June 26 – September 11, 2011
Atlanta-based, internationally known artist Radcliffe Bailey explores American history and memory to encourage healing and transcendence through art. The exhibition features 37 works ranging from heroic to intimate scale, including installations, paintings, sculptures, mixed media, photos on metal, and works on paper.
June 6, 2012–September 2, 2012
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX
Memory as Medicine is the most comprehensive exhibition of art by Atlanta-based artist Radcliffe Bailey to date. It includes many new works and others never before presented publicly. The exhibition highlights underlining themes in Bailey’s work represented by his signature layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials, and text.
The exhibition is organized around the broad themes of “Water,” “Blues,” and “Blood.” “Water,” invokes the Black Atlantic Passage as a site of historical trauma as it highlights the fluidity of culture and traces Bailey’s own artistic and spiritual journey. “Blues” includes works that point to the importance of music as a transcendent art form. “Blood” focuses on ideas related to ancestry, race, memory, struggle, and sacrifice.
Radcliffe Bailey
The New York Times describes artist Radcliffe Bailey’s shimmering, shape-shifting works as being fueled by an exploration of “Black Atlantic culture, the vital, nurturing, agitated link between Africa and the Americas.”
Born in 1968 in Bridgeton, New Jersey, Radcliffe Bailey moved to Atlanta when he was four years old. Growing up, his interest in art was piqued by visits to the High and the art classes he took at the Atlanta College of Art. He later earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991.
Bailey harmonizes an intuitive balance of world history and familial memory. Through exploration of the past, the present, and the unknown, Bailey layers meaning into his art by layering objects. Combining two and three dimensional forms, he uses various mediums and scale to create a
diverse and engaging collection of art that can be read together as pages of the same book.
Bailey’s work is represented in leading museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco
Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas
City; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.