The High Museum of Art (colloquially the High) is the largest museum for visual art in the Southeastern United States. Located in Atlanta, Georgia (on Peachtree Street in Midtown, the city's arts district), the High is 312,000 square feet (28,985 m2) and a division of the Woodruff Arts Center. The High organizes and presents exhibitions of international and national significance alongside its comprehensive collection of more than 20,000 works of art, and is especially known for its 19th- and 20th-century American decorative arts, folk and self-taught art, modern and contemporary art, and photography. A cultural nexus of Atlanta since 1926, it hosts festivals, live performances, public conversations, independent art films, and educational programs year-round. It also features dedicated spaces for children of all ages and their caregivers, an on-site restaurant, and a museum store.
History
In 1926, Harriet "Hattie" High donated her home on Peachtree Street to create the museum and school of art that had been the goal of the Atlanta Art Association since 1905. The museum was named in memory of Mrs. High's husband, J.M. High. Leading up to Mrs. High's donation of her home Atlanta art collector J. J. Haverty had organized two exhibitions working with the Grand Central Art Galleries to build interest and support for the creation of an art museum for Atlanta. In 1949 Haverty's daughter donated many pieces from the Haverty collection to the High which are now on permanent display. In 1951 the High was offered a gift from the Kress Foundation of over 30 Renaissance and Baroque works of art if they could promise a climate controlled building. This prompted a building project resulting in a new museum building constructed adjacent to the family home in 1955. On June 3, 1962, 106 Atlanta arts patrons died in an airplane crash at Paris's Orly Airport while on a museum-sponsored trip. Including crew and other passengers, 130 people were killed in what was, at the time, the worst single plane aviation disaster in history. Members of Atlanta's prominent families were lost including members of the Berry family who founded Berry College. During their visit to Paris, the Atlanta arts patrons had seen Whistler's Mother at the Louvre. In the winter of 1963, the Louvre, as a gesture of good will to the people of Atlanta, sent Whistler's Mother to Atlanta to be exhibited at the Atlanta Art Association museum on Peachtree Street. To honor those killed in the 1962 crash, the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center was built which included the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the High Museum of Art, the Atlanta College of Art, and later the Alliance Theater. The French government donated a Rodin sculpture The Shade to the High in memory of the victims of the crash. As part of the 1996 Summer Olympics, the museum offered an exhibit called Rings: Five Passions in World Art, themed around five emotions: love, joy, awe, anguish, and triumph. Curated by J. Carter Brown, it highlighted paintings and sculptures from the US National Gallery of Art and museums from around the world. Today the High Museum has an audience that is younger than the average art museum audience, whose income levels are diverse, and that is fifty percent people of color, paralleling the city of Atlanta's racial demographics.
Architecture In 1983, a 135,000-square-foot (12,500 m2) building designed by Richard Meier opened to house the High Museum of Art. Meier won the 1984 Pritzker Prize after completing the building. The Meier building was funded by a $7.9 million challenge grant from former Coca-Cola president Robert W. Woodruff matched by $20 million raised by the museum. The building contains 135,000 square feet with about 52,000 square feet (4,800 m2) of gallery space. In 2005, Renzo Piano designed three new buildings which more than doubled the museum's size to 312,000 square feet (29,000 m2), at a cost of $124 million. The Piano buildings were designed as part of an overall upgrade of the entire Woodruff Arts Center complex. All three new buildings erected as part of the expansion of the High are clad in panels of aluminum to align with Meier's original choice of a white enamel façade. Piano's design of the new Wieland Pavilion and Anne Cox Chambers Wing features a special roof system of 1,000 light scoops that capture northern light and filter it into the skyway galleries. In 2018 the Museum hired the New York-based architecture firm of Annabelle Selldorf to design a reinstallation of its collection galleries across the Meier and Piano buildings. The work included a new system of gallery organization, lighting systems, and exhibition furnishings to create a more closely integrated series of collection experiences across the Museum’s various curatorial departments.
Collection
The High Museum of Art's permanent collection includes more than 20,000 artworks across seven collecting areas: African art, American art, decorative arts and design, European art, folk and self-taught art, modern and contemporary art, and photography. More than one-third of the High's collection was acquired after the museum announced its plans for expansion in 1999. Highlights of the collection include works by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Claude Monet, Martin Johnson Heade, Dorothea Lange, Clarence John Laughlin, and Chuck Close.
African art To reflect the continent’s history while foregrounding recent innovations, the High’s African art collection includes a diversity of art forms from ancient to contemporary times. To represent the depth and breadth of the African diaspora, the High continues to strengthen its holdings of works by artists of African ancestry, including African American artists, to highlight cultural bonds throughout the Black Atlantic world and beyond. The heart of the African art collection consists of masks and figurative sculptures, enriched by exceptionally fine textiles, beadwork, metalwork, and ceramics. Antiquities include an animated terracotta sculpture of a female torso wrapped in snakes (c. 1200–1500). From the region of ancient Djenné, one of Africa’s oldest cities, this work represents Sogolon, mother of Sundiata, the founder of the Mali Empire. Along with this work, a Quran (c. 1600) from Timbuktu, Djenné’s sister city, highlights art of the Mali Empire.
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