Observers in the seventeenth century described the Netherlands as the world’s marketplace. Dutch merchants possessed a capitalist mindset and benefited from innovations in naval and military technology. The Dutch East India Company, the world’s first multinational corporation, was founded in 1602 to dominate trade in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, forever changing the global economy. New commodities flowed to the Dutch Republic and made a small nation immensely rich. This in turn fueled an artistic boom. The most famous Dutch artists in the seventeenth century—Hals, Rembrandt, Ruisdael, Ruysch—are still admired today.

This exhibition explores how international travel and trade transformed Dutch art and society. Still life paintings feature imported products; seascapes, landscapes, and maps reveal where these products came from. A section including cityscapes and maps addresses Amsterdam’s rise as Europe’s commercial hub. The focus then turns to Dutch portraits, both painted and printed. Local landscapes show how exposure to the world’s wonders paradoxically reinforced pride in Dutch topography. The exhibition concludes with beautiful objects in silver and ceramic and depictions of daily life, demonstrating the coexistence of the familiar and the foreign. Throughout, this exhibition emphasizes artistic achievement while encouraging visitors to consider the human costs of global

• Sugar was traditionally sold, stored, and served at the table in cone-shaped mounds. Diners would scrape off small portions and add them to food or beverages. In some affluent households, sugar was grated into small grains like those in use today. Silversmiths responded to the demand for specialty sugar containers by creating decorative objects for the table. The tulip flower top of this silver basket would have held granulated sugar, which diners sprinkled over their food with the small spoons shaped like flowers.

Members and Museum Pass: Free
Not-Yet-Members: $18.50

Truth Told Slant examines a recent shift in how photographers have taken on the challenge of making meaningful images of the world around them. Rather than using the traditional documentary approach of dispassionate observation, they work in a stylistically expressive manner akin to literary nonfiction, weaving between observational and narrative modes while embracing their own subjectivity.

The title of this exhibition, which is inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem, accentuates the sidelong and deeply personal approach these artists use to make sense of the current social and political landscape. The five artists gathered here—Jill Frank, Rose Marie Cromwell, Zora J Murff, Kristine Potter, and Tommy Kha—consider issues that documentary photographers have grappled with for decades and that remain pertinent today. They explore topics of American life, such as race and inequality; identity and sexual orientation; immigration and globalization; youth and coming of age; climate change and environmental justice; and the pervasiveness of violence, to reveal deeper truths and reframe prevailing narratives in a manner that is more felt than didactic.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind

— By Emily Dickinson

Members and Museum Pass: Free
Not-Yet-Members: $18.50

This exhibition tells the story of the enslaved potters of Old Edgefield District, a rural area on the western edge of South Carolina famous for its natural clays. While many associate labor of the enslaved with staple crops like cotton and tobacco, historians describe Old Edgefield as the site of “industrial slavery.” For roughly fifty years before emancipation and the end of the Civil War, the Black potters of Old Edgefield crafted stoneware storage vessels later sold to neighboring plantations. Despite their beauty and expert craftsmanship, these vessels were made under duress.

Edgefield stoneware was a staple of life across South Carolina and parts of Georgia and known for its affordable prices, durability, and glassy, impervious glaze. By the 1840s, multiple potteries served the growing population, producing tens of thousands of vessels per year. Enslaved African Americans led all aspects of this labor-intensive industry. Their knowledge, creativity, and skill stand at the heart of this exhibition, which seeks to honor their work and legacy.

Hear Me Now also links the past to the present with work by leading contemporary Black artists who have responded to or whose practice connects with the Edgefield story, including Theaster Gates, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Simone Leigh, and Woody De Othello. Hear Me Now is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation.
I’m excited by the work of Black artists who did the work no matter what and claimed space Maker(s) once known
Known as face vessels, the jugs, cups, and pitchers in this exhibition, like the vessel pictured here, were powerful spiritual objects made by the Edgefield potters for their own use. The functions and meanings of face vessels in the African American community were likely multiple and varied: used as whimsies, receptacles for water or alcoholic spirits, deeper spiritual or religious purposes, or even for burial and funerary rituals. Their emergence coincides roughly with the 1858 arrival of the Wanderer, a slave ship illegally transporting more than four hundred captive Africans, some fifty years after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed in the United States..

—Simone Leigh

Premier Exhibition Series Sponsor 
Delta

Premier Exhibition Series Supporters
ACT Foundation, Inc.
William N. Banks, Jr.
Mr. Joseph H. Boland, Jr.
Cousins Foundation
Burton M. Gold
Sarah and Jim Kennedy
Hn 500 2
Wishfoundation

Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporters 
Helen C. Griffith
Robin and Hilton Howell 

Ambassador Exhibition Series Supporters
Mrs. Fay S. Howell/The Howell Fund
Karen and Jeb Hughes/Corporate Environments
Loomis Charitable Foundation
The Fred and Rita Richman Fund
Louise Sams and Jerome Grilhot
Mrs. Harriet H. Warren
Elizabeth and Chris Willett

Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters 
Farideh and Al Azadi
Sandra and Dan Baldwin
Ceramic Circle of Atlanta
Mr. and Mrs. Robin E. Delmer
Peggy Foreman
Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones
Joel Knox and Joan Marmo 
Margot and Danny McCaul 
Wade A. Rakes II and Nicholas Miller

Generous support is also provided by
  Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund , Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund , Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor,

Exhibition Fund, RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund, USI Insurance Services.

More Information about featured piece:

• Maker(s) once known
  Known as face vessels, the jugs, cups, and pitchers in this exhibition, like the vessel pictured here, were powerful spiritual objects made by the Edgefield potters for their own use. The functions and meanings of face vessels in the African American community were likely multiple and varied: used as whimsies, receptacles for water or alcoholic spirits, deeper spiritual or religious purposes, or even for burial and funerary rituals. Their emergence coincides roughly with the 1858 arrival of the Wanderer, a slave ship illegally transporting more than four hundred captive Africans, some fifty years after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed in the United States.