The Bronson Collection
  Joseph Cornet; 379 pages; Publisher: North Carolina Museum of Art (1978)
• Art de l'Afrique noire au pays du fleuve Zaire (Not available)
  Joseph Cornet; 367 pages; Publisher: Arcade (1972)
• Art from Zaire = L'Art du Zaire : 100 masterworks from the national collection : an exhibition of traditional art from the Institute of the National ... , and the government of the Republic of Zaire
  Joseph Cornet; Publisher: African-American Institute (1975)
• Zaïre: Terre de tous les trésors (Grands livres)
  Joseph Cornet; 185 pages; Publisher: Editions J.A (1985)

read also Joseph Cornet: 1919-2004

New Orleans Museum of Arts Collection of African Art

See the exhibition in NYC New Orleans Museum of Art in NYC