Emerging from Micah Cash’s photography series and photo book of the same name, this exhibition focuses on the built and natural environments as seen through the windows of Waffle House restaurants. Captured from locations across the southeastern United States, these images contemplate the physical and social environments and commerce that surround each location of the southern cultural icon.

The natural landscapes beyond the windowpanes are as diverse as the perspectives and stories of each guest at the tables. Yet the similarities of the restaurants’ interiors echo across states and time zones. The images look out from the restaurant’s iconic booths, past the signature midcentury pendant lamps and make viewers newly conscious of buildings so commonplace they often go unseen. Each guest, waiting for their hashbrowns, becomes witness to the intertwined narratives of economic stability, transience and politics. The familiar, well-worn interiors make us think about what we have in common. Yet the differences in environment call to mind the different ways we experience structures built and felt.

This exhibition will premiere a newly commissioned time-based media component of the series. This video realizes Cash’s directive to “look up” through prolonged footage of views and sounds from three Waffle Houses. The video and its soundscape disrupt the nostalgia of the still photographs, which the audience animates with actual or imagined memories of a Waffle House meal. Instead, they emphasize a long, time-based vision of the surrounding landscape and architecture.

Curator
Kathryn Hill, associate curator of contemporary art

This exhibition focuses on George Cooke’s “Tallulah Falls,” a pivotal example of early southern U.S. painting, by considering the notion of natural wonder and the dynamics of witnessing the natural world.

Nineteenth-century tourist destinations in North America, such as the cascades at Tallulah Falls in northeast Georgia and Niagara Falls in northwest New York, stood as emblems of the nation’s unblemished and powerful wilderness. American writers and painters like Cooke, Thomas Addison Richards and Henry R. Jackson believed that their visions of American nature were a patriotic project. They sought to associate the U.S. landscape with a sublime present and future in contrast to the picturesque past of the European Old World. In doing so, these early American painters sought to lay claim to the landscape for the white settlers and forcibly erase the histories of the Indigenous nations who stewarded the lands and waters.

The exhibition places Cooke’s and Richards’ landscapes alongside contemporary photographs of Tallulah Gorge by Caitlin Peterson, the exhibition illuminates the contradictions involved in marking off natural wonders and the paradoxes of witnessing nature. Through these visual conversations, 19th-century southern art is seen in new contexts, including in relation to Indigenous and environmental histories of the region.

“In Dialogue” is a series of installations in which the Georgia Museum of Art’s curators create focused, innovative conversations around works of art from the permanent collection. The series brings these familiar works to life by placing them in dialogue with objects by influential peers, related sketches and studies or objects from other periods.

Curator
Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, George Putnam Curator of American Art, Peabody Essex Museum

Humanity’s impact on the natural landscape is undeniable even when human figures are not immediately visible. This selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection serves as a visual response to the exhibition “Joel Sternfeld: When It Changed.” Artists including Arthur Tress, Robert von Sternberg and Diane Farris illustrate how human enterprise has reshaped the natural landscape. Some works trace the entanglement of human life and environmental change. Others catalogue the environment’s natural processes of self-preservation and renewal. Sternfeld’s photographs focus on the people and diplomatic powers that have shaped the global response to climate change. The artists and works in this companion installation recenter the impacted landscapes and surreal scenes of our changing environments.

Curator
Kathryn Hill, associate curator of contemporary art, with assistance by Mary Alice Smith (UGA ’24)

In late 2005, Montreal hosted the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Government ministers, scientists, leaders of nongovernmental organizations and journalists gathered for this annual meeting of countries participating in the Kyoto Protocol, a policy aimed at reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.

American photographer Joel Sternfeld gained access to the conference using newspaper credentials. He hoped to answer a question for himself: “I wanted to know if climate change was real.” What he found was worse than what he expected. “In the opinion of nearly all the participants, not only was climate change occurring, it was also about to reach a tipping point and become irreversible.” Using a telephoto lens, Sternfeld trained his camera on a range of participants to create an “archive of humanity” amid what was then a largely invisible ecological crisis. “I tried to take photographs of delegates at the moment when the horror of what they were hearing was visible on their faces. At stake, after all, is the continuation of Earth as a planet fit for us to live on.”

Sternfeld published “When It Changed,” a book of these images, in 2007. It outlines alarming scientific discoveries, the actions and inactions of governments and corporations and increasingly extreme weather events. This exhibition presents the photographs from that book. At this watershed moment in global environmental history, and in the face of an ever-unfurling stream of evidence, Sternfeld is emphatic: we cannot say that we did not know that our world had changed.

This exhibition serves as both a reminder and an invitation to explore spaces between tradition and innovation in art. Just as passengers are urged to mind the gap between the train door and the platform edge, we encourage visitors to this exhibition to navigate the spaces between historical and contemporary narratives, various media and different interpretations of art.

Each work in this exhibition represents a snapshot of human experience preserved for future generations. Each connects us to the past while pointing toward the future. As we journey through each gallery, we are reminded that museums are not just places in which to store the past but living reflections of an evolving cultural landscape.

Acquisitions from the past five years have often filled major gaps in the collection in ideas, materials and techniques. They have also added depth and diversity to the museum's holdings. These works chart the evolution of materials and techniques in sculpture in the 20th and 21st century. They show changes in landscape painting and portraiture over the past two centuries. Each work invites us to contemplate time passing and the changing currents of art and social history. Passengers must be careful when navigating a gap, and we must approach these artworks with care and consideration. We must be mindful of the spaces between us and the stories they tell. The exhibition invites you to bridge the past and the present, embracing the elements of human creativity that unite us across time and space.

Curator
Nelda Damiano, Pierre Daura Curator of European Art; Shawnya L. Harris, deputy director of curatorial and academic affairs and Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art; Kathryn Hill, associate curator of modern and contemporary art; Callan Steinmann, head of education and curator of academic and public programs

This exhibition is organized in conjunction with the American Liszt Society Festival at the University of Georgia’s Hugh Hodgson School of Music October 13 - 16, 2024. The event celebrates the legacy of the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886). This year’s edition of the festival focuses on the idea of the “composer-pianist” and highlights Liszt’s visits to Russia in the 1840s.

Our exhibition features works on paper from the Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection showing Russia at the time of the great musician’s visit. Large lithographic prints feature cityscapes of St. Petersburg, while small hand-colored ones picture genre scenes and different occupations: coachmen, porters, water carriers, innkeepers, street peddlers. All these prints were issued by the same publisher, Giuseppe Daziaro (1796 – 1865). Daziaro held shops in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Paris and Warsaw. He also collaborated with the French printer Lemercier à Paris. Within their sweeping vistas, the large cityscapes contain figures and scenes that find close parallels in the small prints.