The largest and fastest-growing aspect of the High Museum of Art’s permanent collection stands to increase in size and significance with Tuesday’s announcement that the Atlanta institution has received nearly $4 million to support its photography initiatives.
The recent gifts will endow a permanent curatorial position in photography, create a dedicated full-time gallery space for the increasingly popular medium, establish an acquisitions fund and support the photo department’s ongoing lectures and programs.
Collectively, the gifts “represent a transformational moment for photography at the High,” museum director Michael Shapiro said in a statement.
Former Coca-Cola Co. president and chief operating officer Donald Keough and his wife, Marilyn, made the largest of the four donations, $2 million. Their funding will endow a permanent curatorial position in photography and support the department’s ongoing programs and acquisitions.
Brett Abbott, who has been as active behind the scenes in selling his vision for the museum’s photography program as he has in organizing a series of ambitious exhibitions since arriving in 2011, officially becomes the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography.
“It’s really wonderful that we have this critical mass and we can talk about the next stage for photography at the High,” Abbott said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. As a result of the gifts, he predicted that the museum will enter the top rank of American showcases of the medium.
Atlanta photographer and arts patron Lucinda Bunnen, who was the subject of a recent exhibition drawn from more than four decades of giving to the High, has donated an undisclosed amount to establish the museum's first dedicated photography gallery. The large wedge-shaped space is on the Wieland Pavilion's Skyway level, the top floor in the Renzo Piano-designed expansion, adjoining modern and contemporary art galleries.
The curator turned to Bunnen toward the end of a recent week in which Atlanta artist and gallery owner Paul Hagedorn, right on the heels of the Keough commitment, pledged $500,000 to support photography acquisitions and establish the department’s first endowment.
Bunnen and Abbott had been talking about the idea of a permanent photography space, and the patron essentially was waiting for the right time to seal the deal.
“That was a really wonderful week,” Abbott recalled. “When I called Lucinda and told her there was some real momentum happening for the department, she thought that now would be the moment.”
Finally, the Yellowlees family, whose prior donations allowed the High to add noteworthy works by Harry Callahan and Peter Sekaer, offered $400,000 to strengthen the museum’s collection of Southern photography.
Abbott said one of his goals is to build on the collection’s strength in regional photography, including works commissioned as part of the ongoing “Picturing the South” initiative, making the museum the go-to U.S. institution for images from and about the region.
“It’s relevant to who we are and where we are,” said Abbott, who worked as associate photography curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles before coming to Atlanta. “It’s important to tell that part of the history of photography. I think we’re the institution to do it.”
Without an acquisitions fund, Abbott had continued to build the collection mainly through gifts of prints. He characterized that as largely a “passive” practice and said that the fund will allow the museum to target “extraordinary opportunities” to be more active in the marketplace.
“I don’t think we’re done,” Abbott said. “I don’t think that these gifts are going to solve every fundraising issue. But it puts us in a new position to really serve the community and do something special.”
The announcement is timely, coming as the High hosts an expansive photography exhibit, “Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door” (through May 18), with a 40-year retrospective of the late California modernist Wynn Bullock set for a June 14 opening.
