What We Fund

Where kids do more than play, they experience magic.

Located across the footbridge outside Louisiana Children’s Museum

When visitors approach the Louisiana Children’s Museum (LCM) in New Orleans City Park, they’re welcomed across a footbridge over a restored lagoon by an ethereal sculptural fog environment—the first permanent installation by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya in the American South and only the second in the U.S. This significant commission was underwritten in full by The Helis Foundation.  

The fog mist emerges every half hour, enveloping guests crossing and lingering on the footbridge. This breathtaking fog sculpture is in a constant state of change, like nature itself: So, take your time walking across it as the mist shifts and changes, making it different every time you visit.  

 Another notable part of Nakaya’s installation is that it seamlessly complements the museum’s focus on water and the ecology of coastal Louisiana. The lagoon the footbridge crosses is a restored freshwater and brackish lagoon that takes advantage of the area’s natural resources and landscape. To make the lagoon eco-friendlier, a 15,000-gallon cistern was created to collect rainwater from the roof for the 2,000 plants and flowers.      

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About the Artist

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In 1970 Fujiko Nakaya, working as part of the legendary group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), enveloped the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka in vaporous fog, becoming the first artist to create a sculptural fog environment. Nakaya’s sculptures have since been presented all over the world from the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to the Australian National Gallery in Canberra to the grounds of the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Ct. The Louisiana Children’s Musuem exhibit is her first project in the American South, and only second permanent installation in the United States. In 2018, Nakaya was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award, a global arts prize presented annually by the Japan Art Association.