High Museum Summer Exhibits (Tuesdays)
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From the venue:
Patterns in Abstraction: Black Quilts from the High Collection
Over the past six years, the High has more than quintupled its holdings of quilts made by Black women. This collection-based exhibition will be the first to bring a number of these recent acquisitions together to answer a larger question: “How can quilts made by Black women change the way we tell the history of abstract art?”
Patterns in Abstraction will include about a dozen works by well-known Gee’s Bend quilters such as Mary Lee Bendolph, Louisiana Bendolph, and Lucy T. Pettway, along with works by Atlanta-based quilter Marquetta Johnson and early twentieth-century examples by artists once known. The quilts on view are mostly variations on Birds in the Air and Housetop themes, two centuries-old quilt patterns that are geometric distillations of natural phenomenon and humanmade environments, while others have deeper meanings as memorials to family members.
Presented as both objects made for use and with the artistic intent to represent people, places, and things abstractly, these quilts offer a window into how the production of nonacademic artists can transform our understanding of artistic innovation in American art. A corresponding publication through LINK, the museum’s platform for online engagement, will offer multimedia and interactive content related to the High’s expanded and growing collection of Black quilts.
Tyler Mitchell: Idyllic Space
Tyler Mitchell is an American photographer and filmmaker renowned for his tender and innovative portrayals that center Black self-determination and empowerment through scenes of love, leisure, and camaraderie. Mitchell rose to global prominence in 2018 when he photographed Beyonce for the September issue of Vogue as the first Black artist to shoot the cover in the magazine’s then 126-year history. He explores style, beauty, and identity through playfully theatrical, expressive photographs that seamlessly blend his fashion and conceptual work.
Drawing inspiration from the landscapes, homes, and communities of suburban Atlanta where he was raised, this homecoming exhibition features work made from 2017 to 2024 and considers Mitchell’s exploration of themes such as family lineage, play, companionship, the natural world, and domestic spaces. His lens captures the essence of relationships, weaving an intimate narrative of shared experiences.
All works of art are by Tyler Mitchell (American, born 1995) unless otherwise noted.
Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys
The High will be the exclusive venue in the Southeastern United States to present the first major exhibition of the world-class art collection owned by musical and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys.
Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, where it debuted in February, Giants will feature a focused selection from the couple’s holdings, spotlighting works by multigenerational Black diasporic artists, from 20th century legends such as Nick Cave, Lorna Simpson, and Barkley L. Hendricks, to artists of a younger generation including Deana Lawson, Amy Sherald, and Ebony G. Patterson, who are expanding the legacies of those who came before them.
Giants stands as a testament to the Deans’ ethos of “collecting and preserving the culture of ourselves for ourselves, now and into the future.” Through approximately 115 objects, including 98 major artworks, the exhibition will trace the evolution of an audacious and ambitious collection and explore the ways in which the featured artists and their work have grappled with societal issues, embraced monumentality, and made a palpable impact on the art canon. In addition to paintings, photographs, and sculptures, the galleries will include noteworthy examples of the Deans’ early non-art collecting interests, including albums, musical equipment, and BMX bikes, along with related ephemera.
Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis
Debuting at the High this fall and co-organized with the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography and the Cleveland Museum of Art, this groundbreaking exhibition will feature a powerful body of work by Kelli Connell (American, born 1974) that reconsiders the complicated relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston from a contemporary queer and feminist perspective.
Through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s photographs, Connell enriches our understanding of the couple and weaves their stories together with her own artistic practice. Using their publications and archives as a guide, Connell and her former partner, Betsy Odom, traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work, and spent time together. Along the way, Connell collaboratively made photographs of Odom that upend conventional notions of photographer and muse. She also photographed, in a raw and less idealized manner, the grand Western landscapes that Weston made iconic seventy-five years before.
The exhibition will include more than forty of Connell’s recent large-format portrait and landscape photographs, along with dozens of Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes made between 1934 and 1945, one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson. Four of Connell’s photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the High’s collection, exemplifying the museum’s recent commitment to growing its holdings of work by queer artists.
exhibit page here
Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks”
Famed for her images of flowers and Southwestern landscapes, Georgia O’Keeffe spent several years of her prolific career exploring the built environment of New York City with brush in hand. The artist moved to the city’s newly built Shelton Hotel in 1924, then the tallest residential skyscraper in the world, and its soaring heights inspired a five-year period of energetic experimentation, across media, scale, subject matter, form, and perspective. She created street-level compositions capturing the city’s monumental skyscrapers from below and suspended views looking down from her 30th-floor apartment. She called these works her “New Yorks” and through them investigated the dynamic potential of New York’s cityscape — the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the constructed. The High is the exclusive venue in the Southeastern United States for this exhibition, the first to seriously examine O’Keeffe’s paintings, drawings, and pastels of urban landscapes while also situating them in the diverse context of her other compositions of the 1920s and early 1930s. The presentation establishes these works not as outliers or anomalous to her practice but as entirely integral to her modernist investigation in the 1920s — from her abstractions and still lifes at Lake George in upstate New York and beyond to her works upon arriving in the Southwest in 1929. O’Keeffe’s “New Yorks” are essential to understanding how she became the artist we know today.
exhibit page here
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 Eugene 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.