New South, Ground Truth brings together four Atlanta-based artists—Sheila Pree Bright, Michi Meko, Paul Stephen Benjamin, and Shanequa Gay—to explore the Piedmont South as a landscape shaped by memory, power, displacement, and Black experience. Rather than treating land as a passive backdrop, the exhibition considers it as a form of evidence, carrying traces of Indigenous displacement, plantation violence, the Civil Rights Movement, and the generations of Black communities who have built lives and imagined futures there.
At the center of the exhibition is Michi Meko, whose gestural cosmologies contribute a more imaginative and layered reading of the landscape. His practice enters into dialogue with Pree Bright’s documentary photography, Benjamin’s conceptual approach, and Gay’s mythic figuration, collectively addressing three interconnected dimensions of place: the landscape of history, the landscape of the body, and the landscape of imagination.
Curated by Karen Comer Lowe, New South, Ground Truth is part of Assembly 2026, MoCA Arlington’s national biennial. The exhibition positions Atlanta as an important site for examining who has the right to occupy, remember, and imagine space in America, and how contemporary artists can reclaim landscapes marked by both beauty and violence.
Exhibition dates: October 3, 2026, to January 24, 2027.
