Atlanta Artist to be Featured at High

Radcliffe Bailey, Windward Coast (detail), 2009. Piano keys, plaster bust, glitter. Collection of the artist.

The High Museum of Art announced recently that it will be organizing the most comprehensive display of work by Atlanta-based artist Radcliffe Bailey. “Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine” will comprise 25 works, demonstrating the artist’s diverse use of media by showcasing sculptures, paintings, installations, works-on-paper, glass works and modified found objects. The exhibition is scheduled to premiere a year from now, on June 28, 2011, and feature works created specifically for the exhibition, as well as previous pieces never before seen on public display.

Bailey, born in New Jersey, was raised in Atlanta and graduated from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991. He first gained acclaim in 1996 for his large-scale mural, “Saints,” which was commissioned during the 1996 Summer Olympics and remains on view in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. He later taught at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art for five years, from 2001 to 2006.

Bailey’s exhibition at the High will be divided up into the three main themes of “Water,” “Blues” and “Blood.” “Water” contains pieces referring to the Black Atlantic as a site of both historical trauma and artistic and spiritual growth; “Blues” refers to the importance of music in this spiritual journey; “Blood” focuses on ancestry, race, and sacrifice.

All pieces have significant ties to family, history and the South. One portion of the exhibition features seven sets of “medicine cabinet sculptures” composed of raw materials such as tobacco leaves and Georgia red clay.

“Radcliffe Bailey’s art is consistently informed by a strong social and historical consciousness, and solidly grounded in family and community. The exhibition combines a rich, narrative content with a high-level of abstraction and poetic resonance to explore questions of history and memory,” said Carol Thompson, the High’s Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art and curator of the exhibition. “Bailey’s art traces the complex network of his ‘aesthetic DNA’ to create an antidote to cultural and historical amnesia,” she continued.

The High will also juxtapose classic African sculptures from the museum’s permanent collection with the exhibition to emphasize the influence of African art on Bailey’s work. The exhibition is set to premiere on June 28, 2011, and run until September 11, 2011.

For more information on this exhibition, please click here.