MOCA Artist Talk with Ayana Ross

From the venue:

Ayana Ross: Saving Our Sacred Selves

Aug 30, 2025 - Oct 25, 2025

About the Exhibition

“Preservation is not simply survival—it is continuity, awareness, daily resistance, care and righteous imagining. Saving Our Sacred Selves examines how we preserve our individual and collective selves and what should be carried forward or relinquished.

Grounded in the artist’s introspective inquiry, the exhibition straddles the tension between what the world forgets and what we fight to remember—our stories, our legacy, and the unseen, but critical, bonds that shape who we are. The work draws upon the prophetic frameworks of Black women writers and thinkers—most notably Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison— as reminders that imagining is a radical act, that predicting what’s ahead can be practical, and that what we tend to with care, survives. This exhibition offers large-scale narrative paintings, tonal portraits, landscapes, and domestic objects that emerge to present a visual and spatial introspection of daily life and the translation of those moments to the larger narrative of cultural exploration. Throughout this intergenerational investigation and dialogue, nature herself bears witness.

This exhibition, and all that is good within it, is dedicated to the memory of loved ones lost and the other 92%.”

–Ayana Ross

Studio Apprentices: From the 2023/2024 Working Artist Project

Aug 30, 2025 - Oct 25, 2025

This exhibition features works by emerging artists from the MOCA GA 2023/2024 Working Artist Project. WAP Fellows José Ibarra Rizo, Jane Foley and Namwon Choi mentored these carefully selected Studio Apprentices during their award year.

The Working Artist Project (WAP) is an awards program to support established visual artists of merit who reside in the metropolitan Atlanta area. This initiative provides an unparalleled level of support for individual artists, expands the Museum’s mission, and promotes Atlanta as a city where artists can live, work, and thrive. A guest curator selects three visual artists to receive the Award. Representing our city’s best and brightest; these artists are supported with an exhibition, promotion, studio apprentice(s), and a major stipend to create work over the course of the year. Major funding for this program is provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, PNC Foundation, The Antinori Foundation and The Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.