Exhibition

Off the Grid is divided into four sections: “Systems,” “Grids among Us,” “Containment and Expansion,” and “Sum of Its Parts.” Together, the sections confirm the grid’s centrality in twentieth-century art and provide insight into why humans are drawn to this seemingly simple geometric form. This exhibition offers the widest view to date of the kinds of artists who were interested in working Off the Grid.

Systems

Grids are so fundamental to how humans experience the world that they have even been identified within our brain. Scientists recently named a class of neurons “grid cells” based on the geometric patterns they create while determining spatial position. Their presence in our hardwiring may be responsible for why so many artists, from different cultures and working with such different materials, return to them as useful systems for visual representation.

The works on view in this section demonstrate how artists have approached grids as systems that provide clarity and can facilitate more complex experiences. For some artists, the grid is an organizational system for sequencing images and symbols. For others, it can be a starting point that becomes almost invisible or superimposed to create order in a chaotic visual experience. Even such artists as Agnes Martin and Katherine Mitchell, who appear to embrace the stark rationality of grids by leaving them bare, are interested in how the grid’s systematic nature can facilitate less rational sides of human experience, such as meditative states.

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  Allegory of Justice
  Allegory of Justice

  Baldassare Peruzzi
  Italian, 1481–1536
  Allegory of Justice, ca. 1527
  Pen, brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white, squared on pink-tinted paper
  Purchase in honor of Mrs. Tench C. Coxe, President of the Members Guild, 1970–1971, 71.9

  Artists’ use of grids did not flourish until the 1900s, but the grid was used in previous centuries, especially to facilitate mathematical and scientific processes in art. In Allegory of Justice, Baldassare Peruzzi divided his drawing with a grid, breaking it down into quadrants that helped him proportion his imagery as he copied it onto a larger canvas.

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  Grid Painting Half Shift: Olive and Umber
  Grid Painting Half Shift: Olive and Umber

  Katherine Mitchell
  American, born 1944
  Grid Painting Half Shift: Olive and Umber, 1977
  Colored pencil and acrylic on canvas
  Purchase, 1977.52

  The Atlanta-based Mitchell subtly changes the colors of her line in this painting, creating a balance between variation and predictability that is both calming and stimulating.

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  Screenprint from On a Clear Day
  Screenprint from On a Clear Day

  Agnes Martin
  American, born Canada, 1912–2004
  Screenprint from On a Clear Day, undated
  Screenprint on paper
  Purchase, 73.82

  After a decade in New York, Martin decamped to an isolated mesa in New Mexico and took a hiatus from painting. During this period, she made her only print series from which this small, slightly imperfect grid is drawn. “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power,” she said.

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  Untitled #69
  Untitled #69

  Howardena Pindell
  American, born 1943
  Untitled #69, 1974
  Watercolor, crayon, and paper collage
  Purchase, 1983.78

  As a child, Howardena Pindell went to a store and was told that the circles on the bottom of certain merchandise denoted products only White people could use. This experience of being unable to buy the glassware that she wanted because of her race became a core memory for her, and she reclaimed the form of that tiny circle in works like this one. She applied layers and layers of hole-punched paper that obscure the surface beneath, which sometimes contains carefully drawn grids. Pindell represents visually her desire to blur the seemingly insurmountable and viscerally painful experience of institutional racism with whimsy and beauty.

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  Adire Cloth
  Adire Cloth

  Yoruba Artist, Nigeria
  Nigeria
  Adire Cloth, twentieth century
  Cotton and indigo
  Fred and Rita Richman Collection, 1983.87

  Adire means “tie and dye” in Yoruba. The designs that appear across the gridded layout of the cloth were added with cassava paste, and the cloth was then submerged in indigo dye. Although many of the individual designs were once rooted in specific symbolism related to spiritual beliefs and historical events, the patterns of adire have evolved according to consumer demand. Historically, they were prepared by Yoruba women of Southwest Nigeria for the members of royal houses, but today they are widely worn across Nigeria and beyond.

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  Blue and Green Grid with Script
  Blue and Green Grid with Script

  John (J. B.) Murray
  American, 1908–1988
  Blue and Green Grid with Script, 1985
  Ink on paper
  Purchase with funds from T. Marshall Hahn and Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Nasisse Collection, 1993.75

  J. B. Murray began making art in the 1970s while living alone in a remote area outside of Athens, Georgia. He kept a vial of water that he considered to be holy by his bed and used it to create around fifteen hundred drawings like this one. Looking through the water, he became a medium for holy messages that he inscribed in the cursive script seen here. He was not known to be literate but clearly understood the conventions of writing and reading, imposing a system of rows and columns on his messages with bright blue and green lines.

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  Doubling Squares
  Doubling Squares

  Alfred Jensen
  American, born Guatemala, 1903–1981
  Doubling Squares, 1964
  Ink wash on paper
  Purchase, 66.6

  Alfred Jensen began investigating Mayan and Chinese calendrical systems in 1960, which led him to embrace layered and color-coated numerical diagrams. Along the horizontal and vertical axes of this work, he records an identical sequence of numbers that begins with six and progresses by six each time. His title refers to the mathematical operations of doubling and squaring—processes of multiplying that are echoed by the many reflections of triangles that form the squares of this dizzying grid.

Grids Among Us

Grids present themselves everywhere in our daily lives, whether in the communal infrastructure that we share or tucked privately into our domestic spaces. As artists in this section show, the grid appears in city blocks, suspension bridges, brickwork, newspapers, sewer grates, and shelving, to name a few of the form’s endless manifestations. Artists chose to foreground the naturally occurring grids they were finding not simply for the grid’s presence but because of their aesthetic appreciation for it. Their aesthetics were nurtured in a range of environments, whether in the cosmopolitan modernist circles that Berenice Abbott ran in or in the Black quilting traditions that shaped Ronald Lockett.

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  Untitled 28
  Untitled 28

  Sheila Pree Bright
  American, born 1967
  Untitled 28, from the Suburbia series, 2007
  Dye coupler print
  Purchase with funds from the Hagedorn Family and the Friends of Photography, 2015.344

  People are absent from this photograph, leaving the viewer to wonder who lives here and how the objects on display are related to their identities. The stylish midcentury shelving forms a gridded backdrop displaying books such as The End of Blackness and titles on Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso, as well as masks from continental Africa, establishing an air of worldliness and erudition. Sheila Pree Bright intended for this scene to subvert the American media’s projection of the typical African American home. The rigid, carefully curated interior also raises questions about expectations of resilience and perfection in the Black community.

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  Untitled (Freezer)
  Untitled (Freezer)

  William Eggleston
  American, born 1939
  Untitled (Freezer), ca. 1971–1973, printed 1980
  Dye transfer print
  Gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection, 1983.55

  William Eggleston is credited as one of the first major proponents of color photography in America. He showed an early interest in the arts and began making color photographs in 1965, when the medium was rarely shown in art museums. His images commonly focus on the mundane objects of everyday life. There is a familiar tension in this scene between the metal framework of the freezer as it attempts to keep the products organized and the unruly assortment of goods and encroaching frost that ultimately push the space into a state of disarray.

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  Line of Sight Drawing
  Line of Sight Drawing

  Gretchen Hupfel
  American, 1963–2002
  Line of Sight Drawing, 1999
  Diffusion transfer prints with ink
  Gift of Pamela Alexander, 2006.72

  Gretchen Hupfel created this work as part of a series on the human condition within the postindustrial world. Photographing signal towers using a Polaroid camera, she was consumed by the fact that “these gigantic structures are everywhere and yet invisible—the proliferation of this architecture has happened without notice.” She assembled her studies in large grids and made intricate, weblike line drawings connecting each tower to make visible their systems of transmission. There is an obsessive quality to the work that seems closely related to the visual and auditory hallucinations she experienced, which were diagnosed as schizophrenia in 2001.

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  Sunday Papers, New York
  Sunday Papers, New York

  Edward J. Steichen
  American, 1879–1973
  Sunday Papers, New York, 1922, printed later
  Gelatin silver print
  Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Michael Bernstein, 1998.50

  In this scene of a tenement building in New York, Edward Steichen captured many grids nested within each other. The eye is drawn across the image by straight lines, from the brickwork that fills the image to the open window at its center. Beyond the window sits a man, the only loose, curved form within the composition, reading a newspaper—yet another manifestation of a grid. Steichen’s decision to center the image at the top of the window, rather than with the man, emphasizes the way urban environments encompass and dictate the movement of people within them.

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  Nightview, NY
  Nightview, NY

  Berenice Abbott
  American, 1898–1991
  Nightview, NY, 1932, 1932, printed 1974
  Gelatin silver print
  Purchase with funds from a friend of the Museum, 74.58

  To capture this image, Berenice Abbott hung her camera off an upper floor of the Empire State Building in the early evening. From this bird’s-eye view, she highlights the importance of the grid to a city’s infrastructure, making it clear how ubiquitous it is as a dominant form on both the individual human level and the macro societal level. Her photograph also conveys a social message: in the midst of the Great Depression, the dancing lights and soaring skyscrapers provided an alternative narrative of American strength and progress as respite from the nationwide economic crisis.

Containment and Expansion

The core components of a grid are intersecting horizontal and vertical lines that give it the appearance of internal stability. Some of the artists in this section have used that association as a tool for containing the chaos of their experience and the world around them—such as Frank Jones, who drew a grid of rooms within a home to contain unfriendly “devil haunts” he saw through a milky veil over his eye. Others have turned that stability on its head, disrupting it through optical and spatial illusions that suggest movement—such as quilt artist Pamela Studstill, who painted tiny individual stripes of alternating color, achieving a shimmering ombre effect that seemingly continues to infinity.

The grid’s capacity for containment and expansion continues today through its dominance as a core principle in graphic and interface design, structuring the technology we encounter daily. The gridded formats of our browsers and other applications contain visual information to aid in our processing, but like Frank Stella’s Double Gray Scramble, they also continually expand, drawing us into their potentially infinite depths.

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  Untitled
  Untitled

  Burgoyne Diller
  American, 1906–1965
  Untitled, ca. 1945
  Colored pencil on paper
  Bequest of Mr. Bim Franklin, 2008.45

  A geometric design floats in the center of the page, dividing and containing the space. Burgoyne Diller’s commitment to the grid was part of a larger set of values with egalitarian aspirations. He understood geometric shapes and primary colors as a universal artistic language that could communicate across social boundaries. He sought this equitable art form as he was working through the Great Depression and World War II. For him, mapping geometric boundaries on a page brought order and control to art, when his outside world was tumultuous.

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  Vega II
  Vega II

  Victor Vasarely (Hungarian, 1906–1997), Vega II, 1969, silkscreen on silk, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Ferst, 72.1000.11 B. © Victor Vasarely

  Victor Vasarely has been hailed as the father of Op Art, a painting movement that embraces visual trickery. His Vega series comprises a checkerboard pattern that is disrupted by the appearance of objects pulsating beneath the surface of the work, stretching the flatness of its gridded surface forward. In 1969, Vasarely licensed his design for silk scarves, like the one on view here, and in early 2022, Paco Rabanne teamed with the London department store Selfridges to offer a new line of Vasarely-inspired scarves.

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  Double Gray Scramble
  Double Gray Scramble

  Frank Stella
  American, born 1936
  Double Gray Scramble, 1973
  Screenprint on paper
  Gift of the Phoenix Society, 75.96

  Frank Stella has been recognized as a canonical grid artist due to his interest in stark geometries. In the 1970s, he began using a technique he described as “maximalist” that involved using thick strokes of bold colors to give a sculptural quality to 2D works. Here he uses color gradients working in opposite directions to contrast two sets of squares. Going from light to dark, the left square pushes outward, while the right square, from dark to light, descends into a square pit. The shades of gray nested between the colorful squares further enhance the optical illusion of depth.

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  Quilt #77
  Quilt #77

  Quilt #77, 1988
  Cotton and fabric paint
  Pamela Studstill (American, born 1957), designer and maker
  Purchase with funds from the Decorative Arts Acquisition Endowment, 1988.227

  “Each of my quilts is a study in light,” says Pamela Studstill. As the eye moves down this quilt, the colors become gradually darker. This ombre effect is inspired by the light reflecting off the landscapes of the artist’s home state of Texas. Studstill achieves a greater range of color and complexity in her gradient effect by painting tiny stripes on her fabric strips. Her repetition of squares brings predictability to the quilt, but the individual color and combined contrast of her fabric strips imbue her grid with motion, allowing her geometric landscape to shimmer into infinity.

Sum of its Parts

The artworks in this section demonstrate how grids can emerge not as a starting point but as a final product, as is the case for Lightbox Armchair, created with antiquated slides of the High’s Decorative Arts collection. For other works in this section, the intersecting horizontal and vertical lines that define the grid are not drawn or painted on the surface of these objects, coming instead from the edges created by paper strips, shadows, woven segments, mosaic patterns, and fabric squares.

Most of the works on view here are by individual artists, but others represent collaborative or communal processes including weaving, quilt making, and mural painting. The sum of the individual efforts as well as the distinct parts of these works come together to create a more complex object. In building up their complex aggregates of form, these artists come back to the grid as a powerful structure for presenting a cohesive whole.

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  “Cabinet No. 50”
  “Cabinet No. 50”

  “Cabinet No. 50,” 2003
  Ice birch
  Ettore Sottsass (Italian, 1917–2007), designer
  Gallery Mourmans, Dutch, maker
  Purchase through prior acquisitions, 2010.102

  Ettore Sottsass was one of Italy’s most versatile and expressive architect-designers from the second half of the twentieth century. A cofounder of the irreverent design collective Memphis, Sottsass enjoyed poking fun at the puritanical restraint of International style. Revered in the field of architecture for decades, the style was defined by rectilinear lines and rigid structures. This cabinet defies such rationality on several levels, from its unusual and limited capacity for storage to the way its component parts appear to be in the process of tumbling out of an orderly formation like a grid.

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  Kente Cloth
  Kente Cloth

  Asante Artist, Ghana
  Kente Cloth, ca. 1900–1925
  Silk
  Purchase with funds from Fred and Rita Richman, 2004.166

  Kente is woven on a loom by the Asante people of Ghana and was originally worn as a garment. The collage effect of this cloth is created by arranging narrow strips of woven cloth, then hand sewing them together. Here the grid is formed by an ensemble of rhythmic patterns that carry specific meanings related to the kente’s wearer. Traditionally weaving was only done by men, but today a few women are weavers as well. Although it was once worn only by the Asante elite, kente has now become a symbol of Pan-African and Black identity worn by many.

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  Friendship Quilt
  Friendship Quilt

  Friendship Quilt, 1910
  Cotton
  Unidentified Maker, Midwestern United States
  Anonymous Gift, 1980.1000.18

  As the name suggests, family and friends constructed and signed quilts like this one together to commemorate their bonds on occasions such as weddings, births, or relocations. The tradition of friendship quilts dates back to the 1840s in New England, and its popularity surged at the turn of the century across the South and Midwest, as people increasingly migrated west or to urbanizing cities for new social and economic opportunities. Each friend created a medallion for this quilt and added their signature to their contribution.

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  In Black America
  In Black America

  Romare Bearden
  American, 1911–1988
  In Black America, 1971
  Screenprint on paper
  Gift of Henri Ghent in memory of his mother, 1978.4

  Romare Bearden used grid paper to draft a precise design for a now destroyed mural honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the facade of Atlanta’s Kutz Building in the 1970s. This study includes a panel with a black face next to diagonal red stripes. In this design, Bearden deconstructs the American flag, presenting its stars as a blue grid that forms the bust of the Black figure and its stripes clashing against his face.

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  Untitled, Study for Mural
  Untitled, Study for Mural

  Romare Bearden
  American, 1911–1988
  Untitled, Study for Mural, 1976
  Watercolor, ink, and graphite on graph paper
  Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Dobbs and Michelle Jordan in honor of Mrs. Millicent Dobbs Jordan, 2009.62.1

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  Lightbox Armchair
  Lightbox Armchair

  Benjamin Rollins Caldwell
  American, born 1983
  Lightbox Armchair, 2014–2015
  Acrylic with laser-cut white powder-coated steel understructure, image slides, and LED lights
  Purchase with funds from the Friends of Photography, 2014.393

  Benjamin Rollins Caldwell is a Southern designer who creates furniture that is often surfaced in a mosaic, grid-like fashion with recycled material such as bottle caps, old trophies, computer parts, and in this case, slides of objects from the High’s historic Decorative Arts collection. The Museum commissioned several pieces of furniture by Caldwell that would utilize old slides after the designer became famous for a similar chair that Lady Gaga made famous while promoting her 2013 album, ArtPop.