2011 EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

As part of Hammonds House Museum's continued commitment to the cultivation of emerging artists the Art Auction Merit Award exhibition will feature an artist selected from the Museum's annual Art Auction.  The artist will be chosen by a trio of Museum professionals based in the local arts community and given a solo exhibition during the late spring early summer museum schedule.

Daniel Minter's art is an art of reclamation. His images -- in painting, in sculpture -- call back the beauty of our darkest skins, the plush of our lips, the fullness of our sight. It is an art of close attention. Almost hyper-real. A realism edged forward to its most essential characteristic -- spirit. Wide oval eyes ever-watchful from all the realms. This is mystery speaking a plain language. Here spirit and flesh combine on canvas, in wood, in iron and bronze. Minter's figures are both history and myth. His bodies, big-boned and full-labored, have an uncommon delicacy and  a heavy grace. Minter's art is a protective art. And an art of protection. Firm lines. Crossed roads. Boxes. Square things. And the open circles of offering. The discipline of love.   


July 11th - September 11th , 2011
Michael D. Harris

Michael Harris' work revolves around his emotional and political consciousness. Growing up, Harris was always aware of issues dealing with race, integration and struggles. It is in his artwork and his studies of art history where the expression of these thoughts and feelings come together.

The value of education and the importance of a positive future were strongly encouraged within Harris' family. It was while he was attending college when he developed a social awareness. In 1979, while working on his MFA in painting, Harris joined the group AfriCOBRA,  African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. The experiences and dialogues that were formed between he and this community of artists had an important influence on his work. He has shown his work all over the United States, in the Caribbean, and in Europe. His influences are varied, ranging from Gauguin and Motherwell to Betye Saar and Nigerian fieldwork. Harris has continued to develop socially relevant work that has conceptually matured through his study of African and African American art. Merging two disciplines of art and art history, Michael Harris creates a body of work, both culturally sensitive and artistically moving. 

September 25th  - November 13th,
David Johnson: Photographer

At age 20, in 1946, David Johnson traveled from Jacksonville, Florida to became Ansel Adam's first African American student at the California School of Fine Arts (currently the San Francisco Art Institute). Adams counseled him to "photograph what you know best". And, with a camera won at age 14 in a contest, he began to make photographs that documented African American culture of the 1940's and 1950's and the civil rights movement of the 1960's. He also photographed important political and cultural leaders such as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, A. Phillip Randolph, and the poet Langston Hughes. Johnson devoted many years to documenting  San Francisco's Fillmore District, which was in the 1940's and 50's, a vibrant center of African American Jazz. In clubs that were long famous but have sadly vanished, Johnson photographed stars such as Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Nat "King" Cole, and Billie Holiday. Much of his work celebrates the vibrancy of this neighborhood and its role as historical jazz center and home to an African American population that had migrated from the Southern states to seek work in the war industries. Johnson is the only living photographer represented in the book Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era.  With an impressive photographic career, which spans over 60 years, he joins the ranks of great photographers with Southern roots, who have made enduring contributions to the history of American photography.

November 20, 2011 - January 29, 2012
An exhibition celebrating the beauty and power of
Contemporary African Art and Atlanta's  African community



An exhibition celebrating the beauty and power of
Contemporary African Art and Atlanta's  African community