Exhibitions

Through September 4, 2022

Off the Grid

This exhibition surveys the High’s diverse collecting areas, offering unprecedented juxtapositions of works by artists from a variety of cultural backgrounds and artistic practices, unified conceptually by their engagement with grids.

Through September 11, 2022

Bob Thompson: This House is Mine

This nationally touring exhibition is the first major survey of work by American artist Bob Thompson (1937-1966) to be presented in more than two decades. Taking its title from one of his paintings, This House Is Mine traces Thompson’s trans-Atlantic artistic journey as he wrestled with the exclusionary Western canon.

Ongoing

Permanent Collection Installation
Shaheen Collection of French Works

The Doris and Shouky Shaheen Collection focuses on French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

September 16, 2022–March 5, 2023

Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place

Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place explores ideas concerning domesticity — namely asking how we can design our interiors to enable joyful living while empowering creativity.

October 7, 2022–February 19, 2023

Deana Lawson

Featuring work made over the past two decades, this exhibition is the first museum survey dedicated to Deana Lawson. Working primarily in photography, Lawson investigates and challenges conventional representations of Black identities and bodies.

October 21, 2022–January 15, 2023

Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern

The more than 70 sculptures and drawings in the exhibition encompass many of Rodin’s best-known compositions, including The Thinker, Monument to Balzac, and The Kiss, as well as less-familiar subjects and an exceptional number of his expressive and probing drawings.

November 18, 2022–April 9, 2023

Monir Farmanfarmaian: A Mirror Garden

This is the first posthumous exhibition at an American museum for Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1924-2019), one of Iran’s most celebrated and revered visual artists, known internationally for her geometric mirror sculptures that combine the mathematical order and beauty of ancient Persian architectural motifs with the forms and patterns of hard-edged, postwar abstraction.

February 24–May 21, 2023

Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature

June 26–September 19, 2021

Calder-Picasso

Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso are two of the foremost figures in the history of twentieth-century art. This touring exhibition presents more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, and works on paper spanning Calder’s and Picasso’s careers that reveal the radical innovation and enduring influence of their art.

April 17–August 1, 2021

Our Good Earth: Rural Life and American Art

Through a selection of prints, drawings, and photographs from the High’s collection, Our Good Earth will explore the many ways in which Americans imagined and engaged with life beyond the city limits over the course of a century.

April 17–August 1, 2021

Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection

For nearly all of photography’s one hundred eighty-year history, women have shaped the development of the art form and experimented with every aspect of the medium.  This exhibition showcases more than one hundred photographs from the High’s collection, many of them never before on view, and charts the medium’s history from the dawn of the modern period to the present through the work of women photographers.

March 6–May 9, 2021

Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors

The High presents The Visitors, an acclaimed video installation by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who is celebrated internationally for his work combining musical, theatrical, and cinematic elements. The mesmerizing nine-channel sound and video recording features performers and musicians playing a composition by Kjartansson and Davíð Þór Jónsson with lyrics from artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir.

February 6–May 9, 2021

David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History

David Driskell (1931-2020) was one of the most revered American artists of his generation. This is the first exhibition to bring together his paintings and works on paper and survey seven decades of the artist’s practice from the 1950s to the 2000s, featuring works from museums and private collections and the artist’s estate.

December 12, 2020–April 18, 2021

Bestowing Beauty: Masterpieces from Persian Lands

Bringing together nearly one hundred works highlighting the rich and artistic cultural heritage of Iranian civilization from the sixth to the nineteenth century, Bestowing Beauty draws from one of the most significant collections of Persian art privately owned and rarely publicly displayed.

November 7, 2020–March 14, 2021

Dawoud Bey: An American Project

This exhibition celebrates more than four decades of renowned photographer Dawoud Bey and his powerful photographs portraying underrepresented communities and exploring African American history.

July 14, 2020–February 14, 2021

Murmuration

Inspired by Atlanta’s reputation as the “city in a forest” and by the High’s proximity to the city’s abundant greenspace Piedmont Park, architectural firm SO – IL has designed a 2,350 square-foot mesh canopy that evokes the environment of neighboring trees.

October 24, 2020–January 31, 2021

Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu is the artist’s first comprehensive survey exhibition featuring her meticulously crafted paintings, drawings, and prints.

August 15–November 8, 2020

Picture the Dream: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through Children’s Books

This exhibition is the first of its kind to delve into the events, people, and themes of the civil rights movement, both celebrated and forgotten, through one of the most compelling forms of visual expression, the children’s picture book.

February 29–August 16, 2020

Paa Joe: Gates of No Return

Relying on traditional techniques and materials, Paa Joe crafts architectural sculptures to represent vessels ferrying the dead into the afterlife that speak to spirits separated from bodies in trauma.

February 22–July 19, 2020

The Plot Thickens: Storytelling in European Print Series

Long before comics and graphic novels, artists used pictures to tell stories. This exhibition presents six series of etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts that do just that.

David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History

David Driskell (1931-2020) was one of the most revered American artists of his generation. This is the first exhibition to bring together his paintings and works on paper and survey seven decades of the artist’s practice from the 1950s to the 2000s, featuring works from museums and private collections and the artist’s estate.

Picture the Dream: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through Children’s Books

This exhibition is the first of its kind to delve into the events, people, and themes of the civil rights movement, both celebrated and forgotten, through one of the most compelling forms of visual expression, the children’s picture book.

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe

Based on the High’s leading collection of Nellie Mae Rowe’s art, Really Free is the first major exhibition of her work in more than twenty years and the first to consider her practice as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the post-civil rights-era South.

Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America

After World War I, artists without formal training began showing their work in major museums, “crashing the gates” of the elite art world. This exhibition will celebrate more than a dozen early twentieth-century painters who fundamentally reshaped who could be an artist in the United States and paved the way for later generations of self-taught artists.