The ninth annual Boxed In/Break Out features the unique sculptures of Abby Edwards, whose work explores the human experience through absurdity, humor, and child-like curiosity. Her installation Dirt and Stardust examines the relationship between humankind’s inner worlds and the outer cosmos through bold and colorful compositions.

Dr. Katie Geha, Director of the Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia, selected Edwards’ proposal, noting: “Abby Edwards proposal for Boxed In/Break Out was accomplished and realized. Her works have a playful approach to the unknown, UFOs, and the awe that accompanies the exploration of the unknown. Her sculptures, exaggerated in form and color, display an absurdist examination of our inner and outer galaxies. Her work will read particularly well from the street and inspire joy in the casual passer-by.” Recognizing that the unknown can be an unsettling topic, Edwards ultimately invites curiosity, inspiring viewers to ask questions, and reignite their imaginations.

Of One Mind is a collaboration between local artists Autumn Gary and Alexis Javier around the theme of “oneness,” an approach outlined in the Ohèn:ton Karihwatéhkwen, or the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. In this invocation, participants express gratitude for life-sustaining forces and elements, effectively recognizing humans’ inseparable bond to the natural and spiritual worlds. Each verse concludes with the following refrain: “Now our minds are one.”

Gary and Javier’s original sculptural installation will speak to this idea, highlighting art’s ability to act as a unified, timeless, and inclusive language. A series of abstract sculptures will demonstrate our symbiotic relationship to the cosmos and the recurring myths that connect the ancient past, our present moment, and the future. This exhibition will also include interactive sensory elements to empower and welcome all visitors. Finally, Gary will create a series of outdoor sculptures for the Jepson’s terraces around the theme of nature as guide.

Honoring beloved Cuban-born, American fashion designer Isabel Toledo, A Love Letter is a posthumous homage to the enduring resonance of her work, curated in close collaboration with her husband, artist and fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo. An innovative spirit, Isabel engineered shapes and patterns to cocoon the body, providing comfort, structure, and ease of movement. Her designs were guided by emotions, rather than concepts, which she translated into elegant, impeccably crafted garments — radical in their construction yet supremely wearable. For more than three decades, the Toledos intertwined their creative processes, acting as each other’s muse, advocate, confidant, and collaborator. The friction between Isabel’s impassioned functionalism and Ruben’s fantasy-prone humor was inspirational, pushing both to greater heights. A Love Letter features a selection of Isabel’s designs displaying her mastery of technique, fabric, shape, and color, complemented by new works by Ruben created exclusively for the exhibition and a short film highlighting Isabel’s practice and memorializing their unique relationship.

One hundred and sixty years have passed since President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. With the nation in the grips of a bloody Civil War, he declared that enslaved people in the rebelling Southern states would be freed as of January 1, 1863. Three months later, sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910) began working on his statuette, The Freedman, a response to the promise and limitations of the Emancipation Proclamation.

This exhibition will feature the work of seven living artists – Sadie Barnette, Alfred Conteh, Maya Freelon, Hugh Hayden, Letitia Huckaby, Jeffrey Meris, and Sable Elyse Smith. It will present their different perspectives about definitions of freedom today. Collectively, they will illuminate how a critical moment in history continues to have lasting legacies.

Friends of African American Arts Members’ Small Works Exhibition 2024

Telfair Museums’ Friends of African American Arts (FAAA) formed in 2007 with a mandate to “raise public awareness and to promote development and understanding of art by African Americans.” Over the years, FAAA has evolved into a vibrant community of artists, collectors, and art enthusiasts, and in 2016 initiated an annual members’ small works exhibition in the Jepson Center’s community gallery. The current exhibition features work in varied media – painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed media – by nearly 30 current FAAA members. The 2024 exhibition theme and title are inspired by Telfair’s presentation of the traveling exhibition Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation, currently on view, and will open in conjunction with the 2024 Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Lecture.

Monira Al Qadiri’s multidisciplinary practice is rooted in the culture and histories of the Persian Gulf. Her works examine the region’s complex past and circumstances that have contributed to rapid change. In Holy Quarter, a film and sculptural installation, she explores the blending of myth and purported fact. The film centers on the exploits of British explorer Harry St. John Philby, who journeyed to the “Empty Quarter” of the Arabian Peninsula in the 1930s in search of the legendary lost region of Ubar, described in local lore as having been destroyed by divine punishment. Rather than discovering this ancient civilization, Philby encountered remnants of a dramatic meteorite strike, which formed black glass “pearls” from melted sand. Juxtaposed with Al Qadiri’s sculptural evocations of these pearls, the film is narrated by the spirit of the meteor, which warns of impending ecological disaster at the hands of man while offering hope for the future through collective efforts at reversal.

Dan Flavin: Works from Dia Art Foundation is a focused exploration of American artist Dan Flavin’s practice during the period spanning 1962 to 1974. Flavin was a significant figure in American Minimalism despite his active rejection of the label. In 1963 he began establishing a simplified formal language based on interactions between light and space, which generated a system of material and conceptual parameters — or “situational” phenomenon — through which his works could exist. Using commercially available lamps and standard-issue fluorescent bulbs, the artist discovered a rich vocabulary of possibilities and infinite variations. The featured works encapsulate pivotal moments and key series in Flavin’s oeuvre, concurrently serving as a testament to the enduring relationship between the artist and Dia Art Foundation.

Artist and designer Olimpia Zagnoli is world-renowned for her iconic pop-deco illustrations that frequently appear in major magazines, books, merchandise, and advertisements. Zagnoli’s process begins in the sketchbook, where her drawings take inspiration from her everyday surroundings and happenstance encounters, sharpening into stylized shapes imbued with vibrant colors that enhance their communicative power. For her site-specific installation in the museum’s public-facing Jewel Box vitrines, Zagnoli transposes her bold images from their two-dimensional format into large-scale sculptures with careful consideration of every line, angle, and hue. Zagnoli populates each space with a portrait of an invented character enshrined in a layered technicolor composition that plays with the rules of the grid. Inviting passersby into her creative universe, she creates a trail of graphic vignettes along the museum’s façade, imparting the impact of image-making while celebrating the elasticity of our identities.

George Clinton is a cultural icon whose contributions to the arts span seven decades. He revolutionized music and performance as the bandleader of Parliament-Funkadelic, collaborating across genres and mediums with outlandish styling, spectacular set designs, and pioneering artistry. While on tour in the 1990s, Clinton began applying his creativity to drawing and painting, developing a surreal, hallucinogenic, maximalist aesthetic that riffs on the characters, mythology, and language of P-Funk. His artistic approach is defined by improvisation, experimentation, and innovation — refusing to be bound by traditional expectations or societal norms. This landmark exhibition focuses on the wildly unconventional works Clinton has made in the years since, showcasing his inventiveness in the context of a fine art museum for the first time. A true visionary, Clinton presents a multidimensional perspective on Black experience in the U.S., inviting us all to enter a world that is fantastical, optimistic, and full of funk.

“If a tree falls in the Metaverse, does it make a noise?” Posing this question in their ongoing project Arboretum, artist collaborators Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra contemplate the intersection of the digital and natural worlds. The series was sparked by the global isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent escalation of virtual mediation between people and their physical world. Amassing a collection of digital images of flora in their immediate environment, the artists used select photos as the basis for hyperrealistic paintings on shaped canvases. The resulting works resist the instant gratification of digital technology, favoring hands-on, labor-intensive techniques that require months to complete. By incorporating analog representations of pixels and glitches, the artists remind the viewer of the inescapable intervention of data and algorithms that inform our daily choices and the ways we see and interpret the world.

Before televisions, computers, and high-speed internet, everyday Americans engaged with image-based storytelling through illustration. Illustration is art created to be reproduced for books, magazines, periodicals, advertisements, and other printed media. Designed covers—based on finished paintings—by artists like Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) regularly reached thousands of homes via mass-produced publications such as The Saturday Evening Post. Celebrating the charming, wholesome, and seemingly commonplace, Rockwell enjoyed a successful career, which unfolded against a string of era-defining crises and revolutions, including two World Wars, the Great Depression, struggles over Civil Rights, and space exploration. Through illustration, Rockwell and his peers chronicled the transformation and challenging of ideals in the 20th-century, sometimes using childhood to explore complex subject matter. By tapping into American adults’ nostalgia and their associations of childhood with innocence, these artists made subjects from consumer goods to wartime politics more appealing. Through advertisements and calendar illustrations, magazine covers, and story artwork, Norman Rockwell & Peers: Illustrating Childhood regards childhood as an expressive and revealing lens to view an evolving and often complex American society.

Cleo the Project Space presents HAMBONE, an exhibition featuring the works of Brandon English, Y. Malik Jalal, and Kare Williams. In the individual practices of these artists, the weight of attendance is held with penitence and celebration. The works in this exhibition form a vocabulary of performance and a grammar of rapture and rupture. In addition to his prolific painting practice, Kare Williams’ interest in Go-Go music led him to Tony, a character from his hometown of Washington, DC. Go-Go is known for its distinctive “pocket” beat and call-and-response interaction with the audience. Go-Go thrives in excess and is not bound by venue or instrument—the pocket is all it needs. 

Within an event centered historical tradition, the phenomenological is often abandoned — testimony becomes a restorative act. Each artist assumes the tenuous position of participant, nearing reenactment. Much of the work is time-based, incorporating footage, archives, and performance; these are ongoing, cyclical, and implicating. The political production and reproduction of the image is a shared theme, explored with varying degrees of clarity. The display and exhibition of archival work, as in the practice of Brandon English, are critical. The integrity of the work hinges on how, or even whether, it is publicly viewed. In many ways, the gallery itself can undermine the work. His work refuses the audience, with partial inclusion or a fully present yet inaccessible, emphasizing the significance of evidence placed in plain view. 

While considering English’s and Williams’ approach to performance, Hambone arose. Striking the body to provide percussion, like that of step teams, Hambone refers to Juba, an ecstatic African American dance tradition from the antebellum era with apparent roots in West Africa and inextricable from the American theater, film, and cartoons is the blackface vaudeville Hambone character. And, of course, stewing ham bones to enrich otherwise meatless meals with savory nutrient-dense marrow, a staple in the African American culinary tradition. It is all also relevant to my role in this exhibition, as I have looked to them for aim. The libidinal, as in appetite, the metabolic, and the erotic, not seduction or representation, but rather the subcutaneous is what is at play here — that which breaks the skin. 

-Y. Malik Jalal

Opening Reception: November 15th, 5-8pm

A boundary between the known and the unknown. An untamed landscape, new and at the same time, nostalgic. An inner journey being explored. Time is blurred and sagging. The weight of this struggle is balanced by a new love, a persistent joy of discovering new limits in the size of our hearts.

Trish Andersen and Michael Porten have stepped into a Wild new Frontier for their first exhibition together. Tackling what it is to be both artists and parents, collaboration is given fresh meaning as their son Walt turns one-year-old on the eve of this show. A wild ride, to say the least, parenting asks one to speed ahead while having little chance to look back. Time stands still and also seems to catapult, prompting excitement and anxiety, igniting instinctive survival skills.