OCTOBER 1, SUNDAY

HIGH MUSEUM

Africa, Europe and America

My flight to Atlanta got me in at 9:30 and I didn’t fly out till 6:30. This gave me time to take MARTA into town to the Art Center where I spent three hours in the High Museum. I had been here once before when I went car camping around the South in 2018 and happened to come to the museum on the grand opening after a major remodeling. It is a marvelous museum with a little bit of everything including a wide collection of European art. How did all these paintings of famous Europeans end up in Atlanta, Georgia, hot and dusty land of cotton and central to the colonialization of North America, wealth built on slavery? There is also a strong overview of American art, but how did so much of Europe, the source of most of our culture end up in the American south where culture is a brand new thing, did we trade new money for European art culture which could just as well have stayed home in the same way that colonialism brought so much of Mediterrean and Oriental art and African art to northern Europe. The High also has a floor dedicated to African art which seems fitting since so much of our cultural tradition comes from Africa. I will give some examples of the High’s diversity here.