Longtime artists Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell will have a symbolic homecoming at the Albany Museum of Art when their multi-gallery exhibition Art Making/World Making opens with an evening reception on Thursday, Jan 22.
Also debuting that day will be Familiar Rhythm: Time, Nostalgia, and Memory, a group exhibition featuring works of Maiya Lea Hartman, Larry Cook, and Kimberly Anderson, and Still Waters, waterscapes from the AMA’s permanent collection.

"This is one of those weeks that reminds us why museums exist,” Executive Director Andrew James Wulf, Ph.D. said. “The work of the Jarrells is audacious, gorgeous, and urgent—and bringing it to Albany feels like coming home.”

The opening reception for the three winter/spring exhibitions will be at 5:30 pm on Jan 22. The event is free for AMA donors at the Reciprocal Level or higher, $10 for Artist Guild donors, and $15 for the general public. The registration link to RSVP can be found at www.albanymuseum.com/event/winter-2026-reception/.

The AMA will also host Family Day from 10 am-5 pm on Jan 24. Families can see the new exhibitions and engage in a scavenger hunt in the galleries, and enjoy creative play in AMAzing Space. From 10 am to 1 pm, Key Club members will lead kids on take-home art projects inspired by the new exhibitions. Admission and all activities are free.

“Please join us on January 22 to celebrate. And please bring everyone you know on January 24,” Wulf said. “These shows demand crowds. See them together. See them loud. See them with loved ones."

Wadsworth & Jae Jarrell: Art Making/World Making will be in the East, Hodges and McCormack Galleries. Both artists have connections to Albany.  Wadsworth Jarrell is an Albany native who last exhibited at the AMA in 1987. Jae Jarrell is the sister-in-law of the late Albany civil rights attorney C.B. King. The exhibition is made possible with support from the Walter & Frances Bunzl Family Foundation.

“At the Albany Museum of Art, the Curatorial Department is committed to presenting high-quality exhibitions for our community in Albany, Georgia,” Director of Curatorial Affairs Katie Dillard said. “Each season, we strive to reach ever higher to bring the art of the world to the South and the art of the South to the world. With the generous and steadfast support of the Walter & Frances Bunzl Family Foundation, we are able to fulfill this mission. We are deeply proud to offer these world-class exhibitions to our community free of charge, and we hope visitors will not only delight in the vibrant and nostalgic works on view, but also take time to reflect on the histories and personal stories they convey.”

The Jarrells are longtime artists, demonstrators, and provocateurs. In their early work as founding members of the Black radical arts group AfriCOBRA, they created a new visual language of Black culture. With key elements like Shine, Positive Images, Cool-Ade Colors, and Visibility that the collective established as key points in their philosophy, they created their own world, with their own aesthetic practice and visual language.

“Wadsworth and Jae’s exhibition here at the AMA is deeply significant and meaningful. It acts almost as a homecoming celebration of these two lifelong artist-activists. Their work is informed by the history that they witnessed, the Civil Rights and Feminist movements. It feels very right for this exhibition to have happened at a time when the many facets of Albany’s history and mark in the Civil Rights movement are being celebrated,” Curator of African Collections and African Diasporic Art Sidney Pettice said.

Wadsworth & Jae Jarrell: Art Making / World Making presents a selection of works by the Jarrells from key points in their lives. It begins with their early art careers, progressing through moments that influenced their practices, such as the first collective solo exhibition of AfriCOBRA at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1970, AfriCOBRA I, or their work in Nigerian Arts Festival Festac ’77. As it moves into the present, Art Making/World Making explores how their work has changed throughout the decades.

The exhibition aims to highlight the legacy of these two dedicated, lifelong artist-activists. Through the interdisciplinary textile practice of Jae Jarrell and the dynamic narrative-building drawings and paintings of Wadsworth Jarrell, these artists together share a passion for visibility, advocacy, and positive representations of Blackness.

In the Haley Gallery will be Familiar Rhythm: Time, Nostalgia, and Memory. In this exhibition, artists Hartman, Cook, and Anderson rethink methods of memory-making and documentation through the manipulation of photography.

Hartman is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist and muralist based in Minneapolis, Minn. Cook is a Washington, D.C.-based conceptual, video, and photo artist. Anderson, based in Brooklyn, N.Y., has a multidisciplinary practice that employs photography, collage, and mixed media.

Through revamping and altering photographs, the artists create feelings of familiarity by allowing snippets of Black cultural tradition to induce a feeling of collective memory and re-memory. A vague nostalgia presents itself within each of the artists’ works, a surreal viewing experience in which the viewer can be comfortable with the cultural and shared memories.

Familiar Rhythm presents a space to embrace Black cultural tradition and memories, regardless of geographic location—moments that capture the essences of friends, family, and communal gathering spaces.

With its rivers, lakes, ponds, and creeks, Southwest Georgia has a powerful connection to water in many tangible ways. Still Waters, which will be in the West Gallery, offers another way to connect.

The exhibition explores waterscapes from the AMA’s permanent collection, inviting viewers into a world where calm becomes a transformative force. Ranging from the mid-19th century to the modern era, each artwork captures the quiet power of water at rest, with scenes of horizons unbroken, reflections gently disturbed by tide ripples, and light gently diffused across tranquil Impressionist surfaces.

Through these serene paintings, sketches, and photographs, Still Waters highlights how moments of stillness can be grounding, offering space for reflection and emotional clarity. By focusing on nature’s more peaceful moods, this sample of the permanent collection celebrates calm, not as an absence, but as a presence—a vital, restorative state that reconnects the viewer to nature’s rhythms and to their own inner balance.

Wadsworth & Jae Jarrell: Art Making/World Making and Familiar Rhythm: Time, Nostalgia, and Memory will be on view through Saturday, May 2. Still Waters will be on view through April 25. The AMA is open 10 am-5 pm Tuesdays through Saturdays, and admission is free.