ATLANTA, Aug. 16, 2022 — 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. 16, 2022. Note: The exhibition schedule is subject to change. Please contact the High’s press office or visit high.org for more information or to confirm details.
Upcoming Exhibitions
“Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place”
Sept. 16, 2022-March 5, 2023
In the wake of several global crises, designers have responded by redefining our relationship to our homes, including interrogating the modernist trope of better living through design. “Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place” explores ideas concerning domesticity during a time of worldwide upheaval, tackling the question of how we can design interiors to enable joyful living while empowering creativity. It is the first major museum exhibition in over a decade to survey Burks’ workshop-based design practice, presenting more than 50 works from several key projects from the last 10 years. These industrial design and craft-centered projects will be seen in conversation with “Shelter in Place,” a multifaceted new commission that will explore the visionary possibilities of design. As an African American designer, Burks has forged a distinctive path by embracing the challenge to advocate for hand production as an innovative approach for industry. “Shelter in Place” will also demonstrate Burks’ holistic approach that unites art, architecture and design while synthesizing craft, community and industry. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Read the full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Deana Lawson”
Oct. 7, 2022-Feb. 19, 2023
Featuring more than 60 works 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. Her work evokes a range of photographic histories and styles, including family albums, studio portraiture and staged tableaux; she also employs documentary pictures and appropriated images. In Lawson’s highly staged tableaux, individuals, couples and families are pictured in intimate domestic spaces and public settings. These intimate scenes channel broader ideas about individual and social histories, sexuality and spiritual beliefs. Lawson’s practice is global in scope, as she creates her images throughout the African diaspora in locations as varied as Brooklyn, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Southern United States. This broad geographical range points to the artist’s interest in a collective memory of shared experiences and various cultural histories of the past. This exhibition is co-organized by ICA/Boston and MoMA PS1.
Read the full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern”
Oct. 21, 2022-Jan. 15, 2023
Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917) is one of the most celebrated sculptors of the modern age, represented in museums and private collections across the globe. However, this was not always the case. From his first sculpture to enter an American museum in 1893 and culminating with his popular revival in the 1980s, this exhibition follows Rodin’s rise to eminence in the United States due in large part to the collectors, critics and curators who helped make it happen. The 45 sculptures and 25 works on paper 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. The exhibition shows Rodin working across an array of media — from terracotta and plaster to bronze and marble — and illuminates his creative process, from studies and maquettes to completed works. “Rodin in the United States” also reveals Rodin’s incredible daring and inventiveness as he continually pushed against and beyond traditional notions of sculpture. This exhibition is organized by the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Read the full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Monir Farmanfarmaian: A Mirror Garden”
Nov. 18, 2022-April 9, 2023
This is the first posthumous exhibition at an American museum for Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922-2019), 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. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Farmanfarmaian’s 2007 memoir, co-authored by Zara Houshmand, which evokes the visual splendor of the artist’s mirror-mosaic sculptures. Objects on view will include a selection of sculptures, drawings, textiles and collages spanning four decades, from 1974 to 2018. The exhibition was inspired by the High’s 2019 acquisition of Farmanfarmaian’s cut-mirror sculpture “Untitled (Muqarnas)” (2012) as well as her 2014 drawing “Untitled (Circles and Squares).” This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Read the full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature”
Feb. 24-May 21, 2023
Co-organized by the High and the Brandywine River Museum of Art, this is the first major museum exhibition to exclusively examine the nature-based works of pioneering American modernist Joseph Stella. Though Stella is primarily recognized for his dynamic Futurist-inspired paintings of New York, particularly of the Brooklyn Bridge, he was also compelled to express the powerful connection he felt to the natural world, a subject he would pursue persistently throughout his career. “Visionary Nature” will feature more than 50 paintings and works on paper that reveal the complexity and spirituality that drove Stella’s nature-based works and the breadth of his artistic vision. The exhibition will dig deeply into the context of the works, exploring their inspirations, sources and stylistic influences. This exhibition is co-organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Brandywine River Museum of Art.
Read the full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City”
March 24-Aug. 13, 2023
Evelyn Hofer (American, born Germany, 1922-2009) was a highly innovative photographer whose prolific career spanned five decades. Despite her extraordinary output, she was underrecognized during her lifetime and was notably referred to by New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer as “the most famous unknown photographer in America.” She made her greatest impact through a series of photobooks, published throughout the 1960s, devoted to European and American cities, including Florence, London, New York, Washington, D.C., and Dublin, as well as a book focused on the country of Spain. Comprising more than 100 vintage prints in both black and white and color, “Eyes on the City,” the artist’s first major museum exhibition in the United States in over 50 years, is organized around those publications. The photographs to be featured combine landscapes and architectural views with portraiture, conveying the unique character and personality of these urban capitals during a period of intense structural, social and economic transformations after World War II. This exhibition is co-organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
“George Voronovsky: Memoryscapes”
March 24-Aug. 13, 2023
This exhibition marks the first major museum presentation of work by the late Ukrainian American artist George Voronovksy. Born in Kiev in 1903, Voronovsky immigrated to the United States after World War II and began working in the rail industry in Philadelphia. He continued to work primarily as a train car upholsterer and followed his occupation south, ultimately settling in Miami, where he turned his room in Miami’s Colony Hotel into an art refuge, living there until his death in 1982. His paradisiacal art installation included carved Styrofoam sculptures, cut tin cans and glorious paintings on cardboard and canvas, which melded his old-world memories and his neon present in Miami Beach. This exhibition will showcase approximately 40 of his paintings alongside sculptures he created from materials discarded along the local beaches he frequented, such as old Styrofoam coolers. His work has been preserved by Florida-based collector and photographer Gary Monroe, whose photos of the artist and his vibrant art environment will also be included in the exhibition. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
“Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Mask and the Cross”
April 7-July 30, 2023
This is the first solo exhibition at an American museum for sculptor and printmaker Bruce Onobrakpeya (born 1932), one of the fathers of Nigerian modernism and a founding member of the Zaria Art Society, an art collective that developed the “natural synthesis” aesthetic that came to define early postcolonial Nigerian art. “The Mask and the Cross” describes the artist’s creative phase from 1967 through 1978, during which he created numerous works marrying Nigerian tradition, folklore and cosmology with Catholic motifs and stories from the Bible. This period began with the creation of a series commissioned by the Catholic Church titled “Fourteen Stations of the Cross,” which depicts scenes from the last earthly day of Jesus Christ. Onobrakpeya portrays Biblical characters as Nigerian and reimagines Biblical scenes in Nigerian settings. This exhibition will consider religious “double belonging” as an exercise in agency, subversion and cultural resilience. Grounded in the High’s own edition of Onobrakpeya’s “Fourteen Stations of the Cross” prints, “The Mask and the Cross” will showcase other works from this period, as well as examples from later periods, as themes of religious hybridity and multiplicity continue to appear throughout the artist’s 60-year career. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Currently on View
“Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine”
Through Sept. 11, 2022
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. It includes paintings and works on paper spanning his brief but prolific career, which is characterized by a rigorous engagement with art history and a commitment to expressive figuration. Throughout Thompson’s practice, canonical European painting served as a point of departure for his radically inventive contemporary allegories. Inspired by European old masters such as Jacopo Tintoretto and Francisco de Goya, he developed a highly personal and symbolic visual vocabulary known for its characteristic vignettes of silhouetted figures and animals in pastoral settings. Taking its title from one of his paintings, “This House Is Mine” traces Thompson’s transatlantic artistic journey as he wrestled with the exclusionary Western canon. The exhibition reflects and contextualizes his significance as a contemporary artist and illuminates critical questions about the politics of representation, particularly for Black artists, while presenting new possibilities for a more inclusive art history. This exhibition is organized by the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine.
Read the full press release here.
Download press images here.
“Off the Grid”
Through Sept. 4, 2022
The grid — a geometric form of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines — has for more than 50 years been recognized for its iconic presence in 20th-century art. 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. Art critics such as Rosalind Krauss and Jonathan Elderfield began writing about the prominence of grids in the 1970s, referencing the ubiquity of the form in the work of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella. This exhibition highlights works on paper in the collection by those artists, presenting them alongside artists from across the collection who also played “off” notions of the grid over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, including quilters such as Agatha Bennett, photographers such as Harry Callahan and multimedia artists such as Howardena Pindell. “Off the Grid” not only confirms the grid as a dominant force in 20th-century art but also expands this notion beyond canonical minimalist and abstract artists to include a more diverse group of artists working in a wide array of media. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Download press images here.
About the High Museum of Art
Located in the heart of Atlanta, 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 18,000 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 prehistory 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
404-733-4585
marci.davis@high.org