Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” might be the most highly anticipated show this year, but she isn’t the only female artist spotlighted this fall. Atlanta in the coming months is flush with shows devoted to women artists, perhaps in recognition of an art world contending with the elision of female voices in the past.
Zanele Muholi. Describing herself as a "visual activist" South African photographer Zanele Muholi's work has often confronted prejudice and stereotypes around gay identity. In her more recent body of work, "Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness" on view at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Muholi acts out different personas and identities, often blackening her skin in the process to emphasize race, as she turns the camera on herself in the 70 photographs on view. Sept. 14-Dec. 8, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, 404-270-5607, www.museum.spelman.edu/
Doris Ulmann. The Georgia Museum of Art mounts "Vernacular Modernism: The Photography of Doris Ulmann," the first extensive retrospective of the work of this early female photographer (1882-1934) who captured both intellectual and literary heavyweights and common folk over the course of her career. The New York artist often documented rural communities, and the 100 photographs on view show Ulmann's work in Appalachia, the rural South and the Gullah community, as well as a perspective that blended documentary and modernist concerns. Aug. 25-Nov. 18, The Georgia Museum of Art, 706-542-4662, www.georgiamuseum.org
Tori Tinsley. For years this Atlanta artist has used her sweetly monstrous figures with their bulging eyes and Mr. Potato Head bodies to comment upon a child's-eye dimension to loss and trauma. In a past body of paintings and sculptures, Tinsley tackled the loss of her mother to a debilitating dementia that stole her identity. Now, a new mother herself, the artist is examining that sense of all-consuming love from a very different vantage. Nov 15-Jan. 12, Hathaway Contemporary Gallery, 470-428-2061, www.hathawaygallery.com
Robert Chamberlin. A graduate of The School of the Museum of Fine Art Boston, Tufts University and Georgia State University, Chamberlin creates exquisite ceramic works that combine a seductive, delicate prettiness and decorative appeal that quickly reveals itself to be deceptive. Keep looking and a far more visceral sense of decay and destruction become aparent as the objects seem to decompose before our eyes. Nov. 7-Dec. 8, Marcia Wood Gallery, 404-827-0030, www.marciawoodgallery.com
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