It may be overlooked by international art insiders, but Atlanta’s art scene is thriving. The city is home to stellar institutions presenting exceptional exhibitions and has helped formatively shape the careers of artists like Nikita Gale, Shara Hughes, Lauren Clay, Torkwase Dyson and Gerald Lovell. That is just a short list, but somehow, despite an abundance of world-class talent, mainstream attention has largely eluded the city. Luckily, that is starting to change. Atlanta Art Week has attracted plenty of attention in recent years, and in October of 2024, Atlanta received the ultimate art world stamp of approval: its own art fair. Atlanta Art Fair debuted to large crowds with around thirty booths, satellite programming and discussion panels and was met with equally uplifting press coverage, with Vanity Fair, the Art Newspaper and Artsy (among others) running glowing articles.
Atlanta’s art community is largely young; crowds at openings and events are populated by people in their twenties and thirties, while the most prominent arts institutions in the city are led by administrators who have more experience than some community members have years of life. While this could signal a lack of midlevel experience within the city, instead, it should be seen as a promising point of potential. No one here is set in their ways, everyone has room for growth and many years left in their professional careers, and there are people primed to mentor the next generation.
The overwhelming presence of the entertainment industry also seems fruitful. Atlanta is home to major league sports teams, like the Atlanta Falcons (football) and Atlanta United (soccer), and movie studios, like Tyler Perry Studios and Marvel (which have given the city its unofficial nickname “Y’allywood”), suggesting the city is already in the spotlight in other highly lucrative industries. With some more time, it’s not unreasonable to think Atlanta’s art scene will also become a national magnet.
The Atlanta Art Fair will return this September, but the city’s art scene marches on. Seeing all that Atlanta has to offer is no small feat. Art-loving visitors should ideally set aside three days, as there really is that much worth seeing. Here’s what’s on and opening in March:
“Mo Costello: Forming sounds with my mouth to approximate something that’s like a flood” at Atlanta Center for Photography
A white jewel box gallery is flecked with a handful of small black and white photographs. Unreadable except when very close, many of the photos depict jagged telephone poles, their ragged wooden structure nearly entirely obscured by countless rusting staples. The visual static created from these rough textures, rendered in high-contrast lighting, mimics their regular use as unsanctioned community boards. At one time displaying anything from handyman services to notices about missing cats to local queer parties, the limitless possibilities of posters parallel the limitless possibilities of the populace when given a voice. The effacement of the ephemeral paper placards leaves behind only decaying hardware—a call to the collapsing faith in democratic representation felt by the working class. When faith is corroded, what remains? When democracy fails, what is left? Through April 26, 2025.
“We Say What Black This Is” at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art
It is nearly impossible to divorce the square of its associations with social media but, as it turns out, this connotation is remarkably apt for Williams’s exhibition has everything to do with social media and the ephemeral activism it engenders. In June 2020, millions took to Instagram to participate in “blackout Tuesday,” a protest in which participants posted black squares to their Instagram profiles to decry the racist killing of Black people at the hands of police around the United States. This moment, now mostly scrubbed from people’s profiles, is reincarnated in Williams’s paintings. Square compositions, ranging in scale from several inches across to several feet, are muted, mostly black abstractions, with faint glimmers of color rising from the tenebrous grounds. Many of the paintings on paper feature captions like “inside Steve’s eyelids black, v.2, 09.24.20,” providing a context from which this murky abstraction emerges. However fleeting “blackout Tuesday” may have been, Williams shows it is not a forgotten gesture. Through May 24, 2025.
“Sally Mann, At Twelve” at Jackson Fine Art
Twelve is a year of outsized importance. The last year before the teens, a slew of years that leads into the onset of the decades—one’s teens, twenties, thirties, forties and on. Twelve is the last standalone year before, or if, one ages to one hundred. This is not to say that twelve is the most important year of one’s life, but its numerical significance reflects the seriousness of these girls’ explorations. As the title of the exhibition implies, the twelve photographs depict girls, all aged twelve. In many ways, these photographs feel playful. In Nicole with Cat (At Twelve) (1983-1985), a girl lounges on a day bed, her head lying on the armrest as she smiles at the camera. Wrapped in her arms is a ceramic white cat, and behind the daybed, a painted backdrop of picturesque countryside. An amusing antic in which the girl can see herself in a place and in a life that is not her own. The girls are playing dress up, trying on different selves in an attempt to find one that rings most true. A formative time full of play and naïve boldness. Through March 29, 2025.
“Innervisions” at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum
This exhibition can be summarized in two words: Black magnificence. Curated from a mixture of loaned artworks and permanent collection pieces, this exhibition is a small survey of the Black presence in abstraction. Using the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s as a starting point, the sprawling exhibition showcases the work of dozens of artists who in the ensuing decades who have implemented non-representational abstraction, many of which are now canonical blue-chip artists. Sam Gilliam is represented by Untitled (1971), a suspended tapestry, an array of cloudy color patches freckling a drooping canvas form. David Hammonds is seen, or rather not seen, with On Loan (2000), a picture frame hook holding nothing, a faint rectangle of dust traces the outline of an artwork that is no longer there. The list of remarkable artworks in this exhibition is almost without end. If this exhibition is a cup, it is overflowing with glory. Through May 2, 2025.
“Jimmy O’Neal, Spitting Image” at Johnson Lowe Gallery
The idiom “spitting image” has sparked debates about its origins, with theories ranging from “spit and image,” referencing divine creation, to “splitting image” or “spirit and image.” While these theories point to likeness, they miss the complexities of representation in a hyperreal age, where the lines between image and reality blur into simulacra. Hyperreality, as defined by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, suggests that the boundary between the real and the simulated has dissolved, so what we perceive as “real” is, in fact, a simulation. In this world, A.I., media and technology not only mimic reality but reshape it entirely. The artist’s practice has, since the 1990s, explored A.I. and other cutting-edge technologies as a mirror of the society that created it, a reflection of our collective consciousness and beliefs. This reflection often stretches across the digital, dreamlike and physical realms—creating a space where reality itself is in constant flux. Through March 29, 2025.
“Annet Couwenberg: Sewing Circles” at Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art
Couwenberg’s technical experiments include 3D printing of multi-pronged connectors that are used to assemble life-size umbrella-like structures, laser-cut buckram (cloth stiffened with glue) that produces dramatic origami “infinity” collars and Y-shaped CNC-cut polyethylene that produces infinitely scalable lace forms. Annet Couwenberg: Sewing Circles features a wide range of projects from the past decade, which Couwenberg has completed as part of her studio practice and in partnerships with cultural institutions throughout North America and Europe. These projects highlight the expanding technological parameters related to textiles and fabrics and their specific application in the worlds of scientific research, fashion and interior design and contemporary social issues. The exhibition explores Couwenberg’s depth of research as well as the multiple intersections that are revealed between established disciplines and fields of knowledge. Through May 10, 2025.
“Ryoji Ikeda, data-verse” at the High Museum of Art
His immersive video projections, which will be presented floor-to-ceiling onto the walls of the museum’s largest exhibition space, feature visualizations of data extracted from mathematical theories and the study of quantum physics. His more recent work, including data-verse (2019- 2020, commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary), incorporates open-source imagery from institutions such as NASA, CERN and the Human Genome Project. Ikeda produced “dataverse” in three “chapters,” transforming open-sourced data sets through self-written programs to create visual output, which he then synchronized and composed in arrangement with an electronic score. Together, the music, video projections and the museum’s architecture will become a dynamically balanced, self-contained whole. Ikeda’s work immerses the audience in a seemingly endless flow of data and explores the macroscopic depths of the universe and our relationship to it. Through August 10, 2025.
SEE ALSO: TEFAF Maastricht’s Manon van den Beuken Reveals Details About the Fair’s Upcoming Edition
“Timothy Hull, Anonymous Fragments” at the Michael C. Carlos Museum
Academia meets whimsy in Timothy Hull’s exhibition. Hanging in a gallery immediately off the Greek and Roman permanent collection gallery, Hull’s exhibition mimics the archaeological and anthropological display methods. Fieldwork photographs are set in multi-photo frames, painted ceramic fragments under glass are flagged with potential attributions, and diagrammatic paintings are hung around the walls, But these are no 2000-year-old artifacts of a long-dead civilization, these are new artworks created by Hull. While mimicking some of the visual motifs of Greek and Roman artifacts, Hull’s artworks are farcical parodies of them. Sporting vibrant coloration and mottos like “be gay do crime,” the new artifacts offer a speculative view of these ancient cultures. If part of anthropology is conjecture, why not hypothesize that the individuals who created the pottery were gay, like the artist himself? Through June 29, 2025.
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