The Musée Conti Wax Museum is currently CLOSED

The WAX will re-open after a brief retirement as part of the Jazzland Resort Complex.

Enter the fascinating world of the French Creoles as the story of New Orleans unfolds before your eyes. Beautiful costumes, accurate décor, and unbelievable stories are woven into a history unlike any other city! Begin 300 years ago as you meet our local legends: Iberville and Bienville discovering the swampy city, the duc d'Orleans planning New Orleans, the casket girls, Napoleon as he sells Louisiana, Jean Lafitte the pirate, Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans, Marie Laveau and her voodoo dancers, Mardi Gras Zulu King Weatherspoon, Louis Armstrong and Pete Fountain. Plus the eerie Haunted Dungeon!

 

Teachers: Once THE WAX re-opens as part of the Jazzland Resort Complex, educational programs will be available that include tours of the museum. More information will be available for scheduling school field trips closer to museum re-opening.

Musée Conti Wax Museum & The Art of Wax Sculpture

Founded in 1963, this 3rd generation, family owned and operated business is a New Orleans treasure chest of history, legend and scandal. Unlike other wax museums, The Musée Conti Wax Museum tells the story of one city alone, and what a story it is! From our city's fair founding, to the legendary Battle of New Orleans, to the mysterious world of Voodoo. The fascinating tableau of New Orleans unique history unfolds before your very eyes.

Representing more than three yeas of careful research and painstaking craftsmanship, Musée Conti depicts the exciting history of New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory. There are 154 life-size figures sculpted in wax, and displayed in historically accurate settings. In addition to our historical exhibit, we also have a Haunted Dungeon.

These details may be of interest:

Ordinary beeswax is mixed with a secret chemical compound that hardens the material and increases its resistance to extremes of temperature. Wax, like human skin, is slightly translucent; the coloring is infused beneath the final layer, thus accounting for the uncanny similarity to human flesh.

Each strand of human hair - imported from Italy - is inserted separately with a special needle. This laborious process achieves the realism we seek. All male figures are given complete beards; if you look carefully at the clean-shaven figures you will see a faint stubble remaining on their chins.

Medical glass eyes are obtained from Germany, a country long famous for supremacy in optical glass.

The artistry of the sculptured heads creates as close a resemblance to the actual persons depicted as history has recorded, and as human skill can reproduce. It has been our policy to show these famous people as they appeared at the time of their greatest impact on the world, a point that should be remembered with living people portrayed in the Museum - they will age but the wax figures will not. Similarly, the size of the figures has been thoroughly researched, and is fully accurate. Sometimes people are astonished at the apparent smallness of some of the wax figurines. Apart from the fact that their immobility tends to suggest this illusion, it should be remembered that the human race has been steadily gaining in average stature throughout history, with the greatest gains recorded in the last hundred years.

For many centuries mankind has marveled at the eerie magic of the Wax Museum. In olden Babylon wax figures were known; Alexander the Great retained his own wax sculptor one hundred years before Christ, and the Romans commonly practiced the art. No fair in the medieval Europe was complete without its collection of figures. We believe that the Musée Conti Wax Museum is a worthy successor to this long and firmly rooted tradition.

We hope that the moments you spend with supreme and honored people who await you in the Musée Conti Wax Museum will always linger in your memory.

 

Thank you for remembering THE WAX. We look forward to bringing the museum back to life in the future!