Collectors Evening,
Price: Platinum Level $12,000
Event DescriptionMark your calendar for Collectors Evening, The High Museum's highly anticipated night of elegance, art, and entertainment. Your support of this event gives you the opportunity to make a difference by casting your vote for your favorite work of art selected by the curators to add to the High's collection. Attend and help shape the future of the Museum! For more information, please email or call Steven Hargrove at 404-733-4425.Purchase TicketsContemporaries LevelOne seat and one vote at Collectors Evening 2022$800 tax-deductible$1000Silver LevelRecognition as Silver Level donor in the Collectors Evening programTwo seats and two votes at Collectors Evening 2022$2,150 tax-deductible$2500Gold LevelInvitation to attend early cocktail reception and private viewing of proposed artworksRecognition as Gold Level donor in the Collectors Evening program and HMA magazineFour seats and four votes at Collectors Evening 2022$4,300 tax-deductible$5000Platinum LevelInvitation to attend early cocktail reception and private viewing of proposed artworksRecognition as Platinum Level donor in the Collectors Evening program and HMA magazinePreferred seating for ten at Collectors Evening 2022; one vote per person$10,000 tax deductible$12000All benefactors will be recognized as part of the group "Collectors Evening 2022" for having made the purchase of an artwork possible.ArtworksAfrican ArtJoana ChoumaliIvorian, born 1974THE DREAM THAT STAYED WITH YOU WHEN YOU WOKE UP, 2022Mixed media38 7/8 x 78 inchesProposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2022Ivorian conceptual photographer and mixed media artist Joana Choumali applies intricate embroidery and textile processes to photographs, bringing fantasy and the imaginary to quiet documentary images of everyday people and landscapes. THE DREAM THAT STAYED WITH YOU WHEN YOU WOKE UP is from the artist's most recent series, Alba'hian, an Agni word describing morning's first light. For the series, Choumali takes photographs during walks between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. in cities such as Abidjan and Dakar, describing this as a "magical time in which there is a sense of dialogue between reality and dream, between present and past memory." She embellishes the vibrant colors of West Africa's dawn by adding to photo prints reflective gold paint and layers of sheer fabrics in corresponding hues of purples, pinks, blues, and oranges. THE DREAM THAT STAYED WITH YOU WHEN YOU WOKE UP differs from many of the well-known and award-winning photos of the artist's previous Ca Va Aller series in that the work is nearly four times larger and incorporates photomontage. It therefore represents the latest experiments of one of Africa's most celebrated contemporary photographers.Ivorian material culture is among the most strongly represented in the African Art collection, which importantly features Ivorian textiles and weaving objects. Choumali's works are in dialogue with these items and centuries-old textile traditions in the region while visually documenting the present day.American ArtSamuel Johnson WoolfAmerican, 1880-1948Brown the Wheats, 1913Oil on canvas50 x 40 1/8 inchesProposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2022With Brown the Wheats, Samuel Woolf situates himself as an artist of social conscience. In the wake of the Gilded Age, economic disparities had become increasingly visible, nowhere more prominently than in New York, where Woolf had grown up in a family of modest means. The appeal of this work, which won an award when exhibited in 1913, may have been not only its sympathetic message but also its real-life setting that would have been familiar to many. The boy stands on the street outside Childs' Restaurant, a well-known chain designed as an economical, quick and clean environment with wholesome food at reasonable prices. To emphasize the cleanliness of the establishments (then a rarity for many public dining halls), the restaurants were furnished with white tiled walls and floors and servers and chefs dressed in starched white uniforms. The interior design always featured a griddle near the window to entice customers with a view of the chefs preparing flapjacks and other delectables. Woolf depicts an inviting scene, a restaurant packed with customers and busy servers while a chef prepares buckwheat pancakes in the foreground. Lights gleam across the shiny white tiles, and a display of fruits--oranges and grapefruits topped with a then-exotic pineapple--suggests the wholesome and quality food on offer. By contrast, the hungry boy peering from the outside is emblematic of an age of haves and have nots.Decorative Art and DesignImmeasurability, 2020Emanuel Admassu (American, born Ethiopia, 1983)and Jen Wood (Australian, born 1984), designersAD-WO, United States, founded 2015Immeasurability: The Ridge, 2020Silk, wool, and other threadsFlanders Tapestries (Belgium, founded 1998), fabricator84 x 84 inches, Edition 2 of 3Immeasurability: ATL Bricks, 2020Black sand, nylon, glass, fiberglass, metal, and audio (24 minutes)Bednark (Brooklyn, NY, founded 2007), fabricator72 x 33 1/2 inchesImmeasurability: Wiregrass WaHo and Conifers WaHo, 2020Vinyl15 x 11 feet, Edition 1Proposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2022The art and architecture practice of AD-WO, founded by Ethiopian-born, Atlanta-raised Emanuel Admassu and Australian-born Jen Wood, comprised the installation Immeasurability (2020) for Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, MoMA's first exhibition featuring Black architects. Immeasurability broadly considers Blackness in the ordinary spaces of Atlanta and the ocean floor of the Atlantic.The project is composed of ATL Bricks, an inverted cone with ambient sounds of Atlanta (the forest, highway, and trap music) playing within the grisaille cityscape that is covered in magnetic sand found along the mid-Atlantic Ridge; the latter is depicted in the tapestry The Ridge as a planetary scar on the ocean floor that divides the continental plate of Africa and the Americas. This project serves as a metaphor for the violence implicit in the extractive history binding the two continents, as well as a space of creative futurism, which can be extended to the two photographic collages that position the highly coded Waffle House signs into idyllic Georgia landscapes.Immeasurability is an important project that explores the iterative spatial practices of Black people on multiple scales--in the city of Atlanta and tied to the movement of Black people across the Atlantic--interrogating alternative architectural spaces that cannot be conventionally measured. The work offers a way to reinterpret history and to radically imagine new futures.European ArtArthur StrasserAustrian, 1854-1927Portrait of a Man, 1880Bronze with colored patination, enamel insets, and redmarble base29 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 10 inchesProposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2022This expressive portrait bust was made in 1880 by Austrian sculptor Arthur Strasser. Strasser was working in Paris at the time, and it is unknown where and how he became acquainted with his subject. Likely, the model was one of several Africans who had traveled or been taken from their homelands to Paris and there found work as artists' models. Art historians have made considerable strides in recent years toward uncovering the identities of Black models in Europe while documenting their important place in the story of modern art. Hopefully, this research will also yield information about Strasser's striking model.With this bust, Strasser depicted a figure who is both an exotic type and an individualized person. He pictured not only the salient foreign elements--hairstyle, facial scars, neck and ear hoops--but also captured quiet pride and a reserved personality in his model's strong features and oblique glance.Strasser's bronze would join two other sculptures of African figures in the European collection: Charles Cordier's Young Abyssinian Girl and Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse's An Algerian Woman. Each emotionally and stylistically distinct, they manifest shifting attitudes toward Black subjects in nineteenth-century European art.Folk and Self-Taught ArtLonnie HolleyAmerican, born 1950Shadows of the People, 2021Acrylic and spray paint on quilted fabric on wood panel78 x 64 1/2 inchesProposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2022Lonnie Holley is an internationally acclaimed visual and performing artist originally from Birmingham, Alabama, who has called Atlanta home for the past thirty years. A 2022 recipient of the highly coveted United States Artist Fellowship, Holley distinguishes himself as theonly artist with major works in the collections of the Met and the Tate who has also opened for indie rock legends like Animal Collective and finds time to engage in countless public art commissions and community based workshops.Shadows of the People is from a new body of work that Holley began while he was in a residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in the Hamptons in 2020 and that earned him a major New York Times profile last May. The title of this work refers to Holley's ongoing dedication to uplifting the legacies of marginalized people, embodying them through the liminal form of the silhouette, a motif that is ubiquitous across his two- and three-dimensional works. Holley has long used textiles in his assemblages and installations, drawing upon their power as a symbol of women's labor, but this is the first time he has used them on a large scale as surfaces for his paintings. He said of the layered "shadows" found throughout his quilt paintings, "Every face in these paintings. They're all the people--especially women--that have supported me." This body of work will be the subject of his debut exhibition at the leading contemporary art gallery Blum & Poe later this summer.Modern and Contemporary ArtPaul MorrisonBritish, born 1966Rhizotron, 2022Powder-coated aluminum and mild steel86 1/4 x 37 x 29 1/2 inchesEdition of five with two APsProposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2022Paul Morrison is best known for his paintings, prints, and sculptures featuring botanical forms and landscapes based on a variety of sources including historical illustrations, Northern Renaissance woodcuts, and Baroque paintings, as well as cartoons from the golden age of American animation. Morrison meticulously reproduces, deconstructs, and modifies his sources, resulting in work that reduces human scale to the Lilliputian and color to flat monochrome, and has an industrially fabricated appearance. These characteristics not only place his images at odds with their natural counterparts but give them a strange, altogether unnatural, even malevolent edge. Described as a "pop-naturalist," Morrison is interested "in the cognitive landscape, the terrain that one sees, somewhere behind the eyes"--images collected in the imagination and reformed in the mind's eye. The dandelion is a recurring motif for Morrison, which he initially sourced from the "Waltz of the Flowers" sequence in the classic Disney film Fantasia. Because of its resilience, the dandelion represents endurance and perseverance. The title of Morrison's new dandelion sculpture Rhizotron is a portmanteau derived from the Greek rhizo for "root" and the French throne for "throne," signifying a majestic type of organism with deep roots or ancestry. The austere majesty of Rhizotron, with its human-sized florets and monumental stems and leaves, belies its humble perseverance as a common dandelion considered an invasive plant that nonetheless persists, returning perennially to its natural habitats.PhotographyDeana LawsonAmerican, born 1979Chief, 2019Pigmented inkjet print with mirror frame61 x 77 inchesProposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2022A singular voice in contemporary art, Deana Lawson has investigated and challenged conventional representations of Black identities for more than fifteen years. Drawing on a wide spectrum of visual languages, including the family album, tableaux, and popular media, Lawson's photographs channel broader ideas about personal and social histories, sexuality, and spiritual beliefs. Her work is global in scope, including spellbinding images created in Atlanta, Brooklyn, Ghana, and Haiti.Chief shows a man seated on a worn couch decked in gold jewelry. He gazes directly into the camera, and even amidst modest surroundings, he carries himself with nobility. The man's regalia is associated with the Asante people of Ghana, who are known for their gold work. Here, Lawson draws connections across the diaspora between West African traditions of adornment and American hip-hop fashion. These markers of status and power underscore a tradition of African royalty. The billowing curtains allude to a sense of spirituality, suggesting an unseen divine presence that is reinforced through the Christian iconography on the wall.Lawson's highly staged photographs are portals to another realm that offer narratives of family, love, and desire amidst ordinary settings. Often engaging strangers, she arranges her photographs in collaboration with her subjects to create intimate and disarming images that destabilize the notion of photography as a passively voyeuristic medium.Lawson teaches photography at Princeton and has had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim, and the Underground Museum. She is the recipient of the Hugo Boss Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship and will be the subject of a midcareer survey at the High this fall.Thank you to our Presenting Sponsor:Additional support for this event is provided by:TAGSParties
