High Museum Fall Exhibits (tuesdays)

From the venue:

Photography's New Vision: Experiments in Seeing

 

Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America, and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterized by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favored extreme angles and unusual viewpoints.

This exhibition, uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s robust photography collection, will trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham, and Moholy-Nagy will be complemented by a multitude of works by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.

exhibit page here

Viktor&Rolf. Fashion Statements

For more than three decades, Dutch fashion artists Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren have explored the boundaries between haute couture and art with breathtaking virtuosity. The self-confessed fashion world outsiders have garnered critical acclaim for their unconventional designs that reveal technical prowess and a deep knowledge of fashion and history, and their creations have been embraced by artists including Cardi B, Lady Gaga, Madonna, and Tilda Swinton. This fall, the High will be the exclusive US venue to present this exhibition, the first major retrospective of their work, organized by curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot and the Kunsthalle Munich in Germany, where it debuted in February 2024. The exhibition will feature more than one hundred of Viktor&Rolf’s most daring and avant-garde works, designed for the runway and beyond, that reflect the duo’s passions, obsessions, and singular vision. Included are garments from more than thirty of their collections as well as selections of their “works-in-progress dolls,” inspired by antique porcelain dolls and dressed in miniature versions of the designers’ handmade creations. The works are accompanied by elaborate animated projections designed for the exhibition by the internationally acclaimed visual effects studio Rodeo FX.

exhibit page here

The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans

 

Minnie Evans once said her drawings of harmoniously intertwined human, botanical, and animal forms came from visions of “the lost world,” or nations destroyed by the Great Flood as described in the Book of Genesis. After her grandmother died in 1934 and the visions she experienced in childhood became stronger, Evans produced a large body of work ranging from abstract to representational styles. Though she found fame beyond her community in Wilmington, North Carolina—she was among the first Black artists to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975—she has not been the subject of a major exhibition since the 1990s.

When Evans turned fifty-six, she shifted from decades of employment as a domestic worker to collecting admissions at Airlie Gardens, one of the most beautifully landscaped gardens in the Southeastern United States. She made art during idle moments and hung it on and near the Gardens’ exquisite wrought-iron gate. Selling or giving away her drawings to Airlie’s visitors led to a reputation beyond Wilmington and eventually a 1966 exhibition at a New York church titled The Lost World of Minnie Evans.

The High’s presentation reprises that 1966 title, honoring Evans’s interest in biblical and ancient civilizations while foregrounding the spiritual and historical circumstances of her extraordinary life. More than one hundred of her artworks are presented in a range of contexts, from the extrasensory experiences of her visions to the double-edged realities of her life in the Jim Crow South. Her drawings, beautiful and complex, thus become portals into her “lost world.”

exhibit page here

The Family Album of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

 

A largely self-taught photographer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925–1972) was a pioneering and inventive artist who created some of the most original images of the mid-twentieth century. His work defies easy categorization as he experimented across various genres and subjects, and throughout his career, he maintained the ethos of an amateur, approaching photography with a sense of affection, discovery, and surprise. He is best known for his staged scenes that suggest an absurd fantasy set in the dilapidated houses and banal suburban environs near his home in Lexington, Kentucky. These scenes, often featuring his family as actors and using props such as masks and dolls, reveal Meatyard’s search for inner truths amid the ordinary.

This exhibition, coinciding with the artist’s centenary, will feature the thirty-six prints that comprise the artist’s first monograph (Gnomon Press, 1970)—one of only two books he published in his lifetime—which Meatyard intended to stand as his definitive artistic statement. Through his idiosyncratic selection of images, this exhibition will explore how Meatyard’s singular approach and voracious curiosity expanded photography’s expressive and conceptual potential.

exhibit page here