High Museum of Art’s 2019 Advance Exhibition Schedule

The High Museum of Art presents a rotating schedule of exhibitions throughout the year. Below is a list of current and upcoming exhibitions as of March 5, 2019.

European Masterworks: The Phillips Collection
April 6 through July 14, 2019
The High is the exclusive venue in the Southeast for this exhibition, which will feature 75 iconic paintings and lptures from The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art. These incomparable European Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Expressionist artworks from the late 19th through the mid-20th century exemplify the distinctive eye of collector Duncan Phillips, who opened his acclaimed museum in Washington, D.C., in 1921. Visitors to the exhibition will encounter masterpieces by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh in dialogue with exquisite examples of Romanticism and Realism by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, which Phillips considered historical sources of modernism. Also featured are superb works by modern artists who held a special place in Phillips’ pioneering collection and who shaped the look of the 20th century, including Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Nicolas de Staël, Alberto Giacometti, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani Pablo Picasso. Many of the works have not traveled together in more than 20 years. This exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.


Strange Light: The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin
May 11 through Nov. 10, 2019
Dubbed the “Father of American Surrealism,” Clarence John Laughlin (1905–1985) was the most important Southern photographer of his time and a singular figure in the development of the American school of photography. The High boasts one of the largest and most important monographic holdings of Laughlin’s work, and the Museum will celebrate his legacy with this comprehensive exhibition. The show surveys Laughlin’s signature photographs between 1935 and 1965 from more than 80 in the Museum’s collection, including many from a landmark 2015 acquisition that will be on view at the High for the first time. The exhibition will also feature works by key artists who influenced Laughlin’s development. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Of Origins and Belonging, Drawn from Atlanta
June 1 through Sept. 29, 2019
Of Origins and Belonging is the third in a series of exhibitions at the High focused on work by Atlanta-based artists. The exhibition will feature six artists who address issues related to place, belonging and heritage in their work: Jessica Caldas, Yehimi Cambrón, Xie Caomin, Wihro Kim, Dianna Settles Cosmo Whyte. Compelled by the national debate and dialogue around immigration reform, this iteration of the High’s Atlanta drawings project features artists whose distinct voices, diverse perspectives and personal experiences represent worldviews informed and enriched by their cultural heritage and the bond they share as members of a diverse creative community in Atlanta. Among the participating artists, Caomin and Whyte immigrated to the United States as adults, and Cambron is a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient. Of Origins and Belonging will consider the ways foreign-born citizens, residents and their children or grandchildren contribute to Atlanta’s growing population, thriving economy, diverse cultural landscape burgeoning arts scene. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

The Pursuit of Everything: Maira Kalman’s Books for Children
June 22 through Sept. 15, 2019
The High Museum of Art will premiere this colorful exhibition exploring the extensive catalog of Maira Kalman’s imaginative stories and illustrations, which have delighted readers of all ages for more than 30 years. Perhaps best known for her quirky New Yorker magazine covers and brilliant pictorial essays, Kalman (American, born 1949) has published more than a dozen books for adults and 18 acclaimed children’s books, beginning with the game-changing picture book “Stay Up Late” (1985), which gave visual form to the famous Talking Heads song from the album “Little Creatures.” Since then her works have followed the comic adventures of beloved characters, including a dog named Max Stravinsky and Pete the dog, and have addressed important historical people and events with books including “Looking at Lincoln” (2012) and the 9/11-inspired “Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey” (2002). The Pursuit of Everything will provide an immersive panorama of Kalman’s picture-book career spanning three decades, including newer publications such as “Bold & Brave: Ten Heroes Who Won Women the Right to Vote” (2018), authored by U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and the illustrated cookbook “Cake” (2018), written in collaboration with the food writer Barbara Scott-Goodman. The more than 100 works on view will include original drawings and paintings from Kalman’s award-winning books, along with manuscripts, dummy books other ephemera. This exhibition marks the High’s fourth collaboration with The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and is presented in conjunction with a world premiere play based on Kalman’s work by the Alliance Theatre. This exhibition is organized by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Massachusetts. Support for the High Museum’s presentation is provided by the Lettie Pate Evans Foundation.


“Something Over Something Else”: Romare Bearden’s Profile Series
Sept. 14, 2019, through Jan. 5, 2020
Organized by the High, this touring exhibition will be the first to bring dozens of works from Romare Bearden’s eminent “Profile” series together since its debut nearly 40 years ago. In November 1977, The New Yorker magazine published a feature-length biography of Bearden (American, 1911–1988) as part of its “Profiles” series. The article brought national focus to the artist, whose rise had been virtually meteoric since the late 1960s, and the experience of the interview prompted Bearden to launch his autobiographical “Profile” collection. He sequenced the project in two parts: “Part I/The Twenties,” featuring memories from his youth in the South and in Pittsburgh, and “Part II/The Thirties,” about his early adult life in New York. Inspired by the High’s recent acquisition of a key work from the series, “Something Over Something Else” will be the first exhibition to reassemble more than 30 from the series and to re-create the experience of its original presentations in 1978 and 1981, which featured accompanying wall texts Bearden wrote in collaboration with his friend Albert Murray, an essayist, jazz critic and novelist. Beyond providing the opportunity to explore an understudied body of work, the exhibition will investigate the roles of narrative and self-presentation for an artist who made a career of creating works based on memory and experience. It will also reveal some of Bearden’s broader inspirations, which lend insight into American life in the first decades of the 20th century. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
Oct. 19, 2019, through Jan. 12, 2020
For more than 40 years, Sally Mann (American, born 1951) has made experimental, elegiac and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family and nature’s magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites her broad body of work, including portraits, still lifes, landscapes and other studies, is that it is all “bred of a place”: the American South. A native of Virginia, Mann has long written about what it means to live in the South and be identified as a Southerner. This major exhibition of the celebrated photographer’s work investigates how her relationship with her native land—as place and source of identity, with a rich literary and artistic tradition and a troubled history—has shaped her photographs. By incorporating a deep love of the South with her knowledge of its historically fraught heritage, Mann creates photographs that prompt powerful, provocative questions about history, identity, race and religion. Organized into five sections—family, landscape, battlefields, legacy and mortality—and featuring many works not previously exhibited, the exhibition is both a sweeping overview of Mann’s artistic achievement over the past four decades and a focused exploration of how the South emerges in her work as a powerful and provocative force that continues to shape American identity and experience. This exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Peabody Essex Museum.

Currently on view:

Look Again: 45 Years of Collecting Photography
Through April 14, 2019
Photography is a uniquely elastic medium. It can fulfill numerous utilitarian purposes—recording personal memories, chronicling collective histories or furnishing documentary evidence—yet it also offers potential for creative expression. The High began collecting photographs in the early 1970s, and the collection now includes more than 7,000 photographs from around the world made by diverse practitioners, from artists to entrepreneurs, journalists and scientists. Spanning the very beginnings of the medium in the 1840s to the present, the collection has depth in American modernist and documentary traditions from the 20th century as well as current contemporary practices. This exhibition, drawn from the High’s collection and local private collections, explores the medium’s layered history and its ever-evolving present by delving into the myriad ways a photograph can be a conduit for ideas, information emotion. Through the collection’s most prized prints and many unsung gems, the exhibition surveys a broad sweep of the history of photography, incorporating some of its oldest photographic objects along with prints made in the past year, while emphasizing the distinct strengths of the High’s collection. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.


William Christenberry: Time & Texture
Through April 14, 2019
A pioneer of color photography, William Christenberry dedicated his career to articulating the unique character of his native Hale County, Alabama. For four decades beginning in the 1960s, Christenberry photographed the vernacular architecture and rural landscape of central Alabama on an annual basis, creating a prolonged study of place and the passing of time. This exhibition includes more than 100 photographs by Christenberry and is drawn entirely from the High’s collection. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Way Out There: The Art of Southern Backroads
Through May 18, 2019Collaboratively organized by the Museum’s renowned photography and folk and self-taught art departments, this exhibition celebrates the South’s self-taught artists and offers a rare look at how their worlds converged with contemporary American photography and literature. Way Out There is inspired by a guidebook of Southern self-taught artists by late poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, who had road-tripped around the South with photographers Guy Mendes and Roger Manley in the 1980s and ’90s. The manuscript lay in a drawer for decades until recently rediscovered and published this year. The exhibition will bring the spirit of Williams’ book to life with more than 50 sculptures, paintings and other works from the High’s collection presented alongside approximately 100 of Mendes’ and Manley’s photographs, many on view for the very first time. Artworks in the show represent more than a dozen artists, including Eddie Owens Martin (“St. EOM”), Sam Doyle, Mose Tolliver, Thornton Dial, Edgar Tolson, Georgia Blizzard, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Howard Finster many others. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.


Hand to Hand: Southern Craft of the 19th Century
Through Aug. 4, 2019
This exhibition focuses on a selection of masterworks from the High’s holdings of 19th-century Southern decorative arts, examining the great achievements in traditional, rural forms of quilts, ceramics, basketry furniture. The styles, techniques materials of each work reveal not only the talents of their makers but also the legacy of learned traditions that, in many instances, have continued to be handed down to subsequent generations. Reflecting the rich blend of cultural influences in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and beyond, the exhibition includes several important works by African-American makers, including David Drake, an enslaved potter working in South Carolina in the first half of the 19th century. Since the 1970s, the High has celebrated and explored the role and impact of Southern decorative arts, including the legacy of historical folk art, which forms an important component of the Museum’s current program through the mutual efforts of its decorative arts and design and folk and self-taught art departments. This exhibition is the first in the new changing exhibition space established as part of the Museum’s collection reinstallation and located on the second level of the High’s Stent Family Wing. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.


About the High Museum of Art
Located in the heart of Atlanta, Ga., the High Museum of Art connects with audiences from across the Southeast and around the world through its distinguished collection, dynamic schedule of special exhibitions and engaging community-focused programs. Housed within facilities designed by Pritzker architects Richard Meier and Renzo Piano, the High features a collection of more than 17,000 works of art, including an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American fine and decorative arts; major holdings of photography and folk and self-taught work, especially that of artists from the American South; burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, including paintings, sculpture, new media and design; a growing collection of African art, with work dating from pre-history through the present; and significant holdings of European paintings and works on paper. The High is dedicated to reflecting the diversity of its communities and offering a variety of exhibitions and educational programs that engage visitors with the world of art, the lives of artists and the creative process. For more information about the High, visit www.high.org.