Fall 2026 Exhibition
Collective Geometries
Don Russell Clayton & Malinda Jolley Mortin Galleries
September 2 - December 4, 2026
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson
Geometry operates not only as an abstract principle but also as a framework informed by cultural histories, labor, and embodied perception. This exhibition examines geometry and pattern as foundational languages that artists use to organize, disrupt, and reimagine visual experience. Collectively, the works investigate how structured forms mediate relationships to space, time, and meaning, and how repetition serves as both a mechanism of control and a catalyst for generative freedom. Across diverse media, repeating forms, grids, and rhythmic structures function as sites of both order and instability. These systems offer the promise of coherence while simultaneously exposing their inherent limitations.
Ruth V. Zuckerman Collection: Inside Out
Long-term display located in the Ruth Zuckerman Pavilion
Curated by Teresa Bramlette Reeves
For the preservation of artwork, museums must often hold their permanent collections in storage rather than in public view. "Visible storage," maintains the necessary safe-keeping of the objects while allowing museum visitors to see and study work that would otherwise be unavailable. This installation employs visible storage to showcase a substantial number of Ruth Zuckerman's sculptures and drawings from the KSU Permanent Collection, while making aspects of a collection's care transparent for the public.
Project Walls
Image credit: Until It's All Gone (Venture Global LNG), 2024. Clay found in a tributary of the Mississippi River, red ochre, and water on Saunders 640 gsm paper.
Project Wall North: Heather Bird Harris
September 1 - December 4, 2026
Heather Bird Harris is an artist, education leader, and independent curator. Her interdisciplinary practice bridges critical ecology and reparative history, drawing from communal and more-than-human archives. Through painting, social practice, film, and, more broadly, curation, writing, and teaching, her work brings together alternative ways of knowing that make emergence, cooperation, and systems change more possible.
Harris holds a B.A. in Art History from Skidmore College and M.A. in Education Leadership from Columbia University. She has served as the principal of a turnaround school in New Orleans and as a learning consultant for school leaders nationwide, focusing on anti-racist history curriculum. Recent exhibitions include NADA Curates, New Mexico State University Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Greenville, SC), Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, LA), Stoveworks (Chattanooga, TN), SITE (Atlanta, GA), and apexart’s Plastic, the New Coal at the Descendants Project (Vacherie, LA). Recent projects include Resonancia Naturale with musicians and ecologists at Arizona State University and Hope Springs Eternal in collaboration with activist group RISE St. James. Harris’s practice has been featured in Burnaway, ART PAPERS, Garden & Gun, ArtsATL, and on NPR and her writing has appeared in Brink Literary Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtsATL, Burnaway, and Scalawag. She is the recipient of fellowships at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies (Hudson Valley, NY), The Hambidge Center (Rabun Gap, GA), and the Art & Social Justice Fellowship at Emory University (Atlanta, GA). Harris is an MFA candidate at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she lives with her partner and their two children.
Project Wall West: Vadis Turner
August 26, 2025 - July 23, 2027
The ZMA is pleased to present a newly commissioned artwork, Crosscurrent Grid, by artist Vadis Turner. Turner has had solo exhibitions at the Frist Art Museum, the Huntsville Museum of Art, and the Abroms-Engel Institute for Visual Arts at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2016, she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her work is included in numerous permanent collections such as the Museum of Arts and Design, Brooklyn Museum and 21C Museum Hotels among others. She teaches at Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville, TN.
Image credit: Crosscurrent Grid, 2025. 80 x 295 inches. Satin ribbon, gold leaf, and acrylic resin.
Image credit: Image courtesy of the artist.
Project Wall East: Susan Cofer
September 1 - December 4, 2026
Susan Cofer is an Atlanta, Georgia, native born in 1943. She attended the art school at Mrs. High’s house as a child. That school eventually became the Atlanta College of Art and the house gave way to the Woodruff Arts Center. She left Atlanta to study Art History at Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia. She received her BA degree in 1964, the same year she married Carl Cofer. Their two daughters were born in 1966 and ’67.
She taught art and art history at the Lovett School for several years in the 1960s and took studio art courses at Atlanta College of Art and Georgia State University. She had her first solo exhibition at the Heath Gallery in 1976. She has been exhibiting regularly since then. Among her solo exhibits were shows at Savannah College of Art and Design in 1982, a site-specific installation at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in 1989, various exhibitions in different years at Hollins University (1986, 2007, 2014), Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia (2008, 2010), Madison Morgan Cultural Center (1984, 1993, 1997, 2015), Swan Coach House Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia (1992, 1997), and Berry College in Rome, Georgia (1998). Gudmund Vigtel, former director of the High Museum, included her in the “9 Women In Georgia” exhibit at the National Museum of Women in The Arts, Washington, D.C., in 1996.
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