Four Atlanta Artists Put Southern Landscape in Focus
New South, Ground Truth at MoCA Arlington features four Atlanta artists exploring Southern landscape, memory, and belonging.
Oct 6, 2026 · 2 min read
A new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington puts four Atlanta-based artists in dialogue: Sheila Pree Bright, Michi Meko, Paul Stephen Benjamin, and Shanequa Gay. New South, Ground Truth opened October 3 and remains on view through January 24, 2027. Karen Comer Lowe curated the exhibition as part of the museum’s Assembly 2026 biennial. [1]
According to the museum, the presentation spans photography, abstraction, painting, and installation, examining the Piedmont South through questions of memory, power, and history. Its curatorial framework connects landscape with the experiences of Black communities, the histories attached to places, and the possibility of imagining them differently. [1]
Those are substantial questions for an exhibition to take on. They are also relevant well beyond a gallery. A location in a photograph, music video, or painting can look like a setting while carrying information the viewer does not immediately recognize. Who lived there? What was removed? Whose account of the place became the familiar one?
For Le Cadre, that makes this exhibition worth following. Southern creativity deserves attention at the level of individual decisions and particular places. A regional label may help someone find the work, but it cannot do the work of looking. These four names are a starting point for discovery, not interchangeable representatives of a single experience.
The range of media offers another reason to pay attention. Photography and abstraction ask different things of a viewer. A photograph can invite scrutiny of what is visible; an abstract work can ask us to attend to gesture, material, or association. Bringing different practices into one conversation creates room to consider how a subject changes with the form used to approach it.
This is an introduction based on the museum’s published information, not an on-site review. The exhibition’s premise invites creators to examine their own use of place. Before treating a neighborhood, landscape, or landmark as a visual resource, consider what you know about it—and what a person connected to it might see that you have missed.