Ogden Museum of Southern Art

This guide to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans starts with Charles Howard's memorial library, driven fifty-five feet into the mud on the advice of architect Henry Hobson Richardson and opened on Mardi Gras Day 1889 stocked with nine thousand volumes. You'll follow the Great Hall through a strange run of second lives, from wartime storage depot to a gutted radio station, before businessman Patrick Taylor restored it and a foundation folded it into a museum for the art of the American South. Listen for how that museum inherited its own unresolved question, fifteen states and the District of Columbia gathered under one label.