Sibylle Peretti has been celebrated around the world for opalescent glass vignettes of plant and animal life mixed with something magical. Working and living in New Orleans since 1996, the artist recently made a body of work that celebrates this city’s resiliency.
The 2025 work “Diluvial Land,” acquired into the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, has Peretti’s signature layered glass spin on traditional landscape paintings.
Her “diluvial,” or related to a flood, landscape shows the New Orleans skyline as seen from Old Algiers along the Mississippi River. The view is familiar, if overgrown, but when you look closely, you recognize that this transformed world has something otherworldly.
In the absence of humans, along the rocky river shore hawks and weeds intermingle with strands of Carnival beads, remnants of a decadent Mardi Gras season.
In this lustrous work, Peretti contemplates the precarious balance where wildness meets civilization. Her glass finds beauty in this encounter but also serves as a warning about the fragility of our ecosystem.
She reflects: “The resilience of New Orleans and other vulnerable urban landscapes in the face of human expansion and climate change was the guiding theme of this work. I imagine a post-flood world where animals and plants hybridize, using human artifacts to build a stronger, more resilient world.”
“Diluvial Land” is on view in NOMA’s Elise M. Besthoff Gallery in the second-floor decorative arts galleries.
Mel Buchanan is RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts & Design, New Orleans Museum of Art
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