By Julia Forbes, Associate Director, Institutional Research, High Museum of Art

Over the past one hundred years, the High has created a legacy of collecting, preserving, and interpreting extraordinary works of art. From its beginnings, it has engaged with the community by offering programs and experiences for visitors of all ages. Who are the leaders who built and helmed the museum, who guided it to what it is today?

The museum was founded in 1926 as the High Museum and School of Art, so it’s worth noting that in the museum’s early years, up until 1963, its directors oversaw both the museum and the school. Here’s a brief, bulleted overview of the accomplishments and contributions of the nine men to hold the job.

Roland Joseph McKinney (1898–1971)

· First director (1928–1929)

· J. J. Haverty, one of three vice presidents of the Atlanta Art Association (the parent company of the High Museum and School of Art), led the effort to find the museum’s first director.

· McKinney was a native New Yorker and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before coming to the High, he served as director of the Davenport Municipal Art Gallery (today the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa).

· During McKinney’s short tenure, he formalized the art school by bringing in Ben Shute from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to head the program. McKinney also created a children’s gallery and added a sky-lit gallery.

· Annual attendance at the young museum exceeded 15,000 visitors.

· On June 1, 1929, McKinney left to become director of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Lewis Palmer Skidmore (1877–1955)

· Second director (1929–1948)

· Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Skidmore held a fine arts degree from Yale University and attended the École des Beaux Arts and the Academie Julian of Paris.

· In 1911, he was a passenger aboard the S.S. Carpathia when it rescued the survivors of the Titanic. He made a series of famously published sketches of the sinking.

· Prior to joining the High, he served as director of the Norwich Museum and School and was an instructor at the Mechanics Institute of New York and the Pratt Institute of Hoboken, New Jersey.

· Skidmore was appointed director of the High on August 1, 1929, and served during the challenging years of the Depression and World War II.

· His major accomplishments included the addition of an auditorium with funds from the Lucius Perry Hills bequest and financial support from Mrs. Harriet “Hattie” High. (You can learn more about Mrs. High in the Art Stories archive.)

· Skidmore began the museum’s educational efforts by providing regular lectures on a wide variety of art topics.

· He also began to build the collection. In 1930, working with board chair J. J. Haverty, the “Friends of Art” group was founded. Each member pledged $100 a year for five years to increase the collection.

· In 1931, Skidmore received a visit from artist and Atlanta University professor Hale Woodruff, and the two men developed an unlikely friendship. (Learn more about that in the Art Stories archive.)

· In 1936, J. J. Haverty donated the first work of art by an African American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Etaples Fisher Folk.

· During Skidmore’s tenure, the museum began offering exhibitions of objects ranging from European and American art to student works, and, in 1932, it served as the opening venue for Samuel Kress’s collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings. It was at this time that Kress made his first major gift to the High, a painting by Italian Rococo master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Roman Matrons Making Offerings to Juno.

· After retiring in 1948, Skidmore continued as an active artist in the Atlanta area until his death in 1955.

Ben Edgar Shute (1905–1986)

· Acting director (1948–1949)

· Upon Skidmore’s retirement in 1948, Ben Shute, the dean of the High’s art school, was appointed the museum’s acting director. He remained in a leadership role at the school once the new museum director was in place.

· During Shute’s short tenure, future director Gudmund Vigtel attended the Atlanta Art Institute.

· During this time, the Haverty family began discussions with the Atlanta Art Association (AAA) about gifting their collection. (Gifted in October 1949, it was the most important collection donation at the time.) Henry B. Scott bequeathed $500,000 to buy a house (formerly known as the Wilkinson house) adjacent to the High house (later called the Scott Memorial Gallery) for the expansion of the museum, and the McRae house was acquired to expand the art school.

Edmund Robert Hunter (1909–2011)

· Fourth director (1949–1954)

· Hunter was born in Toronto, Canada. He attended the University of Toronto, then studied art at the Ontario College of Art, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Courtauld Institute.

· Before coming to the High in 1949, he worked at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now Ontario) and then the Art Association of Montreal. He became a US citizen after serving in the US Army during World War II. He was twice director of the Norton Gallery (now Museum) of Art.

· In 1951, the Kress Foundation offered a significant donation of Renaissance and Baroque works of art that required a climate-controlled, fireproof structure. Hunter oversaw the fundraising efforts and the beginnings of the construction of the High’s first purpose-built museum, the 1955 building, working closely with Atlanta Art Association President Walter C. Hill.

· The museum received its first work of African art, a sculpture by a Baga artist from Guinea, from New York collector and entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein.

· Hunter resigned in 1954 to become director of the Jacksonville Art Museum.

Reginald Harkness Poland (1892–1975)

· Fifth director (1954–1962)

· Poland was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and studied at Brown University. He held MAs from Princeton and Harvard.

· Before coming to the High, Poland was director of the Denver Art Association and educational director of the Detroit Institute of Arts. He also served as director of the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego and the Norton Gallery in Palm Beach.

· Poland took the helm of the High in 1954 as the museum was constructing its first purpose-built museum.

· Poland was very involved in the arts field and the Atlanta community. He was a member of the American Association of Art Museum Directors, served as vice president of the Atlanta Civic Ballet, and was a board member of the Atlanta Festival of Arts.

· He established the first curatorial department and appointed its first curator. In 1958, the McBurney Decorative Arts Center opened in a large home just north of the new museum, and the High’s first curator was appointed to manage the collection.

· The museum’s collection grew significantly during Poland’s tenure. Pictured here is Poland with a work by Robert Henri, which joined the collection in 1955. Also in 1955, Mrs. Ralph K. Uhry provided funds to establish a print collection in honor of her husband. In 1958, the Kress Collection, which had inspired the 1955 building, arrived and was put on view (for which the museum published a catalogue with a foreword by Poland). In 1960, the museum purchased the 1784 Thornton House (moved from rural Georgia) to be placed behind the McBurney house and used as a period room.

· The museum’s first major volunteer organization was established in 1955. Called the Women’s Committee, it took over the carriage house behind the McBurney house and changed it into the Coach House Tearoom and Gallery, which raised significant funds for the museum.

· Challenges in the Art Association’s leadership structure led to a professional review of the organization in 1961. Critics claimed the High was working as four separate museums managed independently. Atlanta Art Association leadership brought in consulting firm Englehardt, Engelhardt & Leggett to review and write a report, which was completed and delivered in March 1962. The report recommended more professional leadership at the top to centralize decision-making and limit the power of volunteer leaders and to work to improve the physical conditions at the art school.

· On June 3, 1962, tragedy struck when 122 members of the AAA were killed in a plane crash at Orly Field near Paris.

· Poland retired in 1962 but remained in Atlanta.

Gudmund Vigtel (1925–2012)

· Sixth director (1963–1991)

· Born in Jerusalem and raised in Europe, Vigtel received an Atlanta Rotary Club scholarship for European students in 1948 to study in Georgia and enrolled in the Atlanta Art Institute. Later, he was offered a scholarship to the University of Georgia School of Art and studied under Lamar Dodd. He received his BFA and MFA at the University of Georgia.

· Before taking the position at the High, he was the assistant director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

· When Vigtel arrived at the High, there were five staff members, including himself; museum’s annual budget was $60,000.

· During his tenure, Vigtel tripled the size of the collection. He established collections of African art (with support from Fred and Rita Richman), folk art (with support from Judith Alexander), and photography (with support from Lucinda Bunnen). He also significantly expanded collections of works on paper (with support from the Fox Foundation and Ralph K. Uhry), modern and contemporary art (with support from the National Endowment for the Arts), and decorative arts (with support from Frances Cocke and Virginia Crawford and a decorative arts endowment supported by local foundations).

· He built almost $20 million of endowment and trust funds.

· He led the campaign for a new standalone High Museum building, which was designed by Richard Meier in 1983 and put the museum on the national radar.

· Vigtel made a commitment to family audiences with the opening, in 1968, of the Junior Activities Center, reaching around 90,000 children within the first four years. Vigtel is pictured here inside the family space, Spaces and Illusions, an installation that ran from 1979 to 1983. In 1976, he commissioned Isamu Noguchi to design Playscapes in Piedmont Park, as a gift to the city of Atlanta in honor of the bicentennial, to connect children with art through play.

· The museum continued to develop its staff throughout the 1970s and 1980s with the creation of a formal education department and the establishment of three new curatorial departments: European Art and Modern and Contemporary Art in 1979 and American Art in 1985.

· In 1984, the museum recorded its highest visitation: 649,000 visitors, 400,000 of whom came to see the special exhibition China: 7,000 Years of Discovery.

· The museum’s growth continued in 1986 with the opening of a downtown branch at the Georgia-Pacific Center.

· By the time Vigtel retired in 1991, the staff had grown to 135 with an approximate budget of $7.5 million and 20,000 members (the largest museum membership in the United States in proportion to the city’s population at the time). Upon his retirement, Vigtel was named director emeritus.

Ned Rifkin (born 1949)

· Seventh director (1991–2000)

· Born in Brooklyn, New York, Rifkin earned a BFA from Syracuse University as well as an MA and PhD in art history from the University of Michigan.

· Before becoming the director of the High in 1991, he served as chief curator of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

· Rifkin continued to grow the museum’s curatorial departments by establishing a formal Photography department in 1993. In 1994, the High became the first general-interest museum to establish a collection and curatorship dedicated to folk and self-taught art.

· In 1995, Michael Shapiro joined the High’s leadership team as chief curator (and would later become deputy director).

· In 1996, the Picturing the South photography commission series was established.

· When Rifkin learned that Atlanta was to host the 1996 Summer Olympics, he began conversations with J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, to organize an exhibition. Called Rings: Five Passions in World Art, the exhibition was the centerpiece of the cultural events surrounding the Summer Olympic games in Atlanta and led to the establishment of important international relationships.

· Rings also inspired a series of exhibitions and partnerships with major museums around the world that propelled the museum forward, starting with Henri Matisse: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art (November 2, 1996–January 19, 1997).

· Understanding that the museum still needed more space, in 1999, Rifkin’s long-range planning committee invited architect Renzo Piano to design new spaces for the museum and harmoniously connect it to the Memorial Arts Center.

· Rifkin left the museum in 2000 to become director of Houston’s Menil Collection. He is now retired.

Michael E. Shapiro (born 1949)

· Eighth director (2000–2015)

· Born in New York City, Shapiro earned a bachelor’s degree from Hamilton College, an MA from Williams College, and an MA and a PhD in philosophy from Harvard University.

· In 2000, Shapiro was promoted from deputy director to director.

· He established the African Art department in 2001.

· Shapiro led the fundraising effort for the 2005 Renzo Piano expansion, which more than doubled the museum’s size, adding three buildings and 177,000 square feet. This effort included a 2004 reinstallation of the Richard Meier–designed Stent Family Wing.

· During Shapiro’s tenure, the collection grew substantially, including the first purchases of works of art valued at over $1 million (Joseph Stella’s Purissima and Monet’s Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil).

· Shapiro continued to build upon the museum’s commitment to family audiences with named spaces, the Greene Family Education Center and the Greene Family Learning Gallery. In 2013, he launched a family exhibition series celebrating children’s book art.

· He established the David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History in 2005 to celebrate field-defining contributions to African American art by the country’s leading scholars and artists. The annual gala supports the David C. Driskell African American Art Acquisition Restricted and Endowment Funds, used for the acquisition of African American art and related exhibitions and education programs.

· The number of collaborations with major art institutions around the world increased, beginning in 2006 with Louvre Atlanta, a three-year partnership with the Musée du Louvre in Paris, building upon the deep connection made between Atlanta and Paris after the Orly crash. Louvre Atlanta welcomed over 1.3 million visitors from all fifty states. The collaborations continued from 2009 to 2015 with MoMA and from 2010 to 2011 with the National Galleries of Scotland.

· Shapiro retired in 2015.

Rand Suffolk (born 1967)

· Ninth director (2015–present)

· Suffolk was raised in Tallmadge, Ohio and earned a BA in English from Connecticut College, an MA in higher education administration from Columbia University, and an MA in art history from Bryn Mawr College.

· Before joining the High as director in 2015, Suffolk was director of the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and The Hyde Collection in upstate New York.

· Over the last ten years, the High has focused its attention on its community, working to create a museum that is essential to Atlanta and reflects the people who live here. Suffolk pivoted the museum away from the “blockbuster” exhibition model to prioritize community engagement and support greater financial stability.

· Today, the High’s visitation demographic is younger than the average art museum audience, has varying income levels, and is 55 percent people of color, reflecting the city’s demographic. The museum publishes an Art & Inclusion dashboard on its website to share this commitment broadly.

· In 2018, the museum undertook a complete collections reinstallation with architectural interventions by Selldorf Architects, including an expansion of the Greene Family Learning Gallery.

· Initiatives ranging from free admission programs to after-hours events have helped position the High as a national model for community-centered museum engagement.

· In 2024, the High renamed its education department Learning and Civic Engagement, intentionally choosing the word civic to underscore that the High is a museum of, by, and for the city of Atlanta.

· In preparation for the museum’s centennial, Suffolk led a rebranding of the High’s logo, a contemporary new look to bring the institution’s visual identity into the future.

· In celebration of the centennial, the museum has added more than 200 works of art to the collection across photography, contemporary design, and contemporary art.

· Under Suffolk’s leadership, the High’s membership has increased from 26,000 households in 2015 to 48,700 households in 2026.

“The success of our future rests squarely on our ability to increase our space. Improving our collections with discernment will be absolutely essential, but services to the community in terms of education and recreation are going to be crucial to our future success. We will be measured by the growth of our collection, but we can survive as an institution only on our usefulness to the community.”

— Gudmund Vigtel, High Museum long-range planning report, 1974

“We are poised to enter our next 100 years as a dynamic, intentional, and essential contributor to the cultural fabric of our city — an organization, in fact, dedicated to connecting and strengthening our community.”

— Rand Suffolk, 2026

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Leading the High Museum of Art was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Carlton Mackey, Assistant Director, Community Dialogue & Engagement, High Museum of Art

In the most basic sense, we come to museums to experience works of art. One of the most common questions we ask ourselves when we encounter a work is, “What does it mean?” We may begin to come to an answer by looking at the work through the lens of art history, our knowledge of the artist or artistic medium, or information gleaned from the wall text. During our monthly conversation series, Seeing with Spirit, museum staff invite guests to connect with works of art and explore meaning through a different lens.

The High’s Learning and Civic Engagement department regularly creates dynamic experiences for visitors to experience the museum differently. Our largest offerings, HIGH Frequency Friday and Friday Jazz, are important parts of Atlanta’s vibrant and energetic cultural landscape, welcoming thousands of people each month.

In conversations with Andrew Westover, Deputy Director for Learning and Civic Engagement, we realized that we had an opportunity. Atlanta boasts a supermajority who identify as religious: 75% of the metro region. [1]1 What if, alongside our wonderfully energetic Friday programs, we created a contemplative space for visitors to connect more deeply with the art, with one another, and with themselves? Andrew and I both have spent years considering how belief plays a role in public life, academically and practically; that collective experience informed creating a program that engages with spiritual and contemplative practices alongside works of art. Together with colleagues Noa Schmitz and Demetri Burke, we are now three years into a great experiment of treating belief more seriously with regard to both art objects and the people the museum welcomes. In addition to yoga, sound healing, and mindful art, Seeing with Spirit offers a unique entry point for visitors to connect with art. Each month, we invite a speaker whose vocation is rooted in spiritual or contemplative practices to choose a work in the museum’s collection and reflect on it with an audience. Whether shaped by faith, ritual, meditation, intuition, or other traditions, each speaker brings a way of seeing cultivated over years of practice.

The goal is not to offer the definitive interpretation of a work of art nor to persuade anyone toward a particular spiritual tradition. Rather, it is to create space for a different kind of encounter and a different approach to engaging art. Guests are invited to experience how a life of spiritual practice can shape perception, deepen attention, and illuminate dimensions of an artwork they might not have otherwise noticed.

At a recent Seeing with Spirit conversation, we welcomed Kelley Knight, founder of Modern Mystic Shop, to reflect on a work of art by Isamu Noguchi. Drawing from her work as an intuitive and her relationship with symbolism, tarot, and personal transformation, Kelley offered more than just an interpretation of the sculpture. She demonstrated a way of paying attention, shaped by years of listening for meaning, trusting intuition, and remaining open to what reveals itself over time.

The conversation in the gallery invited us to see Noguchi’s work through the lens of Kelley’s spiritual practice. Below is an encapsulation of the conversation that took place that afternoon: one exploring the experiences, disciplines, and questions that have shaped the way Kelley encounters art and, perhaps, how her way of seeing might expand our own.

Mackey: Kelley, tell me a bit about yourself and your spiritual practice.

Knight: I’m a professional tarot reader and have been practicing for more than fifteen years. I’m also a ritualist, with a particular focus on candle magic and altar work. Many of my personal practices can be found in Spells for the Modern Mystic: A Ritual Guidebook and Spell-Casting Kit, which I coauthored in 2020.

My spiritual path really began in my mid-twenties. At the time, I had acquired many of the traditional markers of success. I had followed the prescribed path, and, by most definitions, it had worked. What I hadn’t considered was whether the life I was building had been created by my own intentional design. I began to realize that achievement and meaning were not necessarily the same thing.

That realization led me first into personal development and eventually to a local group offering courses in Gestalt therapy, Buddhist studies, tarot, and a kinesiology-based healing practice. Something about this combination of psychology, spirituality, and embodied experience deeply resonated with me.

As I went further into the work, I began having experiences that fundamentally changed my understanding of myself and the world around me. These included what felt like an instantaneous physical healing and, later, what I consider a psychic awakening — an experience that opened my awareness to what I perceive as communication with spirits, including angels and deceased loved ones.

Those experiences became the foundation of my spiritual practice, but over time the distinction between my “spiritual life” and the rest of my life largely disappeared. The practices became part of how I understand myself, make decisions, create meaning, and move through the world.

Mackey: What role does art play in your life and/or spiritual practice?

Knight: As a tarot reader, my primary tool is itself a collection of art: seventy-eight tangible cards filled with symbolism, archetypes, characters, and recurring human themes. The relationship between the reader and the artwork is an essential part of the process.

Even after more than fifteen years of reading tarot, there are decks I simply cannot read well. I may understand the traditional meaning of every card, but if the artist’s visual interpretation doesn’t resonate with my intuition, the connection isn’t there.

A significant shift in my own practice happened when I began working with artist Kim Krans’s “The Wild Unknown Tarot.” Her imagery gave me a different way into the cards. Rather than relying primarily on learned meanings, I found myself responding more immediately to image, symbol, feeling, and association. It became a gateway to a deeper trust in my own intuition and ultimately changed the way I read.

In that sense, art isn’t adjacent to my spiritual practice. It is at the center of the tool I use most often for spirituality, reflection, and personal development.

Mackey: Why did you choose this piece of art from the museum to discuss, and what connection do you make between it and your art/spiritual practice?

Knight: I initially chose Seraphic Dialogue knowing nothing about its history or meaning. I was simply drawn to it. Its scale, brass color, and geometric forms immediately appealed to my aesthetic sensibility.

The more remarkable connection came afterward, when I learned about the work. Seraphic Dialogue refers to angelic communication, and the piece was created in connection with a stage production telling the story of Joan of Arc, the Catholic saint and historical figure who famously reported receiving divine messages.

That discovery felt particularly significant to me because my own experiences of what I understand as angelic communication were an important opening into my adult spiritual life and eventually my life’s work.

What I love most is that I chose the piece before I knew any of this. I was attracted to it visually first; the meaning came later. Whether someone interprets that as intuition, coincidence, or synchronicity is almost beside the point. For me, it beautifully illustrates the experience of being drawn toward something before consciously understanding why.

Mackey: Even if someone doesn’t share your religious views or faith practice, what is something they could take away from this work of art (or from your tradition) that can be of value for them as they journey through life?

Knight: Perhaps the greatest gift of my spiritual awakening has been learning to trust myself and my intuition.

After working with nearly 10,000 people through tarot readings, I’ve come to believe that intuition isn’t a rare ability reserved for people who identify as psychic or spiritual. I believe we all possess some capacity to perceive, sense, and understand more than we can immediately articulate. The practice is learning how to listen to that information while also developing the discernment to understand it.

For me, the purpose of strengthening intuition isn’t to predict every turn our lives will take. It is to develop enough self-trust to recognize what feels authentic, what doesn’t, and how we want to respond.

Life will inevitably contain uncertainty. We cannot intuit our way out of that. But a strong relationship with ourselves can give us something steady within it. That combination of intuition, discernment, and self-belief has become, for me, a source of peace in what can often be a stormy life.

You can view all of Carlton and Kelley’s Oasis conversation on the High Museum of Art YouTube channel. If you’d like to participate in Seeing with Spirit, reserve your tickets to one of our upcoming Oasis programs on the High’s website.

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Notes:

[1] “Geography: People in the metro Atlanta area,” 2023–24 U.S. Religious Landscape Study (Pew Research Center, 2025), https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/metro-area/atlanta-ga/.

Art, Awe, and Awakening: A Museum-Based Spiritual Experience was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Matthew Shorten, Curatorial Research Associate, High Museum of Art

An angular wash of bluish grays and grayish blues serves as the ground for a geometric collision. A dazzling yellow circle with spirals and rings — struck by a dark mass that’s part prism, part skyscraper, part bell — vibrates concentrically from center to periphery, its own material separated and divided into pie-slice sectors. This action unleashes triangles and diamonds and other spatial droplets of ochre, cream, and crimson into the surrounding void, an eternally indeterminate space. Somehow, phases of time and relationships of cause and effect enfold one another in this painting: The vibration, as though emanating from a freshly struck cymbal, is both forthcoming and in progress. Although the paint on the canvas is dry, the shapes won’t stop moving, and neither will the viewer’s eyes.

This enigmatic work was painted by American modernist Katherine Sophie Dreier (1877–1952). Born in Brooklyn, New York, Dreier played a central role in bringing the modern art of Europe to audiences in the United States throughout the twentieth century. She also amassed her own enviable art collection, overflowing with modernist treasures — many of which ultimately found a home at the Yale University Art Gallery. Dreier’s is not a household name, but nonetheless she held a formidable reputation, not only as an artist of the avant-garde but as an astute patron, collector, and curator. [1]

The High’s Dreier painting entered the collection in 2006, purchased under the title Abstraction. However, in 2007, a major discovery opened up new avenues for how we might encounter this painting. An enthusiastic staff member at the High came across an annotated catalogue for a 1930s retrospective of Dreier’s art, allowing particular works with previously unknown or incorrect titles to be reidentified. There, “Abstraction” was recorded under a different title entirely: Echoes of Bach.

How might the painting’s meaning change in light of this, as a visual artwork now framed by two potent sonic referents — an acoustical phenomenon and the name of a towering musical and historical figure? Dreier’s enduring interest in the relationship between art and music, in her own artistic practice and beyond, is well established. As it happens, Echoes of Bach is linked to another of her projects, published in 1942, around the same time the High’s painting was completed: a series of bright, arresting lithographs entitled 40 Variations. These forty prints bear the traces of the visual language seen in Echoes of Bach, although each variation permutes the central forms and colors in its own way — suggesting an adherence to a musical or rhythmic motif that each print improvises, bends, and expands upon. [2] In fact, 40 Variations was originally designed to accompany choreography and specially composed music, establishing the series’ multisensory and immersive intentions at the outset.

Dreier made her inspiration for these works explicit, in both mode and title, in her foreword to 40 Variations:

During 1933 two things were happening over here which greatly intrigued my imagination! The first of these was the playing of Beethoven’s Variations at many a concert during the winter months, and the other was the International Regatta during some of our most perfect summer days.

Both events made a deep impression, and there flashed on my mind the query — why not translate these two experiences into the realm of abstract art?

Dreier’s summoning of composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven in the same breath, through the titles and sensibilities of these two aurally inclined works, and in an attempt to transfer music’s ineffable qualities into a concrete visual field, is particularly fitting. To invoke Bach is, in the realm of classical music, to invoke cycles and systems of lineage, inheritance, and the transmission of musical knowledge. This passing down of formal and technical conventions through generations of artists suggests another kind of echo, generating ripple effects of influence, instruction, and tradition and their attendant anxieties. Beethoven, for instance, famously kept a portrait of Bach in his apartment, confirming the self-consciousness of his relationship to the work done before him. Decades later, composer Johannes Brahms kept a marble bust of Beethoven in his studio, continuing this process of passing the torch and contending with artistic pasts in an artistic present.

In light of the rediscovered title for Echoes of Bach and its wider constellation of influences, our perception and understanding of the work shifts, and we can read into certain aspects of the composition differently, or more fully. Suddenly, the relationships between shapes and gestures are not only formal, they’re harmonic. The vivid color palette becomes not just visually striking but tonal. The constant sense of movement and kinetic energy, perceived visually, evolves into a vibration and resonance, experienced almost sonically. In this sense, Dreier’s painting calls upon both the eye and the ear, evoking the language of music and sound in its viewer.

A photograph of the artist seated in her living room, her back turned to the viewer, adds another piece to the puzzle. Dreier’s contemplative expression remains visible in the mirror’s reflection. Remarkably, however, the High’s Echoes of Bach is displayed pride of place on the mantel above the fireplace. To my eye, as the son and grandson of painters who only display their very finest and most satisfying pieces in the family home, this gesture expresses just how deeply Dreier resonated with her own resonant painting, more assuredly and emphatically than even words could.

This idea of the “echo” — evoking cause and effect, call and response — also maps itself onto Dreier’s life and work, particularly in her cofounding of the Société Anonyme in 1920. Alongside celebrated modernists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Dreier established the Société Anonyme, Inc. (French for “Corporation, Inc.”), an arts organization in New York City dedicated to the advancement and proliferation of contemporary art, predating the Museum of Modern Art by almost a decade. [3] Although the Société was older than MoMA, the latter’s resources were much more extensive, and thus the Société’s uphill efforts struggled, its headquarters ceasing operations in 1928. Nevertheless, Dreier’s pioneering organization supported the American debuts of artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, whose talents the Société recognized and helped cultivate well before the mainstream caught on.

The “cymbal” form in Dreier’s Echoes of Bach can thereby be seen as a twofold “symbol” for the moment when sensory experience emerges from a sounding point, radiating outward in all directions, reverberating with such intensity that it transfigures everything around it in turn. In effect, this aural paradigm finds a historical mirror in Dreier’s resounding commitment to modernist artistic practices and their dissemination throughout the United States, in the twentieth century and beyond.

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References

[1] Trevor Stark, “Katherine Dreier,” The Modern Art Index Project (November 2016), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[2] For more on 40 Variations and its particular relationship to audiovisual experience, see this excellent post from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: Claire Lui, “‘Sublime Rhythms’: Vivid Lithographs by Artist and Collector Katherine S. Dreier,” in Findings, Guggenheim Articles, updated June 30, 2017, accessed October 3, 2026, https://www.guggenheim.org/articles/findings/sublime-rhythms-vivid-lithographs-by-artist-and-collector-katherine-s-dreier.

[3] Ian Chilvers and John Glaves-Smith, A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press, 2009), 667.

Cymbal Symbols: Katherine Dreier’s Experiments in Art and Music was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Julia Forbes, Associate Director, Institutional Research, High Museum of Art

For the first forty years of its existence, the High Museum of Art was housed in several large homes along Peachtree Street, in the block between 15th and 16th Streets. All the homes were designed (at separate times) by Atlanta architect Walter T. Downing, who also designed the First Presbyterian Church at the corner of Peachtree and 16th Streets. [1]

The first home was the one that started it all, when, in 1926, Hattie High gifted her Tudor mansion to become Atlanta’s first art museum, the High Museum and School of Art. But how did Mrs. High come to have this grand home?

In 1912 Mrs. High hired celebrated Atlanta architect Downing to design and build her a new Tudor mansion, north of downtown, near the young neighborhood of Ansley Park at Peachtree and 15th Streets. A family of five, the Highs had three daughters and had been living at 418 Peachtree Street. That home was nearer to downtown Atlanta and to Mr. High’s business, the J. M. High Department Store, located at the corner of present-day Peachtree Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. Joseph Madison High died in 1906. The loss of her husband caused Hattie to seek a fresh start in a new neighborhood. She and two of her daughters, Elizabeth and Dorothy, moved in to their new home on July 6, 1913. [2] The eldest daughter, Hattie Mae, had married Toulman Williams in 1907. Both Elizabeth (in 1914) and Dorothy (in 1919) were married in the new home. [3]

On May 9, 1926, Hattie donated her home to the Atlanta Art Association, whose aim for the past twenty years had been to build a museum and art school for Atlanta. Hattie asked that the new museum be named in memory of her husband. At the donation ceremony, she said, “It was something of which I had been thinking a long time, but somehow the actual arrangements were never made until now. I saw the need of an art museum in Atlanta, and I recognized the great desire of the city’s art lovers for such an institution. In making the gift, I felt I was merely doing my part for Atlanta. It is a greater favor to me, to be permitted to make this gift, than it could be to the city of Atlanta to receive it.” [4]

After several months of renovating to make the ground floor suitable for showing art and to convert the top floor into classrooms, the High Museum and School of Art opened to the public on October 18, 1926.

For twenty-three years, the High Museum and School of Art lived in Mrs. High’s house. In February 1949, two homes adjacent to the High home were added to the complex. Not much is known about the Wilkinson home (which was located just north of the High home) and its owners other than that it was designed by Downing. The Atlanta Art Association purchased the home with funds from the Henry B. Scott bequest and named it the Scott Memorial Gallery. It quickly became the home of the Haverty Collection, generously gifted by J. J. Haverty’s daughter Mary, and allowed for much needed additional gallery space to display the collection.

The McRae home, located just south of the High home, allowed for the expansion of the art school. It was built by Downing around 1909 for Dr. Floyd Wilcox McRae, chief of surgery and gynecology at the Piedmont Sanatorium (later Piedmont Hospital). After it became part of the High Museum and School of Art campus, a covered bridge was constructed between the two buildings, connecting them while allowing students easy passage sheltered from weather.

The fourth house on the campus was designed by Downing in 1905. The Edgar Poe McBurney House sat just north of the Scott Memorial Gallery. McBurney bequeathed his home to the Atlanta Art Association upon his death in 1940, on the condition his wife could continue to live there until her death. It was their wish that the home serve as a center for the decorative arts. [5] In 1958, after Mrs. McBurney’s death and almost $100,000 in renovations, the McBurney Decorative Arts Center, complete with McBurney’s now-famous ginkgo tree, opened to the public. The High hired its first curator to manage the decorative arts collection.

The Women’s Committee of the Atlanta Art Association turned the carriage house behind the McBurney House into the Coach House Tearoom and Gallery. This quickly became a successful business, raising significant funds for the Association. Later, in 1965, the group of women running the Coach House disaffiliated and founded the Forward Arts Foundation. They moved into the Swan Coach House on the grounds of the Atlanta History Center. The Forward Arts Foundation has made numerous generous contributions to the museum, including over forty works of art as well as financial support for exhibitions and catalogues.

A fifth house on the museum grounds was more of a collection object than a gallery. The Thornton House, as it was called, was built by Redman Thornton sometime around 1790. The Atlanta Art Association purchased it in 1960 and had it moved from Union Point, Georgia, to become part of the McBurney Decorative Arts Center. It was furnished to match its eighteenth-century construction. As the work to build the Memorial Arts Center (today the Woodruff Arts Center) began, the Thornton House found a new home at Stone Mountain Park in 1967. [6]

Over time, all the homes were torn down (with the exception of the Thornton House). The first house to be demolished was the Scott Memorial Gallery in 1955, providing a site for the High’s first purpose-built museum, designed by Edward Moulthrop. Next, in 1963, were the High and McRae homes, to make space for the new Memorial Arts Center. [7] Soon after, in 1967, the McBurney home was razed as well.

Over one hundred years ago, Hattie High generously gave her home to create Atlanta’s first art museum. Now, as we celebrate the institution’s centennial, the museum is housed in buildings designed by two of the world’s leading architects. To learn more about the campus today, check out the Art Stories archive to read how Richard Meier and Renzo Piano designed our current campus architecture.

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NOTES

[1] “Rustles of Bustles Opens Costume Museum,” The Atlanta Journal, October 12, 1958, 34.

[2] “In the World of Society,” Atlanta Georgian, July 6, 1913, 41.

[3] Carlyn Gaye Crannell, “The High Heritage,” The Atlanta Historical Journal XXII, no. 4 (Winter 1979–1980): 79.

[4] “High Residence Given for Atlanta Art Museum,” The Atlanta Constitution, May 9, 1926, 8.

[5] “Rustles of Bustles Opens Costume Museum,” 33.

[6] Dorothy Nix, “Old Thornton house finds mountain home,” The Atlanta Journal, April 6, 1967, 1.

[7] Barge-Thompson, Incorporated Engineers & Contractors to Atlanta Art Association confirming demolishment of the High and McRae homes. October 25, 1963, High Museum of Art Archives.

From House to Museum: Atlanta’s Home for Art was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Julia Forbes, Associate Director, Institutional Research, High Museum of Art

The High’s first curatorial position was created in 1958 to support the newly formed McBurney Decorative Arts Center. The center was housed in a large home north of the High’s first purpose-built museum building and was gifted by Edgar Poe McBurney after his death in 1940. The High had been collecting ceramics since its founding in 1926, but the new building and a new curator, James Nonemaker, provided more space for display and a stronger focus for the collection effort. The Atlanta Journal interviewed Nonemaker just days after the 1958 opening of the new gallery regarding a display of porcelains. He said, “our collection is not a big one, but we can honestly say that what we do have are the finest of their types and periods, and most of them have been found right here in Atlanta.” [1]

What makes this collection at the High so special are the local collectors and donors that helped to build it.

The High received its first important donation of ceramics in 1973. Frances “Fanny” Cocke, long-time benefactor of the High and a founding member of the Forward Arts Foundation, was committed to developing the museum’s collection. A collector herself, Mrs. Cocke built what would become the first art collection formed expressly as a donation for the High. Mrs. Cocke worked closely with experts in the field of ceramics from Colonial Williamsburg and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The Frances and Emory Cocke Collection of English Ceramics is a comprehensive survey of English ceramics ranging from seventeenth-century pottery wares to early nineteenth-century porcelain. This collection of over three hundred pieces focuses on the variety of form, color, place, and function of English ceramics to illustrate the diversity of design during this period. Its strengths reflect the personality and taste of Mrs. Cocke and cover a range of artistic movements from Baroque and Rococo to Neoclassical. This collection can be found on the Second Level of the Stent Family Wing in a gallery overlooking Peachtree Street.

In 1979, collecting began for the Virginia Carroll Crawford Collection of American Decorative Arts. Revealed in 1983 in the new Richard Meier–designed High Museum (now called the Stent Family Wing), this collection positioned the High as a leader in collecting and preserving nineteenth- to early twentieth-century American decorative arts, with objects spanning from 1825 to 1917. The ceramics in this vast collection include such stars as the Century Vase and the Charles Cartlidge and Company Pitcher. Check out my article about Virginia Carroll Crawford and the collection she helped build in the Art Stories archive. Many of the ceramic pieces in this collection are back on view in our newly reinstalled American Art galleries on the Third Level of the Stent Family Wing.

A group of approximately two hundred and seventy-five Japanese ceramics made from the early seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century was gifted to the High in 1988 by Dr. John Lesh Jacobs and his wife, Margaret “Peggy” Jacobs. Dr. Jacobs was a prominent Atlanta physician and medical researcher, and he and his wife were well known in the city’s cultural and philanthropic circles, particularly as collectors of fine art and Japanese ceramics. These works are currently not on view.

Audrey and Michael Landy began collecting in 1978 with a passion for contemporary ceramics. The Atlanta-based, long-time supporters of the High gifted their significant collection of predominantly figurative ceramic works to the High in 2012. Featuring renowned artists like Viola Frey (1933–2004), Rudy Autio (1926–2007), and Akio Takamori (1950–2017), the Landys’ gift of forty ceramics provided an important counterpoint to the nonfigurative ceramic works that were already in the High’s collection. A few works from the Landy Collection, including Frey’s spectacular Untitled (July II A/82), are also on view in the reinstalled American Art galleries on the Third Level of the Stent Family Wing.

Marjorie Eichenlaub West was a trustee of the High, active in the Forward Arts Foundation, and a founding member of the Ceramic Circle of Atlanta. Her generosity and passion for collecting provided the museum in 2017 with some of the finest examples of Meissen porcelain from its earliest decades. The Meissen Porcelain Manufactory of Meissen, Germany, was the first European maker of hard-paste porcelain, or “white gold,” which had been perfected by Chinese potters centuries earlier. European ceramic producers had long sought to discover the well-guarded formula for true Asian porcelain, but it was not until 1708 that this durable and lustrous ceramic was successfully produced in secret. Porcelain became the region’s most profitable manufacturing industry, and Meissen was Europe’s most productive and efficient ceramics manufactory. The Marjorie Eichenlaub West Collection of Meissen Porcelain can be seen on the Second Level of the Stent Family Wing.

As former director Gudmund Vigtel wrote of Frances Cocke in 1988, “All museums rely for their very existence on the generosity of donors. Mrs. Cocke is one of those rare individuals who combine active support with knowledge and the pronounced set of positive values of the impassioned collector.” [2] The same can be said for all the patrons discussed here. These Atlanta-based collectors — as well as the support of anonymous local foundations, which created generous endowments allowing for the purchase of great examples of ceramic art — have been key to collection building at the High. Today the museum’s ceramic collection stands at over thirteen hundred works of art dating from the 1600s to the present.

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[1] Katherine Skogstad, “Rare Porcelain Decorative Arts Shown at Museum,” The Atlanta Journal, October 16, 1958.

[2] Donald C. Peirce, with Bill Roughen, English Ceramics: The Frances and Emory Cocke Collection (High Museum of Art, 1988), 5.

Building the Collection: Ceramics was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2021, The Sara Giles Moore Foundation (SMGF) gifted the High a six-year grant to assess the condition of every work in the High’s collection and to fund treatment for artworks in need of conservation. To accomplish this goal, a conservator or trained registrar would physically examine each work — every painting, sculpture, vase, teapot, quilt, drawing, photograph, print, and so on — and produce a written report describing, as precisely as possible, the work’s condition.

These reports are greatly enhanced when there is a clear visual record, a photograph, of the work to act as a baseline reference against which any future changes can be compared. With this in consideration, part of the SGMF grant provided for a new photographic (digital) imaging station. As the High has no on-staff photographer, the grant allowed us to acquire appropriate camera equipment, lighting, and processing software as well as staff time to document works of art in the collection.

In choosing what to digitize, we decided to concentrate our efforts on works on paper — prints, drawings, and watercolors — because they are the most susceptible to light damage and color shifting over time. It made sense to document the present appearance of these works as closely as possible. Likewise, color photographs, along with early photographic processes such as albumen prints and photogravures, can change tones significantly as they age.

While many types of artwork received a detailed examination with a written report, works on paper and photographs received a general assessment paired with a high-resolution digital image. To make as accurate a visual record as possible, we included a color checker in each frame (fig. 1). This will allow the digital image to be color corrected and viewed on a calibrated monitor to accurately compare the present condition of the work to its condition at the time the photo was taken. The image of the artwork will become part of its permanent record and be stored in the High’s digital asset management system.

Depending on the chemical processes and papers used, there can be astonishingly broad tonal differences in early photographs. This is particularly evident in the High’s collection of albumen prints by French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927), whose images vary as widely in subject matter as in tone. Over the course of his career, Atget produced some eight thousand images that formed a rich photographic catalog of Parisian buildings, people, streets, gardens, facades, doorways, mantelpieces, stairwells, and architectural details. The High currently houses nearly six hundred Atget prints, which range from golden yellow to sepia and reddish-orange to burgundy (figs. 2–5). These colors are an effect of variations in processing the egg white, chloride salt, and silver nitrate emulsion. The prints are especially sensitive to ultraviolet light, and their color permanence could be affected by how long they were kept in gold chloride solution during development.

Just how difficult albumen printing was to master became clear to me at a later point in the project. I had the opportunity to digitize a portfolio of ten modern albumen prints made in 1977 after Eadweard Muybridge’s (1830–1904) nineteenth-century photographs of western landscapes (fig. 6).

In an introductory text included with the portfolio, printer Joel Snyder describes how he had struggled to arrive at an authentic, precise, and reliable procedure for making these prints: “. . . the albumen process, until fully appreciated, is enough to get a philosopher of science to give up on the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature . . . nothing that worked yesterday would work today, and everything that failed yesterday would perform perfectly tomorrow . . ..” Snyder claims these prints “will not discolor or fade. They have been processed to remove the salts responsible for the yellowing and fading of old albumen prints.”

Someday, our digitized condition images will allow us to see whether Snyder was correct.

Another type of photograph, the cyanotype, can have a range of blue color depending on how long it is exposed to sunlight. The High owns a beautiful cyanotype by English botanist Anna Atkins (1799–1871) (fig. 7). Atkins created this print by placing a plant specimen directly onto a piece of sensitized paper. She then laid the paper in sunlight, which turned the uncovered areas blue while the specimen remained silhouetted in unexposed white. Now known as photograms, these prints use no camera and no negative. Whereas an unlimited number of prints can be produced from negatives, a photogram is a unique work of art that can only be made once.

Mauritius is from a set of cyanotypes that Atkins intended to be bound into a book called Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns; she is arguably the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images and possibly the first woman to create a photograph.

Another benefit of the SGMF digitization project was that it allowed us to photograph complete sets of works by individual artists. One such artist was Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952). Between 1900 and 1930, Curtis traveled across the American continent to photograph Indigenous peoples, costumes, artifacts, and ways of life (figs. 8–10). He eventually produced twenty volumes of photogravures collectively called The North American Indian.

The High owns twenty-five of Curtis’s richly toned photogravures, yet for many years only four or five had been digitized, and only those digitized works could be featured in the searchable catalog on the High’s website. Now that all twenty-five have been documented, the full depth of the High’s Curtis holdings are accessible online.

Some of the works I came across during the digitization project were a complete surprise. In my nearly thirty years at the High, I had never encountered the work of Edgerton Chester Garvin (1881–1950). These eleven diminutive prints, beautifully mounted and delicately labeled in ink, were shot in coastal Georgia and Florida in the 1910s–1930s (figs. 11–13). Garvin was one of only a handful of Southern photographers shooting for creative effect rather than documentary purpose in those years. As soon as I saw Garvin’s sunsets, I thought of Alfred Stieglitz’s (1864–1946) Equivalents series (fig. 14). Much like Stieglitz, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), and other Pictorialist photographers of the time, Garvin used soft focus and dramatic lighting to achieve simple but sublime visual masterpieces.

Through the SGMF grant, we have now digitized over five thousand prints, drawings, watercolors, and photographs. It is interesting that digital photography has evolved to help preserve the legacy of its own medium. While digital images can never replace the experience of viewing original works of art in any medium, they can be a useful tool for researchers and future stewards of collections.

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On the Digital Record: Why the High is Digitizing Thousands of Artworks on Paper was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Anni Pullagura, Margaret and Terry Stent Associate Curator of American Art, and Megan Shores, Associate Manager of Collections Care

The history of paper dolls parallels the history of paper. Across cultures and time periods, these illustrative objects have been associated with storytelling and ceremony, used in burial rituals or as humorous means for social and political satire. In the West, the origin of the modern paper doll is perhaps best traced to the story of “Little Fanny.” Published in London in 1810, the cutout character book with interchangeable costumes illustrated the moralizing tale of a prodigal daughter who runs away from home, only to realize the meaningful need for a mother’s discipline.

Over the course of the nineteenth century — with the emergence of color lithography and die-cut printing — mass-manufactured paper dolls in the United States became accessible forms of gendered play that nonetheless signaled and imagined aspirational futures. Magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and weekly newspapers like the Boston Herald issued collectible characters and costumes as part of successful marketing strategies aimed at adults and children. Some milliners, dressmakers, and designers also collected and practiced with the changeable features of these objects to experiment with the latest styles.

By the end of the nineteenth century, paper dolls reached a new height of popularity as a socially appropriate form of creative expression. Bostonian artist Frank Weston Benson (1862–1951) was already known for his bright, airy Impressionist portraits of friends and family when he began creating over one hundred paper dolls for his children. He intended these to function as both customizable toys and artistic works and, in fact, created some of them with his eldest daughter, Eleanor Perry Benson (1890–1959), who would later become an artist in her own right.

The “Coltons” are a fictional family created by this father-daughter artist duo. Each doll — endowed with a name and personality — has costumes and accessories suitable for imagining various activities that closely followed the Bensons’ own outings, such as school, playtime, dinner parties, or picnics. Some of the outfits may have been modeled after the Benson children’s clothes or after popular styles advertised in contemporary magazines or shops. As part of the forthcoming reopening of the High’s American Art galleries, a regular rotation of these rare works on paper will be on view for the first time since they were gifted to the museum.

Megan Shores, the High’s Associate Manager of Collections Care, spoke with Snow F. Hawkins, Senior Paper Conservator at the Atlanta Art Conservation Center, about her experience conserving this delicate collection of paper dolls ahead of their debut.

Megan Shores: Can you explain how the tabs on the paper dolls work?

Snow F. Hawkins: These are classic paper doll tabs where the tabs fold over the shoulder of the figure. The more you fold them, the more likely they are to tear. You can tell the dolls were played with because some of the tabs are more worn than others, indicating which were the preferred outfits. This creates a weak point, however, which I will be reinforcing on the back of the clothing along the fold of the tab. I’m using Japanese tissue adhered with wheat starch paste to treat those areas.

Shores: Did the artist use other attachment methods besides the tabs?

Hawkins: Benson used techniques other than tabs to attach the dresses. One is almost like a strip of paper, and the doll slides underneath it and it wraps around her shoulders. Another technique was that the artist cut out the dress to allow the head to come through.

Shores: Look at those tiny hats! How do the hats fit on the paper dolls?

Hawkins: The same slit technique was used to allow the hats to slip onto the paper doll’s head.

Shores: What can you tell us about this envelope that is part of the collection?

Hawkins: From examining the full Frank Weston Benson, each set of paper dolls came with an envelope. Some of them, like this one, appear to have been recycled from a previous letter to house the paper dolls. The name “Rebecca” appears to be written along the base of the envelope.

Shores: What other treatments did you have to do to make sure the paper dolls were ready for display?

Hawkins: The overall condition of all the pieces within this collection is good overall. There are some pieces with pressure-sensitive tape that I will need to remove and mend before placing in a rotation and/or place in their new housing. There was not much dirt or grime on the surface of the individual pieces, but I do clean the recto and verso with a soft bristle brush. If I need to use a smoke sponge on the verso, I will, but sparingly as they are fragile. The most prominent issue is the weakness of the folds on the tabs. I will go through all the outfits and check all the tabs and more than likely reinforce all of them from the verso with Japanese tissue adhered with wheat starch paste.

Shores: Can you explain how the dolls are mounted for display?

Hawkins: The collection of paper dolls will be rotated out periodically to protect the delicate paper. This will also allow viewers to see more of the collection on subsequent returns to the museum. Each paper doll element is mounted to an archival display board. It is crucial that they do not move during install and deinstall. To ensure their stability, I added small additional hinges to the verso of the paper dolls that are added temporarily and will be removed after each rotation.

Shores: Finally, can you explain how you plan to support and protect the paper dolls moving forward?

Hawkins: To maintain the collection, we created a custom housing system. Each paper doll has a collection of clothes. On archival board, each article of clothing was placed in a polyester L-sleeve so each piece is easily visible. Each piece is labeled with their corresponding accession number above the L-sleeve in pencil.

Hawkins [cont.]: For ease of use, an overall picture of the paper dolls on their housing board will be adhered to the cover page on top of each paper doll layer. This shows each piece in that specific collection, as some paper dolls have two to three layers of clothing on the archival boards. Having this photo will be helpful when the pieces are placed back in storage after each rotation. We will know exactly where it goes when it is returned. Additionally, two micro-spatulas will be included with the housing for us to use to take the paper dolls in and out and a note to wear gloves when handling the pieces. That way, the risk of damage will be minimal.

Conservation work like this is made possible by The Sara Giles Moore Foundation. To view the Benson paper dolls, visit the High’s reimagined American Art galleries when they reopen on July 3, 2026.

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From Playthings to Protected Art: A Look into the High’s Benson Paper Dolls was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Julia Forbes, Associate Director, Institutional Research, High Museum of Art

On June 3, 1962, tragedy struck Atlanta and the High Museum of Art. Earlier that year the parent organization of the High, the Atlanta Art Association, had organized a trip to see the great art museums of Europe. Only members of the Association and their families were invited to make the twenty-seven-day trip. They were to return home filled with exciting ideas about how Atlanta could improve and expand its art museum. On the return journey, disaster struck when their plane crashed at Orly Field near Paris, killing one hundred twenty-two Atlanta Art Association members including the Association’s president, Del Paige. [1] At the time, this was the worst single commercial plane crash in history. The loss both devastated and galvanized the Atlanta arts community. James Carmichael, the new president of the Atlanta Art Association, began a memorial fundraising campaign. The French government loaned Whistler’s Mother by James McNeill Whistler and La Madeleine de la Veilleuse by Georges de La Tour for a memorial exhibition at the High, which thousands of people visited in 1963. In 1968 for the opening of the new Memorial Arts Center (now the Woodruff Arts Center), the French government gifted the Atlanta community with Auguste Rodin’s The Shade, a bronze sculpture that now rests outside the High surrounded by a memorial to those who died.

The Orly crash had a profound impact on the High’s collection building. The museum received many donations of art in memory of those lost. One of the most significant gifts came from New Yorkers Fred and Rita Richman. The Richmans had a small sewing factory in Atlanta on University Avenue and were inspired by their employees to do something for the city after the tragic loss of so many of its arts community. After meeting with the museum’s then-director, Gudmund Vigtel, the Richmans gifted two hundred forty-eight pieces from their collection of sub-Saharan African art to the High. [2]

Watch this short video, shot in 2014, to hear Fred and Rita Richman talk about their gift to the High Museum of Art.

Fred and Rita were both native New Yorkers. After serving in World War II, Fred returned home to join his father’s wholesale textile business and married Rita in 1946. In 1957, Fred founded Richloom Fabrics Group, now a three-generation family-owned and operated home furnishing business. Soon after, Fred and Rita began traveling together and collecting art along the way, including Greek, Roman, and Middle Eastern antiquities; pieces from Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans; and manuscripts, jewelry, and architectural fragments. After seventy-four years of marriage, Fred died in 2020, and Rita followed soon after in 2021. The Richmans’ son, Jim (Great Neck) Richman, has led the family company since 1991 and currently serves on the High’s board of directors.

When the Richmans made their transformative gift to the High in 1972, the museum’s African Art collection was quite small. In fact, until 1971, the High owned only one piece of African art, a D’mba sculpture made by a Baga artist from Guinea given by Helena Rubinstein in 1953. Just a year before the Richmans’ donation, Atlanta collectors Dr. and Mrs. Leslie L. Rood gave the High over fifty works of African art, mostly from the Ivory Coast. [3]

The Richman Collection made its debut in April 1973 in the exhibition A Treasure for Atlanta, which ran through the summer in the High’s home at the time, the Memorial Arts Building. [4] The museum held an opening party to celebrate the gift and published a small catalogue to introduce the pieces to the public. The High’s then-director Gudmund Vigtel wrote in his foreword for the catalogue, “to gain a group of objects for our permanent collection of this scope and quality is nothing less than a landmark in the history of this Museum.” [5] The High’s first formal African Art gallery opened in 1977.

The Richmans followed their initial gift in 1972 with many more. Another group of fifty-five pieces came in 1984 after the opening of the Richard Meier–designed museum building (now called the Stent Family Wing). This inspired the publication of another catalogue to highlight the growth of the Richman Collection. In 1991, the Richmans gave ten more works, in honor of the retirement of then-director Gudmund Vigtel.

One of the unique features of the Richman Collection is their interest in collecting pairs of figures, couples, and twins. The Richmans actively sought this type of object throughout their collecting journey, including, for example, sculptures of couples that were used to memorialize important men and women. In addition, the Richmans’ interest in Nigerian and Congolese objects has given the High a true strength in its holdings of works from these regions. In honor of the High’s centennial this fall, the museum will reinstall its African Art collection with a focus on works from Nigeria.

Throughout 2001 and 2002, the Richmans finalized their intention to give the remainder of their African collection to the High upon their deaths. They also set up an endowment fund for the purchase of African works of art — the Fred and Rita Richman Special Initiatives Endowment Fund for African Art. Importantly, they even provided funds for the creation of an endowed curatorial position in African art in 2001: the Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art, which is currently held by Lauren Tate Baeza. The endowment fund continues to make important acquisitions possible as Baeza seeks stellar works of art to grow the High’s African Art collection.

As the High celebrates its centennial this year, we feel proud knowing that the Richman family has been part of our history for more than half of those one hundred years. Of the over 1,200 works of art in the African collection today, nearly half were donated or made possible by Fred and Rita Richman. As the High’s current director, Rand Suffolk, wrote when he learned of Fred’s death in 2020, “It’s not a stretch to credit Fred, and his wife Rita, with single-handedly transforming the High’s commitment to African art. Their numerous gifts to the museum formed the foundation of that collection, and their ongoing financial support has shaped its growth and importance for decades. From our galleries to endowing the position of Curator of African Art, the Richmans have touched nearly every facet of our African art collection. It is a remarkable legacy.” [6]

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Notes:

[1] Ann Uhry Abrams, Explosion at Orly: The Disaster That Transformed Atlanta (Avion Press, 2002), x.

[2] High Museum of Art Annual Report, July 1, 1969–June 30, 1973, High Museum of Art Archives.

[3] High Museum of Art Annual Report, July 1, 1969–June 30, 1973.

[4] “The Black Board,” The Atlanta Voice, April 7, 1973, 5.

[5] African Tribal Art from the Fred and Rita Richman Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (High Museum of Art, 1973), 4.

[6] Rand Suffolk, email to the Board of Directors, July 27, 2020, High Museum of Art Archives.

Building the Collection: The Richman Collection of African Art was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the “High Notes” series, Matthew Shorten bridges the worlds of music and art through works in the High’s collection.

By Matthew Shorten, Curatorial Research Associate, High Museum of Art

My path to working in museums and studying art unfolded from my musical life. As a lifelong musician, mainly a composer and tenor these days, I have always found it impossible to separate music from the way I experience, write about, and think about art. When viewing art and visiting museums, my eye is drawn toward works that blend these two art forms and disciplines — paintings with sheet music, sculptures featuring musical instruments, immersive installations that activate all of our senses. This new blog series, High Notes, provides a space to explore art and music in tandem, and to consider the ways we encounter objects with our eyes and our ears.

As Richard Leppert, a leading scholar on this artistic intersection, writes, “Reference to music occurs in visual art not because musical sound exists but because it has meaning.” [1] This call to consider music in visual terms, and art in aural terms, enables us to discover the intricate meanings and symbolisms within one of the High’s extraordinary European paintings. But first, let’s time travel for a moment and put ourselves in the shoes of this painting’s seventeenth-century viewers.

We find ourselves in Rome in the early 1600s. The art world has been transformed by one of art history’s most illustrious figures: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). In the wake of Caravaggio’s reinvention of the art form — focusing on chiaroscuro, or the interplay of shadow and light, to impart maximal theatricality and emotional freight into painted images — art is never quite the same again. Caravaggio’s characteristic “tenebrist” (or “dark”) style is so influential that he continues to gain students and followers well into the eighteenth century. Such artists, hailing from all over continental Europe, become aptly named “Caravaggists” (Caravaggisti in Italian; Caravaggesques in French).

Historically speaking, this moment also marks the beginning of the Baroque era, as the Renaissance passes the baton — a global transition with an Italian epicenter in both music and art. This period sees changes and developments in the construction of musical instruments, performance styles, and creative impulses that inspire new works. Just as painters created scenes with greater dynamism and emotional entanglement, in stark contrast to the poise and stillness of Renaissance painting, composers and musicians created works overflowing with ornamentation, virtuosity, drama, and spectacle. In short, these were thrilling times! This vital context allows us to look with fresh eyes at Valentin de Boulogne’s Apollo Disguised as a Shepherd, an oil painting on view at the High.

As with all great works of art, this painting raises lots of questions. Firstly, how do we know this is Apollo? The Greek god of music is usually riding through the heavens in a swan-drawn chariot, wearing free-falling fabrics — if he’s wearing clothes at all! — and carrying extravagant implements like a lyre or an archer’s bow. However, in the somber world of Valentin’s painting, something tells us that this is no ordinary shepherd: the laurel wreath, Apollo’s symbol par excellence. In fact, as we look again, we can see satin and velvet garments beneath his sheepskin vest — princely tastes for a lowly shepherd. But why would a god dress this way? And why is Apollo holding a wind instrument instead of a lyre, the stringed instrument with which he is synonymous?

Several ancient stories might justify his attire, but the most likely source is Ovid’s Metamorphoses — specifically, a passage in which Apollo, tasked with watching over his herd, becomes so absorbed in his playing that Hermes is able to steal the animals and hide them in a cave. [2] This might explain our Apollo’s facial expression, dejected upon discovering the theft. [3] However, because many of Valentin’s surviving works are allegorical, and frequently indicate his own investment and fluency in music, I believe there is more behind Apollo’s expression and the choice to give him a wind instrument instead of his famous lyre.

Specifically, Valentin has given Apollo a tenor recorder, an instrument from the artist’s own time that would have been immediately recognizable for seventeenth-century viewers. [4] It is, however, anachronistic for the subject matter at hand — a Greek god might be best suited to the aulos, an instrument with its own divine origins. [5] If there’s one thing we know for certain, it’s that artists of this period knew their Ovid inside and out. So Valentin’s choice to revamp this ancient subject with a modern instrument is telling.

To move forward artistically, Valentin goes backward historically! In ancient Athens, the debate concerning the relative merits and moral consequences of stringed and wind instruments was both philosophical and political. Even Plato weighed in on the subject, claiming that players of wind instruments — as followers of Dionysus, the deity of chaos and irrationality — should be banned from the city lest they corrupt its moral fabric [6]. Dionysus, as an infamous counterpose to Apollo, has longstanding ties to wind instruments, making Valentin’s choice more curious still.

By giving Apollo a recorder — painted so realistically that we feel we could pluck it from the canvas and play “Hot Cross Buns” ourselves — Valentin enforces a long-overdue punishment, inspired by another fragment from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the musical contest between Apollo, playing the lyre, and the satyr Marsyas, playing the aulos. Apollo’s punishment of Marsyas in victory — flaying the satyr alive for his hubris in challenging a god — won him no favor, and somehow the repentant, pained expression on Apollo’s face in Valentin’s painting feels inseparable from this episode.

But the hidden meanings don’t end there! In the social context of Baroque Italy, Valentin has given Apollo an instrument associated with consorts and ensemble playing. That is, the god of music is no longer a soloist but instead one of many in the group. Apollo being the only figure in this painting makes the work feel even lonelier considering the absence of fellow band members — a sense of isolation made only more acute when the work is compared to the artist’s best-known scenes of music making and performance. Take, for instance, A Musical Party, with its lively multi-instrumentalist band caught in a carousing jam session (with almost-legible sheet music perched on the lute player’s lap!). Apollo’s solitude lies bleak and cold against such a dynamic backdrop.

But can we hear Valentin’s painting after all? The role of sound in this work is an open question, and it all hinges on what moment in time we find ourselves in as we encounter the painting. Is Apollo about to play, leaving us forever suspended in anticipation of his recorder performance to come? Has he just finished playing, leaving his final tones reverberating in eternity, too faintly for us to hear? Or is he in the middle of a performance, given the primed position of his fingers on the holes of the recorder? It remains unclear which moment Valentin had in mind, but this temporal and sonic dilemma is, in my view, exactly what the artist wanted us to meditate on. He invites us to become not just viewers but listeners, to use our own complex aural imaginations and inner ears, sharpened by our cultural surroundings past, present, and future, to bring his work to life.

You can hear more from Matthew at the video below:

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References

[1] Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Social-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3.

[2] Marina Mojana, Valentin de Boulogne (Eikonos, 1989), 202.

[3] Annick Lemoine, Keith Christiansen, Patrizia Cavazzini, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, and Gianni Papi, Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2016), 2.

[4] For more on the history of the recorder, and how it reached the style and construction depicted in Valentin de Boulogne’s painting, see Wendy Powers, “The Development of the Recorder,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 1, 2003, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/recd/hd_recd.htm.

[5] The aulos, a double-reeded pipe, was said to have been created by the goddess Athena and later cast down from the heavens after she saw her reflection while playing and found the sight of her puffed-out cheeks unseemly. For more on the origins of the aulos and what it came to signify, in the ancient Mediterranean world and its afterlives, see Pauline A. LeVen, “New Music and its Myths: Athenaeus’ Reading of the Aulos Revolution (‘Deipnosophistae’ 14.616E-617F),” Journal of Hellenic Studies 130 (2010): 35–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41722529.

[6] Plato, Republic 3.10, trans. Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press,1937), 1:249–51: “Well, will you admit to the city flute-makers and flute-players? … We are not innovating, my friend, in preferring Apollo and the instruments of Apollo to Marsyas and his instruments.”

High Notes: Listening with Our Eyes: “Apollo Disguised as a Shepherd” by Valentin de Boulogne… was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Kate McLeod, Assistant Director of Education, High Museum of Art

Throughout May, student artwork is on view in the High’s Greene Family Education Center. The exhibition invites museum visitors to engage with art created by students in Georgia’s Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ).

The Department of Juvenile Justice is a Georgia state agency that supports justice-involved youth through a network of twenty-six facilities and ninety-eight court service offices across the state. Working with juvenile courts and community partners like the High, DJJ provides supervision, rehabilitation, and educational opportunities for young people up to age twenty-one. As Georgia’s 181st school district, the agency also offers students in custody the opportunity to earn a high school diploma and develop career and vocational skills. Each year, DJJ serves more than 52,000 students through programs that include probation, short- and long-term detention, and other court-directed services.

Due to increased collaboration between DJJ and the High over the past year, this year’s exhibition includes ninety-five works of art — a 350 percent increase from last year. Students visited the High on field trips, participated in art-making workshops, and received art supplies to use within DJJ facilities. Students from sixteen of the agency’s twenty-six facilities are represented in the exhibition.

In 2013, then governor Nathan Deal signed House Bill 242, a justice system reform initiative focused in part on increasing student engagement within DJJ. Among its many initiatives was expanded access to cultural field trips and educational experiences. Since then, the High has welcomed more than 400 students and family members to the museum’s galleries and workshops. Each year, the museum hosts a student exhibition and certificate ceremony that brings students and their families together to celebrate the creativity, growth, and perspectives of these young artists.

The program is called Art181, with “181” referencing Georgia’s 181st school district, and it is generously supported by a local foundation.

Over the years, the High’s education team has also participated in trauma-informed training led by DJJ staff to help shape tours and workshops for participating students. Research has shown that arts engagement can support confidence, self-expression, and community connection for incarcerated individuals, including young people. Through Art181, the High continues its commitment to ensuring that all students — regardless of the name or setting of their school — have opportunities to experience original works of art and create artwork of their own.

At the 2017 student exhibition reception, one student shared that although he did not initially see himself as an artist, creating art helped build his confidence and inspired him to pursue other goals. Another participant reflected, “This opportunity gives me confidence to push my limits and explore even more. Knowing that my painting is displayed in the High Museum of Art gives me a real feeling of accomplishment.”

At the April 2026 celebration, one student offered a powerful reflection: “We are not inspired by art. Art is inspired by us.”

The Art181 student exhibition remains on view during the museum’s public hours through May 31.

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References:

Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice FY2024 Annual Report.
https://djj.georgia.gov/djj-annual-reports-0

PEW Report. “Georgia’s 2013 Juvenile Justice Reform: New Policies to Reduce Secure Confinement, Costs, and Recidivism,” July 10, 2013.
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/0001/01/01/georgias-2013-juvenile-justice-reform

Vignati, Joe, and Dan Edwards. “Georgia Reforms Gave Us More Choices, Better Results.” Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, July 18, 2018.
https://jjie.org/2018/07/18/georgia-reforms-gave-us-more-choices-better-results

Littman, Danielle Maude, and Shannon M. Sliva. “Prison Arts Program Outcomes: A Scoping Review.” Journal of Correctional Education 71, no. 3 (December 2020): 54–82.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1335628

Greene, Justice. “How Can the Arts Help Incarcerated Individuals and Recidivism Rates?” Virginia Tech School of Performing Arts Blog, November 28, 2023.
https://sopa.vt.edu/creative-connections/2023/sopa-bloggreenefall23.html

Engaging Georgia’s Incarcerated Youth through Art181 was originally published in High Museum of Art on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.