After 26 years of supporting Georgia artists, MOCA GA opens artful new home

As Annette Cone-Skelton stood in the west gallery of the new Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) building in early September, less than two weeks before the museum was to open for VIP guests, she appears strikingly stoic; somber even.

Her eyes scan the high-ceilinged, rectangular room where artworks hang on virgin white walls.

The founding director, CEO and president of MOCA GA, Cone-Skelton curated the space she’s now standing in with mostly works from the ’60s and ’70s, created by Georgia artists, many of whom she knew as nascent creatives. They had gone to school with her at Atlanta College of Art when she herself was a budding painter.

“A lot of them are no longer with us,” she says.

Her tone comes into focus. It is reverence. She is among giants. She is among friends.

The room holds work by Edward Walker Ross, a Southeastern minimalist painter who headed the Atlanta College of Art’s painting department for a decade; Katherine Mitchell, who was in Cone-Skelton’s class at the college and builds tightly gridded, geometric paintings; Genevieve Arnold, a fixture of the Atlanta art scene known for pairing figurative and abstracted takes on the places she’s traveled; and Martin Emanuel, an Atlanta sculptor whose creations made of rammed earth have been shown at MOCA GA since its founding 26 years ago.

In the room with Cone-Skelton is also a massive square canvas measuring eight feet, marked with millions of delicate, sand-colored, vertical lines organized in neat, horizontal rows. The untitled work is one of Cone-Skelton’s own, created with pastel pencil in 1995. The work, she said in a 2018 interview, put her into a meditative trance when she was creating it.

It was during one of those flow states (while creating a different work with black paint) that she first had a vision for MOCA GA’s earliest museum space. When she envisioned that space, she pictured something far more modest than the $16.4 million, 26,000 square-foot, architecturally striking building in which she now stands. She merely envisioned a “stable place of our own.”

“This is more than I imagined,” she says of the new West Midtown building, which was designed by Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects. “I didn’t expect that we would ever be able to raise the funds to build this. And that has just been so rewarding.”

Now that the final permits have been issued, Cone-Skelton and staff can finally show off the facility as it prepares for its first weekend welcoming the general public. “The wait is over!” a social media post proclaimed on Wednesday. “After years of fundraising and planning, MOCA GA welcomes visitors to a new space designed to support its mission: collecting, preserving, exhibiting and making the work of contemporary artists lving and working in Georgia accessible.”

Cone-Skelton credits the museum’s long-standing relationships and crystal-clear mission for its ability to fundraise. The city of Atlanta made one of the campaign’s most pivotal contributions, giving $2 million in 2024 — a gift that pushed the fundraising effort to 90% of its goal.

“(Mayor Andre Dickens) made the announcement here looking at our vacant land … we hadn’t even started at that point,” Cone-Skelton says. “It’s really important for a city of this size to have a museum like this, and one that supports our own culture.”

Supporting that culture is what drove Cone-Skelton to found MOCA GA back in 2000. At the time, Atlanta had little infrastructure to support artists like her.

“We didn’t have that much in the way of exhibition support,” she remembers. “We didn’t have the museums. We didn’t have that many galleries.”

There had been momentum once — Mayor Maynard Jackson had launched programs such as the Bureau of Cultural Affairs, Neighborhood Arts Center and Mayor’s Day for the Arts, bringing in Shirley Franklin and Michael Lomax to help lead his cultural affairs efforts — but that progress didn’t last. What remained was, in Cone-Skelton’s words, “just this huge void.”

By then, she had moved on from teaching and gallery management to run her own art consulting business. As a consultant, she was contracted by corporations and private collectors to find them interesting art, which in turn helped her support Georgia artists.

One of her collectors was CGR Advisors, a private real estate investment firm. When they decided to downsize, the fate of their art collection, comprising 250 works by Georgia artists, was uncertain. Cone-Skelton began lobbying the company’s president, David Golden.

“Let’s start a museum,” she remembers saying to him.

“It took a while, but they warmed up to it … CGR donated the collection, and David Golden became my co-founder."

MOCA GA got its 501(c)(3) status in August 2000.

Now more than a quarter century later, as Cone-Skelton wanders the new museum building, it must strike her how far she’s carried the organization. Yet, she doesn’t boast. Instead, she wears an air of humility.

Standing next to her own painting, she shifts in her shoes and admits how she did not want to include any of her paintings in the exhibition, but her staff strongly disagreed.

“They convinced me that I needed to put my own work in this show,” she says.

It’s easy to see why. She is the founding mother of MOCA GA. To not include one of her works in the new building’s opening exhibition, particularly in the room that features early pioneers of Atlanta’s contemporary art world, would be to present a tree without its deepest root.

Curated by Cone-Skelton, the grand opening exhibition includes 48 artists and roughly 70 pieces from MOCA GA’s permanent collection, spread throughout the building’s five galleries. The works span time (though not organized chronologically), going back to Lamar Dodd’s work from the 1940s and stretching forward to the most recent works produced by MOCA GA’s 2026 Working Artist Project cohort.

The Working Artist Project has been a signature program of MOCA GA for 19 years. Artists chosen to be a part of the program get a solo exhibition at the museum, get to work with an esteemed guest curator recruited from a major national museum (including the Whitney, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and get an assigned apprentice.

A gallery space on the east side of the new building is where many of the newer Working Artist Project artists are showcased. MOCA GA’s most recent Working Artist Project honorees, who each exhibited just before the museum closed its longtime home on Bennett Street inside the TULA Art Center (where it had operated since 2007), are displayed in that space, including works by Ayana Ross, Corrine Colarusso and Sergio Suarez. Pieces by Fahamu Pecou and Larry Walker are also on view there, among many others.

A concrete cascade of steps that double as tiered seating descends into that gallery. The white wall above the steps serves as a lofty place to project art.

“This is our theater,” Cone-Skelton says. “It’s kind of like the heart of the museum in that we envision it not only for artists’ talks, lectures, performances, musical performances and dance but also a gathering place for people who are visiting the museum to just come, sit down and have a conversation about what they’ve been seeing.”

Also central to the museum is a windowless room most visitors will likely never see: the archives. This is where the museum now houses its permanent collection numbering more than 1,600 works (that’s six times the 250 works with which MOCA GA started). For the first time in its history, MOCA GA can house its entire collection in one strategically designed space.

Cone-Skelton shows off the archives room proudly. Two-story-tall moving grates organize the museum’s framed artworks. White shelves that move using rotating hand-cranks hold all sorts of three-dimensional works. Huge metal flat files contain art prints. Decorating the tops of those drawers are some fun, puppetlike sculptures made by Susan Cofer of people who have been influential in Atlanta’s art world (including one of Tomer Zvulun and another of Lois Reitzes). A new intern is busy cataloging.

The outdoor spaces at the new MOCA GA are equally impressive as the indoor ones. Behind the museum is a sculpture garden designed by Perkins&Will that will feature rotating sculpture exhibitions. The rooftop, an expansive space that overlooks the Goat Farm Arts Center campus, with its historic industrial buildings and some 50 working artist studios, will be a memorable place to host art events. An open-air projection screen already has been installed up top.