Arts Agenda - High acquires Sirlin’s ‘Retracings’

The High Museum has acquired Atlanta artist Deanna Sirlin’s “Retracings,” an installation she created for exhibition at the museum last fall. The site-specific work was selected from about 150 proposals submitted last summer in an open invitation to regional artists to create work for display in the museum’s non-gallery spaces. Sirlin will not receive compensation for the piece. Instead, the artist has donated the piece to the museum in exchange for the cost of repairing and preserving the piece for future exhibition. The acquisition was made with funds raised in recognition of the 25th anniversary of Nexus Contemporary Arts Center and gifts from the H. B. and Doris Massey charitable trust and the Loridans Foundation.

For the piece, Sirlin magnified the bright swirls of color in her paintings to 50 times their size and transformed them into transparencies. Installed in the glass front of the High Museum, they worked as contemporary stained glass windows to alter the museum environment. The exhibition, extended past its original two-month schedule, was on view September 1999 through January 2000.

“‘Retracing’ was very popular with the staff and our visitors, and it was really pretty,” remembers High curator Carrie Pryzbilla. “Since the work was made specifically for the High, it would be something that we could acquire. It seemed like a wonderful way to give a vote of confidence to a local artist and the local artist community.”

The High sent out a second call for exhibition proposals a week ago. Again, the request is for a regional artist to propose an installation or exhibition for any space of the museum not normally used as a gallery space. The project selected will be on view for at least a month in 2001.

“I think that this building invites people who imagine intervention to play with the building,” says Pryzbilla. “I’m looking forward to seeing what Atlanta artists, who are most familiar with the building and the High, are interested in doing. I hope they have fun.”

For more information, write the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, attention: Call for Artist Proposals, High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. Proposals must be postmarked by Sept. 15. No phone calls will be accepted.