Cut & Paste: Works of Paper, a traveling exhibition of works by 11 Georgia artists, will open at the Albany Museum of Art at the museum’s Winter Exhibitions Reception on Wednesday, Feb 26, 2020.
 
The event, set for 5:30-7:30 pm, is free and open to the public.
 
Two continuing exhibitions also will be celebrated at the reception—Looking at America and Painting How I Want, What I Want and How I See It, works by Dean Mitchell in the East Gallery, and Do Not Hand Me Over to the Impure Whiteness of Noon: A Hemings Elegy, works by Yanique Norman, in the West Gallery. Both exhibitions continue through March 28, 2020.
 
“These three shows push the AMA to serve once again as a proving ground for celebrating the richness and diversity of Southeastern artists and their phenomenal works,” Albany Museum of Art Executive Director Andrew James Wulf, Ph.D., said. “It is our self-imposed mandate to elevate the role of the museum to community gathering space, opening up the possibility that we shall remain a place of welcome for all and for meaningful artistic expression.”
 
Cut & Paste: Works of Paper examines the relationship of art and paper, a versatile but fragile material that has long been instrumental in the creation of art. The works of 11 Georgia artists included in the show bring awareness of the vitality of paper, demonstrating that it is more than a two-dimensional form. Several of the artists whose works are in the exhibition will attend the reception.
 
In Looking at America and Painting How I Want, What I Want and How I See It, Mitchell, a Tampa, Fla., artist, paints poetic urban and rural scenes that are rich in tone, but also vibrate with the desolation of so much of America's landscapes. Mitchell says that in his work he is “looking for freedom regardless of painting styles and labels imposed on artists in regards to race and ethnic origins, total freedom to explore my full potential as an artist."
 
Do Not Hand Me Over to the Impure Whiteness of Noon: A Hemings Elegy is the first solo exhibition for Norman, an Atlanta multimedia artist. In an ongoing series that features collage on paper, video and sculpture, Norman reworks official portraits of presidential wives to allude to a troubled past. Her work serves as a reclamation project by reimagining iconic images to both reflect and institute a counter narrative regarding blackness.
 
Cut & Paste: Works of Paper was organized by the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia and Lyndon House Arts Center in Athens. It has shown at Lyndon House, the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon. After Albany, it will travel to the Telfair Museum of Art’s Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah for an Aug 1, 2020 opening.
 
AMA Guest Curator Didi Dunphy says the exhibition, which will continue at the AMA through June 27, 2020, is a further testament to the remarkable talents of Georgia artists.
 
“I have traveled across the state of Georgia, stepping into the different working environments where artists embark on the most amazing of endeavors,” Dunphy said. “From a studio in a small second bedroom to a clean white cube, the talent in Georgia-based artists astounds.”