Spring Exhibits at the High Museum (wednesdays)
From the venue:
Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina
This exhibition tells the story of the enslaved potters of Old Edgefield District, a rural area on the western edge of South Carolina famous for its natural clays. While many associate labor of the enslaved with staple crops like cotton and tobacco, historians describe Old Edgefield as the site of “industrial slavery.” For roughly fifty years before emancipation and the end of the Civil War, the Black potters of Old Edgefield crafted stoneware storage vessels later sold to neighboring plantations. Despite their beauty and expert craftsmanship, these vessels were made under duress.
Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Observers in the seventeenth century described the Netherlands as the world’s marketplace. Dutch merchants possessed a capitalist mindset and benefited from innovations in naval and military technology. The Dutch East India Company, the world’s first multinational corporation, was founded in 1602 to dominate trade in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, forever changing the global economy. New commodities flowed to the Dutch Republic and made a small nation immensely rich. This in turn fueled an artistic boom. The most famous Dutch artists in the seventeenth century - Hals, Rembrandt, Ruisdael, Ruysch are still admired today.
exhibit page here
Truth Told Slant: Contemporary Photography
Truth Told Slant examines a recent shift in how photographers have taken on the challenge of making meaningful images of the world around them. Rather than using the traditional documentary approach of dispassionate observation, they work in a stylistically expressive manner akin to literary nonfiction, weaving between observational and narrative modes while embracing their own subjectivity.
The title of this exhibition, which is inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem, accentuates the sidelong and deeply personal approach these artists use to make sense of the current social and political landscape. The five artists gathered here -Jill Frank, Rose Marie Cromwell, Zora J Murff, Kristine Potter, and Tommy Kha -consider issues that documentary photographers have grappled with for decades and that remain pertinent today. They explore topics of American life, such as race and inequality; identity and sexual orientation; immigration and globalization; youth and coming of age; climate change and environmental justice; and the pervasiveness of violence, to reveal deeper truths and reframe prevailing narratives in a manner that is more felt than didactic.
Three Decades of Democracy: South African Works on Paper
On May 10, 1994, Nelson Mandela became the first democratically elected president of South Africa, marking the end of decades of systematic and legalized racial segregation known as apartheid. This installation commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the end of apartheid through a presentation of South African prints and works on paper from the High’s collection. The eight artists featured make observations about South African social and cultural life, employing their art to resist, witness, and reflect.
Shaheen Collection of French Works
Through the generosity of numerous collectors, benefactors, and supporters, the High Museum has assembled a distinguished collection of European art ranging in date from the fourteenth through twentieth centuries. The collection of paintings displayed in this installation represent the accomplishment of Doris and Shouky Shaheen. Collected over a span of four decades, these works were presented as a gift to the High Museum in 2019.
The Doris and Shouky Shaheen Collection focuses on French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within this timeframe, the paintings represent an array of styles, including the pre-Impressionist realism of Eugène Boudin’s harbor views, the shimmering Impressionism of Claude Monet’s and Camille Pissarro’s landscapes, and the expressive modernism of Amedeo Modigliani’s and Henri Matisse’s figure studies.