New Worlds—Georgia Women to Watch 2023
Anila Quayyum Agha, Shanequa Gay, Victoria Dugger, Namwon Choi, Marianna Dixon Williams (All Event Photography by Stanchez Kenyatta, Courtesy of Atlanta Contemporary)
New Worlds: Georgia Women to Watch unites five emerging Georgia women artists contemplating a strange and uncertain future. In a moment of dramatic cultural, political and environmental tumult, New Worlds—Georgia Women to Watch offers an opportunity to speculate on what our shared destinies might hold. The exhibition, organized by the Georgia Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, examines how our societal conditions have impacted artists’ visions for the future or inspired them to create alternative realities. When women artists envision a different world, how does that look?
New Worlds was co-curated by Melissa Messina and Sierra King and was presented at Atlanta Contemporary January 27-June 4, 2023.
The Women to Watch exhibition is a highly-competitive exhibition held approximately every three years. A Georgia-based curator is invited to select a group of five Georgia women artists whose work fits within the exhibition’s theme. The program is designed to increase the visibility of, and critical response to, promising women artists. Additionally, the program seeks to incorporate high quality art professionals into the committees’ activities. Women to Watch is an exhibition program that features underrepresented and emerging women artists. The previous Women to Watch exhibition in 2020 was curated by the High Museum of Art’s Wieland family curator of modern and contemporary art, Michael Rooks.
The New Worlds: Georgia Women to Watch exhibition is an important move toward greater equity in the arts when major art museums across the United States have devoted the majority of their collection holdings to work by male artists.
With a track record of supporting women artists (76% of its exhibiting artists are female), the non-profit alternative art space Atlanta Contemporary has a mission that aligns perfectly with the Georgia Committee’s goal to support and advocate for women artists in Georgia.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Sierra King + Melissa Messina
Melissa Messina is an independent curator, curatorial advisor, and curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate. She has curated solo shows for such esteemed female artists as Uta Barth, Lynda Benglis, Chakaia Booker, Clare Rojas, Shinique Smith and Ursula Von Rydingsvard to name a few; and she has also authored essays on numerous women artists including: Candida Alvarez, Alison Elizabeth Taylor and Trish Tillman, among others. She has been a recent guest curator at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA, and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA, and was the co-curator of the 2018 and 2020 Bermuda Biennials. In 2017, Messina co-curated Magnetic Fields, Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, an intergenerational exhibition celebrating abstraction by Black female artists that toured from Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL. Her curatorial research has been funded by Creative Time | Warhol Foundation, the Stuart A. Rose Library at Emory University and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. In 2020 she co-founded Living Trust for the Arts, an organization that specializes in legacy planning and professional services for artists.
Sierra King is an Atlanta-based artist, photographer and archivist. Her creative and arts administration work is dedicated to documenting, preserving and archiving the work of Black women artists. She worked as the Lead Photo Archivist for the Kathleen Cleaver Papers before it was acquired by Emory University and is currently building and preserving the archives of printmaker Jasmine Nicole Williams and director Ebony Blanding. Sierra was awarded the Billops-Hatch Fellowship Award to continue research for Build Your Archive, an interactive assessment plan to help Black women artists build their archives in real time. As of February 2021, she is a Hambidge Cross Pollination Art Lab Studio Resident and National Black Arts Festival Micro-Grant Recipient.
Event Photos
