Memento Mori

Welcome to Memento Mori, an evocative and thought-provoking art exhibit that brings together diverse voices and artistic expressions to explore the universal theme of mortality. This exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the City of Atlanta Department of City Planning's (DCP) Historic Preservation and Public Space Studios and the Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs (OCA).

The conception of this exhibit began with Elizabeth Clappin from the Historic Preservation Studio, whose visionary ideas served as the foundation for Memento Mori. Recognizing the potential for a cross-disciplinary collaboration, Elizabeth partnered with Dorian McDuffie to coordinate the exhibit’s logistics, who forged the connection with the OCA, and served as the primary liaison with the participating artists. Bringing in Kevin Sipp as the exhibition manager from OCA was the obvious decision. Kevin’s expertise and passion for the topic and Atlanta’s arts community have significantly enriched the development of this exhibit.

In addition to the powerful artworks on display, we are pleased to offer a series of engaging events, including an artist talk, a cemetery panel, and a presentation from Elizabeth Roark, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Chatham University who focuses on the relationship between art and cemeteries. These events will provide deeper insights into the themes explored in the exhibit and foster meaningful discussions among artists, scholars, and the community.

We invite you to immerse yourself in the reflections and revelations of Memento Mori, and we look forward to the conversations and connections that will arise from this profound exploration of our shared human experience.

Exhibition Events:

  • Exhibition Opening: Friday, Aug 15th, 5:00–8:00 PM

  • Artist Panel: Saturday, Sept 13th, 1:00–3:00 PM

  • Cemetery Panel: Saturday, Sept 20th, 1:00–3:00 PM

  • Virtual Presentation: Tuesday, October 7th, 6:30-7:30

  • Alms House (Chastain Arts Center) Tour: Wednesday, October 15th 6:00-8:00 PM

 
 

Scan the QR code or Click Here to RSVP for these events.

Meet the Artists

Andre Manzel Henderson

André Henderson was born in New York City, and raised by a highly creative family that was motivated by science, visual and literary arts. He taught himself to draw and paint as a youngster, inspired by his intuition and a desire to capture the human spirit. His series, The Journey, depicts an otherworldly serenity that is visually incongruent with the intolerable travesty that was endured by men, women and children who lost their lives and recaptured their freedom in the same moment, in the depths of the ocean.These paintings are portraits of Henderson’s introspections honoring those whose lives were stolen, then lost at sea.

With this work, Henderson inquires about the psychology and spirituality of the people that helped them survive such tumultuous and violent uprooting — investigating how human beings can find peace amidst danger, captivity and violence— to live. On these canvases, dark blue backgrounds signify the vastness of the Atlantic and the slave ships above. Each piece reflects a particular moment in time. Under the threatening night sky, blended in the folds of the tumultuous sea, The Journey, captures figures sinking, serenely. The viewer may not consciously observe the actual forms, but they are there, in the midst of the rough waters.

 

Charmaine Minniefield & Cienna Minniefield

Firmly rooted in womanist social theory and ancestral veneration, the work of Charmaine Minniefield is community-based as her research and resulting bodies of work often draw from public archives. She served as the Stuart A. Rose Library artist-in-residence at Emory University. She was awarded the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Grant to present her Praise House Project at three different locations in the metro Atlanta area to celebrate the African-American history of each community. Her exhibition titled, "Indigo Prayers: A Creation Story" was presented by the Michael C. Carlos Museum in 2022. Minniefield currently serves as an inaugural Constellations Fellow with the Center for Cultural Power. She splits her time in residence between Atlanta and the Gambia, where she continues to study the origins of her cultural identity and indigenous traditions by tracing the Ring Shout.

Cienna Minniefield is Also known as THE COLOR (pronouns: Dey/Dem/they/them/Cie) is a black trans-non-binary multi-expensive artist and cultural worker. Their work is rooted in Black feminist theory, Black Trans liberation, and community care and collective joy. Their visual artwork is deeply influenced by the Black South through a contemporary and Afro-futuristic lens. Mediums include acrylic on canvas and paper, photography, sound, digital illustration, collage, installation, quilting and mural work. The COLOR’s work has been featured and commissioned by THEM Magazine, Facebook, Glossier, and I.D. Magazine, the WMBA, Living Walls, and Arts & Entertainment Atlanta. As a cultural curator, their signature projects include Safe Space: A Blacqueer Figure Drawing workshop and the Blacqueer Artist Market in Atlanta.

 

Gabi Madrid

Gabi Madrid is a multidisciplinary artist who lives in Atlanta, Georgia and works from their studio at South River Art Studios. They are a graduate of the Savannah College of Art & Design where they received their BFA degree in sculpture in 2019. Madrid has exhibited their work in group shows nationally and internationally. Their outdoor sculptures have been part of public art in the Southeast of the United States, including Freedom Park Trail and Art on the BeltLine in Atlanta.

The artist works in a range of mediums, from new media installation, found objects, paper & book arts, as well as reclaimed wood and metal. Madrid’s work is informed through their intuition and personal history, therefore, engaging in an ongoing conversation focused on healing and the processing of past experiences. Their journey as an artist has begun an unfolding of generational and ancestral trauma, connected to their Muscogee Creek heritage. Within their work, there is an exploration of self-development, identity formation, and the collective unconscious

 

Harrison Wayne

Harrison Wayne is an artist born and raised in Georgia. After receiving his Bachelor’s in chemistry from Georgia State University, Harrison continued his work as an industrial research chemist at a local manufacturing plant. Harrison’s work has been exhibited both locally and nationally within institutional bodies, while concurrently his practice has often manifested itself in alternative contexts outside of traditional exhibition frameworks. Harrison has been the recipient of residencies at Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN) and the Hambidge Center (Rabun Gap, GA), and in Spring 2025 he was the recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (New York, NY). As a writer, Harrison has published several books of poetry and has written for Burnaway, Institute 193, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

 

Lisa Tuttle

Lisa Tuttle is an artist, curator, arts advocate, educator, public art consultant, and writer. Her artwork is interdisciplinary, lens-based, and mixed mediums. Tuttle’s' works are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Federal Reserve Bank-Atlanta, and numerous private collections. A former lead administrator with the Fulton County Public Art Program and gallery director for both Nexus Contemporary Art Center (now Atlanta Contemporary) and the Atlanta College of Art, Lisa was also the Visual Arts Director for The Arts Festival of Atlanta, where she oversaw NEA-funded site work projects, organized several projects during the 1996 Olympics, and curated temporary exhibitions of contemporary art.

As an artist, she has completed several public art projects including Harriet Rising, in collaboration with Alice Lovelace, commissioned by the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs Public Art Program and Underground Atlanta, which received an Americans for the Arts Public Art Network 2012 Year-in-Review award as one of the top 50 public art projects in the country. In 2019, she established Lisa Tuttle Studio at the ArtsXchange in East Point, where she works daily as a full-time artist and part-time curatorial and public art consultant. In 2022, she presented a “retrospective” of her conceptual work about the American South entitled “postcolonial karma”. In 2024, she curated the exhibition A Room of Her Own: Women Studio Artists from the AXC’s 40-Year History for the Jack Sinclair Gallery at the ArtsXchange.

 

Lynn Marshall-Linnemeir

Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier researches and collages photography, painting, and writing, with primary source documents that she incorporates into her image-based mixed-media quilts and installations. She experiments with film, writing, and abstraction. To re-examine and re-frame historical figures, she engages her subjects through dialogue in communities by focusing on their life stories and historical incidents attached to a place. Marshall-Linnemeier has been documenting the American South since 1989. Her work often provides an avenue to explore political issues that include the environment, race, gender, and culture through the universal concept of ancestry and memory.

 

Lynsey Weatherspoon

Lynsey Weatherspoon is a portrait and editorial photographer based in both Atlanta and Birmingham. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, NPR, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time, ESPN and ESPN-owned The Undefeated. The fingerprint of heritage can be found on assignments and personal projects featuring Black Lives Matter, Gullah Geechee culture, unsung players in the Negro Baseball League, and the last of dying breed – a shoe cobbler. Her work has been exhibited at The African American Museum in Philadelphia and Photoville NYC. She is an awardee of The Lit List, 2018. Her affiliations include Diversify Photo, Authority Collective, and Women Photograph.

 

Radcliffe Bailey

Radcliffe Bailey (1968-2023) was a painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist who utilized the layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials and text to explore themes of ancestry, race, migration and collective memory. His work often incorporated found materials and objects from his past into textured compositions, including traditional African sculpture, tintypes of his family members, ships, train tracks and Georgia red clay. The cultural significance and rhythmic properties of music were also important influences that can be seen throughout his oeuvre. Individual experience served as a departure point in Bailey’s quest to excavate the collective consciousness of African diasporas and regional American identities. Found objects and imagery present seemingly bygone pasts as contemporary, neon Northern Stars that lead us through Bailey’s constellation of works on view, exploring and interweaving our shared histories. Often quilt-like in aesthetic, his practice created links between diasporic histories and potential futures, investigating the evolution or stagnation of notions of identity.

 

William Massey

William Massey is a found-object sculptor in Atlanta, Georgia who creates iconic public and private artwork with repurposed items. In his public installations, William utilizes not only locally relevant materials and equitable historical narrative, but also welcomes neighboring communities into a collaborative process to create each artwork.

William currently works at South River Studios, serves as art director and curator of the local nonprofit Remerge, and stewards the land at his South Atlanta home with his wife and children.

 

Julie Yarbrough

With 25 years of photographic experience; selling photographic equipment; consulting; and teaching budding photographers. Julie has continuously nurtured her passion for the photographic image. From film to digital technology Julie creates personal work and client assignments that are visually interesting, meaningful, and educational. Guided by spirit and awareness, watching for interesting gestures and the best possible light, Julie is inspired to capture and record the human experience.