The Ozols Collection: A Museum of American Painting and Pedagogy

The Ozols Collection is an organization dedicated to preservation, research, practice, and education in historical painting techniques. It is a federally recognized non profit 501(c)(3) organization.

Our mission in visual arts practice, education, preservation, and scholarship spans 5 decades and three generations in New Orleans. Established by Auseklis Ozols in 1978, our mission will live on with your help. 

Our unique and irreplaceable archive is foremost a teaching collection which documents the pedagogy of painting while inviting scholarship on the diverse language, practice, and history of visual literacy. The Ozols Collection is an organization dedicated to preservation, research, practice, and education in historical painting techniques. At the Collection we simultaneously look to history and the future with the understanding that one can not exist without the other.

Through preservation and education efforts we strive to offer opportunities for community empowerment and growth through the promotion of visual literacy and hands on practice.

Preservation, conservation, and maintainance of Auseklis Ozols' life's work is our immediate task; his paintings, drawings, demonstrations, lecture notes, carvings, cartoons, correspondence, and personal collections are in desperate need of care and conservation. These archives include art work and notes on classes and lectures he developed for color theory, drawing, painting, sculpture, figure drawing, anatomy, portrait painting, plein air landscape, still life, and more. 

Ozols' life's work offers a unique window into these techniques as they intersect with  broader culture and contemporary expression; providing a valuable resource for future generations.

Testimonials

"Contemporary innovation comes and goes, and it is the duty of an art institution to be aware of it, even support it. Yet it must balance against the traditions that have withstood the test of time. "(Auseklis Ozols)

"The Collection was born as a result of my untoward expulsion from the school, the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, that I founded in 1978. . It was my life's work, 42 years maintaining aesthetic disciplines which had been abandoned by other art schools. " (Auseklis Ozols)