Radcliffe Bailey Exhibit Premiering at High Museum

MOST COMPREHENSIVE EXHIBITION OF WORK BY ATLANTA ARTIST RADCLIFFE BAILEY TO PREMIERE AT THE HIGH MUSEUM

Exhibition Will Include New and Never Before Seen Works

“Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine”
June 28–September 11, 2011

The High Museum of Art will organize and premiere the most comprehensive presentation of works by Atlanta-based artist Radcliffe Bailey beginning June 28, 2011. The exhibition “Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine” will highlight the artist’s experimentation with diverse media, showcasing sculptures, paintings, installations, works-on-paper, glass works and modified found objects. Comprising more than 25 works, “Memory as Medicine” will include new art created for the exhibition as well as works never before seen on public display. The exhibition will also juxtapose Bailey’s work with a display of classic African sculptures from the High’s permanent collection
and selected loans of African art to show the influence of African aesthetic practices on the artist’s work.

“Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine,” organized by the High, will be on view in Atlanta from June 28 through September 11, 2011. The exhibition is scheduled to travel to the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C. (presented in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture); the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; the Museum for African Art, New York; and additional venues yet to be announced.

“In this exhibition, visitors will discover Radcliffe’s ability to a combine sculpture and painting, two- and three-dimensional forms and grand and intimate scales, creating works of art that are rich in texture, detail, color and, most importantly, meaning,” stated Michael E. Shapiro, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. Director. “The High is pleased to debut this exhibition in Atlanta, underscoring the Museum’s continued commitment to celebrating the talents and legacies of our local artists.”

The exhibition will present Bailey’s work divided into three main themes: “Water,” “Blues” and “Blood.” Works included in the “Water” group will feature the artist’s references to the Black Atlantic as a site of historical trauma as well as an artistic and spiritual journey. “Blues” will highlight works that illustrate the importance of music as a transcendent artform, including Bailey’s 1999 painting “Transbluesency,” which references a book of poems by Amiri Baraka and echoes the “Blues” theme. The third theme, “Blood,” will feature works focusing on the ideas of ancestry, race, memory, struggle and sacrifice. This section will further explore the artist’s engagement with African sculptures in tandem with his investigation of his own family’s DNA.

In 2006 Bailey learned his family’s ancestral links to the Mende people of Sierra Leone. This inspired the smallest, most intimate work he ever created―a miniature drawing done in ink and coffee on a piece of sheet music that features a Mende mask framed within a tiny red-velvet lined, 19th-century tintype case, as though a family portrait. This work will be on view in the exhibition alongside more recent works, including a new sculpture that has the smooth, curvilinear forms of Mende masks. It is made of wood and was repeatedly rubbed with finishing wax in a daily studio ritual. Minus the functional purpose of Mende masks, this work becomes a Brancusi-esque objet d’art, an inscrutable prop for a Neo-Dada-style, contemporary art world performance. Another 2010 work, “Clean-up,” is a painted wooden sculpture in the form of a 10-foot-high baseball bat. Bailey comments, “The reason why I made the bat so big was to beat down all the things that I confront. Baseball being one of my first passions, before art, the bat was like my paintbrush. In baseball, the fourth batter that comes up is the clean-up hitter.”

At the core of the exhibition will be seven sets of “medicine cabinet sculptures.” Their contents include a broad range of culturally charged objects, imagery and raw materials, from indigo powder to tobacco leaves to Georgia red earth. Just as Kongo minkisi sculptures from central Africa contain healing and protective medicine within mirrored packets, the socially cathartic contents of Bailey’s medicine cabinet sculptures are deeply recessed under reflective, tinted glass. These sculptures were conceived to link the too often disconnected histories of peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora and to emphasize collective experiences.

“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.”

A number of works in the exhibition will highlight the artist’s penchant to animate his work with large-scale photographic reproductions of black-and-white prints given to him by his grandmother as well as historic photos he collects, in order to place African Americans at the center of both American and world history. “I am interested in an Africanism that permeates our contemporary world but goes unnamed and is not talked about or fully addressed culturally,” stated Bailey. “I am interested in the impulse of that mysterious African force that propels black people wherever they are in the world.” Bailey strives to convey an African sensibility and spirituality that he says “exists in the tangible and the intangible.”

Opening and closing the exhibition will be several works that reference Èsù, the guardian of the crossroads and mediator of opposites who is honored throughout Yoruba regions of Africa and the African Diaspora. These early 21st-century works by Bailey resonate with the late 19th- or early 20th-century dance staff for Èsù from the Fred and Rita Richman Collection, also included in the exhibition. Caged African Finches will add a sound element to the exhibition.

Radcliffe Bailey
Radcliffe Bailey was born in 1968, in Bridgeton, New Jersey. He grew up in Atlanta, earning a bachelor’s degree in fine art from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991. From 2001 to 2006 Bailey taught at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. He received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2004) and was a visiting faculty member at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2006). In 2008, he created large-scale glass works as a participant in the Toledo Museum of Art’s Guest Artist Pavilion Project (GAPP). His work is represented in leading museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. In 1994 Bailey’s work was included in “The Hale Woodruff Memorial Exhibition” at The Studio Museum of Harlem. In 1996 Bailey gained acclaim for his large-scale mural “Saints,” a commission for Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. “Saints” remains on view, welcoming travelers entering the airport at International Terminal E.

“Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine” will be on view at the High Museum of Art from June 28 to September 11, 2011, and is curated by Carol Thompson, the High’s Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art, in consultation with Michael Rooks, the High’s Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of “American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.” Additional support is provided by the Lubo Fund and the Radcliffe Bailey Guild. A full-color catalogue will accompany “Memory as Medicine,” and will feature essays by Carol Thompson, Michael Rooks and additional authors.

High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art, founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, is the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. With more than 12,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the High Museum of Art has an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American and decorative art; significant holdings of European paintings; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography and African art. The High is also dedicated to supporting and collecting works by Southern artists and is distinguished as the only major museum in North America to have a curatorial department specifically devoted to the field of folk and self-taught art. The High’s media arts department produces acclaimed annual film series and festivals of foreign, independent and classic cinema. In November 2005 the High opened three new buildings by architect Renzo Piano that more than doubled the Museum’s size, creating a vibrant “village for the arts” at the Woodruff Arts Center in midtown Atlanta.

The Woodruff Arts Center
The Woodruff Arts Center is ranked among the top four arts centers in the nation. The Woodruff is unique in that it combines four visual and performing arts divisions on one campus as one not-for-profit organization. Opening in 1968, the Woodruff Arts Center is home to the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the High Museum of Art and Young Audiences.

Memorial Day Weekend Atlanta 2010

2010 Memorial Day Weekend Events in Atlanta, Ga. Although about 1,000,000 people will be leaving Atlanta this Memorial Day Weekend there is still plenty of things to do. Top picks for the weekend include the Atlanta Jazz Festival, a beer festival at the zoo and the Memorial Day Celebration Salute to the Troops at Stone Mountain Park.

Things To Do in Atlanta Friday May 28, 2010

Arts: Allure of the Automobile, A “Rolling Sculpture” features some of the Rarest Cars in the World, 10 a.m., High Museum of Art, Atlanta – Midtown.

Comedy: Rob Schneider, Saturday Night Live Legend, 2 Shows 8:p.m. and 10 p.m., The Punchline, Sandy Springs.

Music Event: Georgia Aquarium Jazz Journeys, Friday Night Jazz at the World’s Largest Aquarium, 7:00 p.m., Georgia Aquarium, Atlanta – Downtown.

Outdoor Activities: RUN FOR THE HEROES, the most grueling run of all – 260 MILE RUN ACROSS GEORGIA and RELAY from May 27 to May 31, raises funds for the House of Heroes, a charitable organization that provides assistant to our Veterans and their spouses by making repairs, improvements and maintenance to their homes at no charge to them, individual runs start Thursday – relays start Saturday, more information here.

Sports Event: Atlanta Braves vs. Pittsburgh Pirates, Major League Baseball – the Braves are always one of the best shows in town, 1:05 p.m., Turner Field, Downtown Atlanta.

Things To Do Today Saturday May 29, 2010

Arts and Culture: “The Portrait Unbound”, Fascinating digital photography by Robert Weingarten, 10:00 a.m., High Museum of Art, Midtown Atlanta.

Celebration: Memorial Day Weekend Salute to Troops, Atlanta’s Largest Memorial Day Weekend celebration – salutes American troops and their families, Memorial Day Weekend, Stone Mountain Park, Stone Mountain.

Concert: Neil Young, Twisted Road Tour, 8:00 p.m., Fabulous Fox Theatre, Atlanta – Downtown, Midtown.

Concert: The Psychedelic Furs, Infamous Punk Rock Band, 8:00 p.m., Masquerade, Downtown Atlanta.

Exhibit: Diana: A Celebration, discover of one of the most fascination women of the 20th Century, 10:00 a.m., Atlanta Civic Center, Atlanta.

Beer Festival: Brew at the Zoo, city’s most unique festival experience, 5:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m., Zoo Atlanta, Atlanta.

Festival: Georgia Renaissance Festival, Memorial Day Weekend Special – Buy One Ticket Get One FREE!,  Saturday-Sunday-Monday, 10:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., Fairburn, Georgia.

Festival: Atlanta Jazz Festival, 2 Days Saturday and Sunday – this Atlanta music event is possibly the Largest Free Jazz Festival in the country, Memorial Day Weekend, Grant Park, Atlanta. FREE Event!

Improv: Rob Schneider, Saturday Night Live Legend, 3 Shows 7:p.m. – 9:00 p.m. and 11 p.m., The Punchline, Sandy Springs.

Sports Event: Atlanta Braves vs. Pittsburgh Pirates, Major League Baseball – the Braves are always one of the best shows in town, 7:10 p.m., Turner Field, Downtown Atlanta.

Things To Do Today Memorial Day Weekend – Sunday May 30, 2010

Comedy: Rob Schneider, Saturday Night Live Legend, 8:p.m., The Punchline, Sandy Springs.

Exhibit: Diana: A Celebration, discover of one of the most fascination women of the 20th Century, 10:00 a.m., Atlanta Civic Center, Atlanta.

Festival: Memorial Day Weekend Salute to Troops, Atlanta’s Largest Memorial Day Weekend celebration continues- salutes American troops and their families, Memorial Day, Stone Mountain Park, Stone Mountain.

Festival: Atlanta Jazz Festival – continues, this 2 day event is possibly the Largest Free Jazz Festival in the country, Memorial Day Weekend, Grant Park, Atlanta.

Sports Event: Atlanta Braves vs. Pittsburgh Pirates , Major League Baseball – the Braves are always one of the best shows in town, 1:05 p.m., Turner Field, Downtown Atlanta.

Things To Do Memorial Day – Monday May 31, 2010

Festival: Memorial Day Weekend Salute to Troops, Atlanta’s Largest Memorial Day Weekend celebration continues- salutes American troops and their families, Memorial Day, Stone Mountain Park, Stone Mountain.

Outdoor Activities: Celebrate America 5k/10k, hosted by the Alpharetta Junior Woman’s Club for the past 13 years to benefit local charities supported by the club – a Peachtree Road Race Qualifier!, 7:30 a.m., Mansell Crossing at AMC Theatres, Alpharetta.

Buy One Get One Free Offer for Martinis & IMAX

Available through May 28, 2010 you can buy one ticket and get one Free for Martinis & IMAX at the Fernbank Museum.

This is a great opportunity to visit the southeast’s premier museum of natural history at a discount. Enjoy a refreshing martini and the big screen at Fernbank’s IMAX theater. Use promo code MayMartinis-M&I-B1G1.

Related Articles:
Fernbank Museum of Natural History
DeSoto Artifacts Showcased at Fernbank

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