In the mid-1970s, artist and Georgia State University professor Medford Johnston and his wife and collaborator Loraine began collecting works by artists who were in the vanguard of contemporary art in the late 1960s and 1970s. Although they acquired a range of paintings and objects when they first began collecting, they quickly narrowed their focus to drawings, primarily by artists working on the frontlines of abstraction in the mid-1960s during a time of great innovation and experimentation.
Today, they hold one of the finest collections of postwar American drawings and related objects of its kind, now numbering more than eighty-five works, bequeathed to the High. This exhibition—featuring works by artists including Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, and Stanley Whitney, among many others—traces a trajectory of the evolution of American abstraction from 1960 to 1990 and can help visitors understand the various directions in abstraction that artists took during the period, as well as the motivations and context for their stylistic exploration. Thinking Eye, Seeing Mind: The Medford and Loraine Johnston Collection demonstrates how establishing the parameters of an art collection requires infinite patience, focus, discipline, and a keen eye.
