Georgia Women to Watch

For the 2023 iteration of the ongoing Women to Watch series, the Georgia Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) invited guest curators Sierra King and Melissa Messina to select five woman-identifying Georgia-connected artists whose work responds to the question:

When women artists envision a different world, how does that look?

With over 60 artists initially considered, and 16 studio visits conducted, these 5 artists represent a diverse range of artistic excellence, age, backgrounds, and geographic locations. Their practices push the boundaries of their chosen media and the exhibition’s thematic inquiry.

Anila Quayyum Agha (Augusta), Namwon Choi (Savannah), Victoria Dugger (Athens), Shanequa Gay (Atlanta), and Marianna Dixon Williams (Augusta) each employ an experiential, installation-based practice that allows the viewer to charge each space with their personal physical presence and emotional and intellectual considerations. In this way, the viewer becomes the subject of the exhibition. A collaborative call-and-response to visions of the future is, after all, what determines possibility.

In New Worlds, such visions include young women honored as goddesses, vulnerabilities celebrated as sources of strength, and our relationship to the landscape re-imagined and redefined. The ancient and timeless symbol of the pyramid illuminates our way into these multivalent environments. Each artist presents time as a poetic, bendable, cyclical element. In so doing, they collectively remind us that we must consider the past – transform its ills and cultivate its beauty – to chart a more peaceful, bountiful, equitable, and enchanted future.

Women to Watch is a collaboration between NMWA and its network of national and international outreach committees. Held every two to three years, Women to Watch features emerging and underrepresented women artists from the states and countries in which the museum has committees.

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.

Presented by Georgia Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts