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The Crescent City's shopping is as eclectic as its music, food, and culture. In local boutiques and specialty stores, you’ll find everything from rare antiques to novelty T-shirts, artwork, jewelry, fashion, and foods that represent the city's varied flavors. Up and down Magazine Street and throughout the French Quarter, you'll spot old-world influences intersecting with modern trends, making it easy for even the most discerning shopper to find something new to treasure.
New Orleanians have a deep love for their city and its culture. For shoppers, this translates into pride-centric merchandise, including jewelry and clothing bearing city emblems, such as the fleur-de-lis—the stylized iris design associated with New Orleans since its early days—and Mardi Gras masks, black-and-gold Saints symbols, and humorous statements about political issues and local personalities. Residents strongly support local entrepreneurs, and there are many homegrown stores selling locally made goods.
Make sure to pay attention to some of the city's artwork. Posters designed around Jazz Fest and other special events, for example, often become collector's items. In the thriving arts districts, you'll find contemporary works by local artists alongside renowned names in the art world. The sounds of New Orleans—Dixieland, contemporary jazz, rhythm and blues, Cajun, zydeco, rap, hip-hop, and the unique bounce beat—are available in music stores, such as Louisiana Music Factory and Peaches Records, and at live-music venues including Preservation Hall, Snug Harbor, and House of Blues. Bookstores stock a plethora of local books on photography, history, cooking, and folklore. Clothing stores focus on items that wear well in New Orleans's often intense heat and humidity, with styles ranging from the latest runway fashions to vintage frocks and styles by local designers.
You don't have to pay admission to enter this part of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, where you can buy ceramics, glasswork, decorative pieces, books, scarves, and jewelry by Southern artists. The museum itself is filled with contemporary and folk paintings, mixed-media artworks, photography, and sculpture.
Live music and after-hours events are held on Thursday.
Mostly local and Gulf Coast artists are represented in this gallery, featuring high-end and reasonably priced contemporary crafts and fine art, including jewelry, blown glass, sculpture, furniture, photography, paintings, ceramics, and decorative accessories.
This co-op of regional artists showcases a wide variety of works, including handmade masks, photography focusing on New Orleans personalities and scenery, ceramics, blown glass, paintings, wrought-iron architectural accents, turned-wood bowls and vases, prints, jewelry, beads, and more.
More than 50 regional artists display their works in this double-shotgun house in the middle of the French Quarter. You'll find paintings, metalwork mirrors, a vast array of earrings, blown glass, ceramics, wood sculptures, handmade clothing, hats, ironwork, masks, and vignettes in oyster shells.
In a hushed art-museum atmosphere, this gallery, with its well-educated staff, showcases high-end European paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries. Visits are by appointment only.
Global themes from Russian art to African American experiences in music, history, and culture are portrayed through limited-edition graphics, photographs, posters, paintings, furniture, ceramics, textiles, and sculpture. Call before you go as visits are by appointment only, but someone is usually around.
Local artist James Michalopoulos showcases his abstract visions of New Orleans's architecture, street scenes, and personalities in oil paintings, lithographs, prints, posters, and serigraphs.
One of the South's largest glassblowing and printmaking studios has a viewing room where visitors can watch glassblowers at work. The gallery also displays and sells functional and decorative art and sculptures.
Local and regional blown-glass artists are represented in this Riverbend neighborhood studio, which also carries an eclectic mix of jewelry, pewter, ceramics, lamps, T-shirts, and more.
The name stands for Right Here In New Orleans, which is where most of the artists involved in this upscale co-op live and work. You'll find original paintings in a variety of styles, metalwork, sculpture, ceramics, glass, functional art, jewelry, fashion accessories, and artwork made from found objects. The gallery also holds art classes for children and adults.
One of Louisiana's most successful artists, George Rodrigue (1944–2013) is best known for his series featuring the Blue Dog, which has become a local icon. But it's the images of his Cajun ancestors in stylized Acadiana settings that got the most praise from art critics. His work is available in original paintings and signed and numbered silkscreen prints, mixed media, and sculpture.
Handmade jewelry by local artist Thomas Mann, known for his "technoromantic" pins, earrings, bracelets, and necklaces (often featuring industrial-style hearts), is showcased here, alongside work by a changing slate of other artists. The result is an eclectic mix of contemporary jewelry, housewares, sculpture, and unique gifts—the "I/O" stands for "Insight-full Objects."
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