High Museum of Art Announces 2024 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, 2024. Note: The exhibition schedule is subject to change. Please contact the High’s press office or visit high.org for more information or to confirm details.

Upcoming Exhibitions

“Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston”

April 19-July 14, 2024

This exhibition brings together more than 100 paintings — still lifes, portraits, seascapes, landscapes, architectural views and genre scenes — as well as prints, maps and decorative arts spanning the 17th and the first half of the 18th centuries by the period’s leading Dutch artists including Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Willem Kalf and Rachel Ruysch. Representing the highest artistic achievement, these works are considered in the context of global exchange and colonialism. The display explores how Dutch preeminence in international maritime trade and the influx of new goods and information transformed life in the Netherlands and led to a remarkable cultural flowering. The art of this period reflects how the Dutch wished to represent themselves, their ideals and their concerns. Few artists addressed the human toll of colonialism head-on, but many paintings reveal the influence of international expansion on Dutch art and society. The exhibition addresses these complex histories through up-to-date scholarship, contextualizing 17th- and 18th-century Dutch art in a fresh, compelling way. This exhibition is organized in partnership with the Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Through an expansive library, a residency fellowship program, and an active slate of public and academic programs, the CNA shares Dutch and Flemish art with wide audiences in Boston and beyond; stimulates multidisciplinary research and object-based learning; nurtures future generations of scholars and curators in the field; and expands public appreciation of Netherlandish art — especially works from the 17th century.

“Tyler Mitchell: Idyllic Space”

June 21-Dec. 1, 2024

Atlanta native Tyler Mitchell (born 1995) ascended to global prominence when he photographed Beyoncé for the September 2018 issue of Vogue — the first Black artist to shoot the cover in the magazine’s history. This summer, the High will present a major exhibition featuring his seamless blend of fine art and fashion photography, along with a new photo-sculptural artwork. In his practice, he centers Black self-determination and empowerment with affirmative images of people who are often shown enjoying the freedom of leisure, play and recreation. This homecoming exhibition will feature more than 30 photographs considering his examination of themes such as masculinity, motherhood, domesticity, play, rest and the natural world. The playfully theatrical, expressive works explore style, beauty and identity and delve into the profound themes of family and connection, capturing not just moments but the essence of relationships, as they weave a narrative of love, intimacy and shared experiences. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

“Patterns in Abstraction: Black Quilts from the High’s Collection”

June 28, 2024-Jan. 5, 2025

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 African American women change how we view the history of abstraction?” “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 20th-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 as well as with the artistic intent to represent people, places and things abstractly, these quilts offer a window into how the works of nonacademic artists can transform our understanding of artistic innovation in American art. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys”

Sept. 13, 2024-Jan. 19, 2025

This is the first major exhibition devoted to the collection of African American and African diasporic artists owned by musical and cultural icons Kasseem Dean (aka Swizz Beatz) and Alicia Keys. The collection presents a world-class group of multigenerational artists, including icons of the mid-to-late 20th century such as Nick Cave, Lorna Simpson and Barkley Hendricks, alongside artists of a younger generation including Kehinde Wiley, Deana Lawson and Ebony G. Patterson, who are expanding the legacies of those who came before them. “Giants” stands as a testament to the couple’s ethos of “collecting and preserving the culture of ourselves for ourselves, now and into the future.” Through approximately 115 objects, including noteworthy examples of their early non-art collecting interests and related ephemera, the exhibition traces the evolution of an audacious and ambitious collection and explores 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. This exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum.

“Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis”

Sept. 20, 2024-Jan. 5, 2025

In “Pictures for Charis,” American photographer Kelli Connell reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s iconic photographs. Connell weaves together the stories of Wilson and Weston with her own and enriches our understanding of the couple from her contemporary queer and feminist perspective. Using Weston’s and Wilson’s publications as a guide, Connell and her partner, Betsy Odom, traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work and spent time together. Along the way, they collaboratively made photographs of Odom that upend conventional notions of photographer and muse. Connell also photographed, in a raw and less idealized manner, the grand Western landscapes that Weston made iconic 75 years before. The exhibition will bring together Connell’s recent portrait and landscape photographs with 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. “Pictures for Charis” will offer a new perspective about Wilson and Weston while raising important questions about gender, sexuality and relationships in the 21st century. This exhibition is co-organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’”

Oct. 25, 2024-Feb. 16, 2025

Famed for her images of flowers and Southwestern landscapes, Georgia O’Keeffe spent several years exploring the built environment of New York City with brush in hand. The artist moved to the city’s newly built Shelton Hotel in 1925, then the tallest residential skyscraper in the world, and its soaring heights inspired a five-year period of energetic experimentation, across media and at a variety of scales, with 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 “my New Yorks” and through them investigated the dynamic potential of New York’s cityscape — the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the constructed. This exhibition is 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. This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Thinking Eye, Seeing Mind: The Medford and Loraine Johnston Collection”

Jan. 17-May 25, 2025

In the mid-1970s, artist and Georgia State University professor Medford Johnston and his wife Loraine began collecting artworks by artists who were in the vanguard of contemporary art in the late 1960s and 1970s. Their emphasis on abstraction aligned with Johnston’s own studio practice inspired by American modernists such as Josef Albers, Stuart Davis and Ellsworth Kelly. Although they acquired several paintings and objects, the Johnstons quickly narrowed their focus to drawing. This single-minded pursuit of the finest drawings by the best artists of their time has resulted in one of the finest collections of its kind in the country. This exhibition is the first occasion when the Johnston Collection will be presented in its entirety. It will demonstrate the practice of connoisseurship, discernment and infinite patience required in pursuing excellence, while also maintaining focus, to establish the collection’s parameters. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Currently on View

“Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina”

Through May 12, 2024

The High is the exclusive Southeast venue for this critically acclaimed exhibition featuring nearly 60 ceramic objects created by enslaved African Americans in Edgefield, South Carolina, in the decades before the Civil War. Considered through the lens of current scholarship in the fields of history, literature, anthropology, material culture, diaspora and African American studies, these 19th-century vessels testify to the lived experiences, artistic agency and material knowledge of those who created them. The works include monumental storage jars by the potter and poet Dave (later recorded as David Drake, ca. 1801-1870s) and rare examples of utilitarian wares and face vessels by unrecorded makers, including a ca. 1840 water cooler jug from the High’s collection. “Hear Me Now” also includes work by leading contemporary Black artists who have responded to or whose practice connects with the Edgefield story, including Theaster Gates, Simone Leigh and Woody De Othello. This exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“Truth Told Slant: Contemporary Photography”

Through Aug. 11, 2024

This exhibition features the work of Rose Marie Cromwell, Jill Frank, Tommy Kha, Zora J Murff and Kristine Potter, five emerging photographers who take dynamic and innovative approaches to documentary photography that challenge the established principles of observing the contemporary world. The approximately 70 works in the exhibition, including several from the High’s collection, exemplify a recent shift in how photographers have taken up the challenge of making meaningful images from the world around them in a lyrical way, rather than utilizing the traditional approach of a dispassionate observer. These artists consider issues that documentary photographers have grappled with for decades and that remain pertinent to contemporary American life: race and inequality; identity and sexual orientation; immigration and globalization; youth and coming of age; climate change and environmental justice; and the uncanny pervasiveness of violence. There are overlaps and intersections of more than one of these topics within each body of work as the artists address the pulse of the moment while self-consciously skirting the direct and detached methods of traditional documentary photography. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.