ATLANTA, Aug. 22, 2019 — The High Museum of Art presents a rotating schedule of exhibitions throughout the year. Below is a list of current and upcoming exhibitions as of Aug. 22, 2019. Note: The exhibition schedule is subject to change. Please contact the High’s press office or visit www.high.org for more information or to confirm details.
Upcoming Exhibitions:
“‘Something Over Something Else’”: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series
Sept. 14, 2019 – Feb. 2, 2020
Organized by the High Museum of Art, this touring exhibition is the first to bring dozens of works from Romare Bearden’s eminent “Profile” series together since its debut nearly 40 years ago. In November 1977, The New Yorker magazine published a feature-length biography of Bearden (American, 1911 – 1988) as part of its Profiles column. The article brought national focus to the artist, whose rise had been virtually meteoric since the late 1960s, and the experience of the interview prompted Bearden to launch his autobiographical “Profile” collection of collage paintings. He sequenced the project in two parts: “Part I/The Twenties,” featuring memories from his youth in the South and in Pittsburgh, and “Part II/The Thirties,” about his early adult life in New York. Inspired by the High’s recent acquisition of a key work from the series, “Something Over Something Else” is the first exhibition to reassemble more than 30 collages from the series and to re-create the experience of its original presentations in 1978 and 1981, which featured accompanying wall texts Bearden wrote in collaboration with his friend Albert Murray, an essayist, jazz critic and novelist. Beyond providing the opportunity to explore an understudied body of work, the exhibition investigates the roles of narrative and self-presentation for an artist who made a career of creating works based on memory and experience. It also reveals some of Bearden’s broader inspirations, which lend insight into American life in the first decades of the 20th century. Following its presentation at the High, the exhibition will travel to the Cincinnati Art Museum (Feb. 28 – May 24, 2020). This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Read full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings”
Oct. 19, 2019 – Feb. 2, 2020
For more than 40 years, Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) has made experimental, elegiac and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature’s indifference to human endeavor. A native of Virginia, Mann has long written about what it means to live in the South and be identified as a Southerner. This major exhibition features more than 100 figure studies, landscapes and architectural views that are united by their common origin and inspiration in the American South. Using her deep love of her homeland and her knowledge of its historically fraught heritage, Mann asks powerful, provocative questions—about history, identity, race and religion—that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. Organized into five sections—focused on family, landscape, battlefields, legacy and mortality—and featuring many new works, the exhibition is both a sweeping overview of Mann’s artistic achievement over the past four decades and a focused exploration of how the South emerges in her work as a powerful and provocative force that continues to shape American identity and experience. This exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.
Read full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Fine Lines: American Works on Paper”
Oct. 26, 2019 – March 22, 2020
Drawing in the 19th century was a popular medium for its convenience, requiring little beyond a sheet of paper and something with which to draw. Before painting, one learned to draw as an exercise, but it also came in handy for rendering quick impressions in the days before snapshot photography. In this way, 19th-century American artists rendered nearly all facets of daily life, whether recordings of their travels, commissioned illustrations, portraits of loved ones, or studies of a passerby on the street. “Fine Lines” celebrates a recent gift to the High of 50 late 19th-century drawings from Atlanta collector Paul Stein that will be on view at the Museum for the first time. In addition, the exhibition features a suite of watercolors on loan from Stein. Together, these works highlight the diversity of makers (women and men, famous and obscure) and the range of uses (from the casual to the formal) associated with works on paper in 19th-century America. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
“Virgil Abloh: ‘Figures of Speech’”
Nov. 12, 2019 – March 8, 2020
This fall, the High presents the first museum exhibition devoted to the work of Virgil Abloh (American, b. 1980), the modern, genre-bending artist and designer who became creative director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear line in 2018. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where it debuted in June, the exhibition focuses on Abloh’s creative process, collaborative work and pioneering discipline, which ranges across media and connects visual artists, musicians, graphic designers, fashion designers and architects. The works on view offer an in-depth look at the defining highlights of Abloh’s career, including his recent designs for Louis Vuitton menswear collection, video documentation of his most iconic fashion shows and his distinctive furniture and graphic design work. This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Read full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Our Strange New Land: Photographs by Alex Harris”
Nov. 29, 2019 – May 2020
This latest chapter in the High’s “Picturing the South” commission series features new work made by North Carolina-based photographer Alex Harris (American, b. 1949) on independent film sets throughout the South to explore how the region is seen, imagined and created by contemporary visual storytellers. Harris photographed both the scenes constructed for the film production and the activity that unfolded around the sets in adjacent communities, often blurring the lines between staged storytelling and real life. With the South’s diverse topography as a backdrop, Harris strings together impeccably lit and meticulously composed images to build an intuitive narrative that vacillates among deep sorrow, explosive anger and mundane anticipation. Though he leaves clues, Harris never fully reveals which pictures are contrived for the cinema and which are proximate documentary happenstance. His photographs poignantly record the current wave of filmmaking in the region while also exploring the back–and–forth between fiction and reality and between past and present in the South as portrayed in film. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
“Paa Joe: Gates of No Return”
Feb. 29 – May 31, 2020
Artist and master craftsman Joseph Tetteh Ashong (Ghanian, b. 1947), also known as Paa Joe, is the most celebrated figurative coffin maker of his generation. In the tradition of figurative coffins—or abeduu adekai (which means “proverb boxes”)—the structures represent the unique lives of the dead. This exhibition comprises a series of large-scale, painted wood sculptures commissioned in 2004 and 2005 that represent architectural models of Gold Coast castles and forts, which served as way stations for more than 6 million Africans sold into slavery and sent to the Americas and the Caribbean between the 16th and 19th centuries. Once they were forced through the “Gates of No Return,” these enslaved people started an irreversible and perilous journey during which many died. Relying on traditional techniques and materials, Joe crafts his coffins to represent vessels ferrying the dead into the afterlife that speak to spirits separated from bodies in trauma. In addition to the seven architectural models, the exhibition features archival documents and recordings, including photographs and short films by award-winning filmmaker Benjamin Wigley and art historian Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, curator of Ghana’s 58th pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennale. This exhibition is organized by the American Folk Art Museum, New York.
LiveLab Photography Residency and Exhibition
Residency: March 14 – 26, 2020
Exhibition: March 27 – April 19, 2020
Organized by the High in collaboration with the international photographic cooperative Magnum, the LiveLab is a residency and related exhibition that will address contemporary life in Atlanta by involving the community in the realization of a new body of photographs. For the two-week long “photographic jam session” (March 14 – 26, 2020), American photographer Carolyn Drake and South African artist Mikhael Subotzky will create individual projects about themes relevant to the city. A studio or “lab” will be set up at the High as a base of operations for the artists. To make the creative process transparent, the active workspace will be open to the public at select times, offering visitors insight into the processes of developing, editing and sequencing the finished project. The residency will result in a pop-up exhibition of the work produced at the High. Past LiveLabs have been hosted in London, Paris, Moscow, Shenzhen, China and Kyoto, Japan. This will be the first LiveLab in the United States. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in collaboration with Magnum Photos.
“speechless: different by design”
April 25 – Sept. 6, 2020
Organized by the High Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art, “speechless” merges research, aesthetics and innovative new design to explore the vast spectrum of sensory experiences and new approaches to accessibility and modes of communication in the museum setting. The exhibition debuts new work by six leading and emerging international designers and design teams — Ini Archibong, Matt Checkowski, Misha Kahn, Steven and William Ladd, Laurie Haycock Makela and Yuri Suzuki — whose projects were informed by conversations with specialists from prominent academic and medical institutions. Their site-specific installations and new commissions present participatory environments and distinct situations in which senses merge or are substituted for one another. By harnessing the power and impact of design, “speechless” offers audiences unconventional multisensory experiences that foster understanding of the varied ways we experience the world through our senses. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Read full press release here.
Download press images here.
Currently on view:
“Supple Means of Connection”
Through Sept. 8, 2019
The High commissioned its first choreographer as artist in residence, glo founder Lauri Stallings, to create a new suite of live art designed for the Museum’s galleries. A Rome Prize nominee and Creative Time artist, Stallings creates works of very diverse context, scale and textures. “Supple Means of Connection” is both a gallery installation and a public artwork that explores themes of family, falling and maps with respect to women’s roles. The choreography activates the Cousins galleries on the second level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion — relating to and co-existing with installed neon art, text and mixed-media sculpture “trees” — and migrates to and from the galleries through other rarely habited spaces around the interior and exterior of the Museum. The shifting locations ask the public to discover, lean under, peek through and part ways with traditional ways to view art, offering an alternative spatial experience of the Museum. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Read the full press release here.
Download press images here.
“The Pursuit of Everything: Maira Kalman’s Books for Children”
Through Sept. 15, 2019
The High premieres this colorful exhibition exploring the extensive catalog of Maira Kalman’s imaginative stories and illustrations, which have delighted readers of all ages for more than 30 years. Perhaps best known for her quirky New Yorker magazine covers and brilliant pictorial essays, Kalman (American, born 1949) has published more than a dozen books for adults and 18 acclaimed children’s books, beginning with the game-changing picture book “Stay Up Late” (1985), which gave visual form to the popular Talking Heads song from their “Little Creatures” album. “The Pursuit of Everything” provides an immersive panorama of Kalman’s picture book career, including newer publications “Bold & Brave: Ten Heroes Who Won Women the Right to Vote” (2018), authored by U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and the illustrated cookbook “Cake” (2018), written in collaboration with food writer Barbara Scott-Goodman. This exhibition marks the High’s fourth collaboration with The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, which organized the show and will present it in Amherst, Mass., from October 13, 2019, through January 19, 2020. This exhibition is organized by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst Massachusetts.
Read full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Of Origins and Belonging, Drawn from Atlanta”
Through Sept. 29, 2019
“Of Origins and Belonging, Drawn from Atlanta” is the third in a series of exhibitions at the High focused on work by Atlanta-based artists. The exhibition features six artists who address issues related to place, belonging and heritage in their work: Jessica Caldas, Yehimi Cambrón, Xie Caomin, Wihro Kim, Dianna Settles and Cosmo Whyte. Compelled by the national debate and dialogue around immigration reform, this iteration of the High’s Atlanta drawings project features artists whose distinct voices, diverse perspectives and personal experiences represent worldviews informed and enriched by their cultural heritage and the bond they share as members of a diverse creative community in Atlanta. Among the participating artists, Caomin and Whyte immigrated to the United States as adults, and Cambrón is a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Read full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Strange Light: The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin”
Through Nov. 10, 2019
Dubbed “The Father of American Surrealism,” Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) was the most important Southern photographer of his time and a singular figure within the burgeoning American school of photography. Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated in his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from the style of his peers, who championed realism and social documentary. The exhibition surveys Laughlin’s signature bodies of work made between 1935 and 1965, emphasizing his inventiveness, artistic influences and deep connection to the written word. The High began collecting Laughlin’s work in 1974, and this exhibition is the first major presentation of Laughlin’s photographs by the High following a landmark acquisition of his work in 2015. The more than 100 works on view attest to Laughlin’s innovative approach and prescience for the future of the photographic medium. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art.
Read full press release here.
Download press images here.
About the High Museum of Art
Located in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia, the High Museum of Art connects with audiences from across the Southeast and around the world through its distinguished collection, dynamic schedule of special exhibitions and engaging community-focused programs. Housed within facilities designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architects Richard Meier and Renzo Piano, the High features a collection of more than 17,000 works of art, including an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American fine and decorative arts; major holdings of photography and folk and self-taught work, especially that of artists from the American South; burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, including paintings, sculpture, new media and design; a growing collection of African art, with work dating from pre-history through the present; and significant holdings of European paintings and works on paper. The High is dedicated to reflecting the diversity of its communities and offering a variety of exhibitions and educational programs that engage visitors with the world of art, the lives of artists and the creative process. For more information about the High, visit www.high.org.
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Media contact:
Marci Tate Davis
Manager of Public Relations
Tel: 404-733-4585
E-mail: marci.davis@high.org