exhibitions
coming soon
Waffle House Vistas Through June 1, 2025
Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900 – 1939 July 19 – November 2, 2025
Micah Cash, “Store #1591: Oak Grove, Kentucky,” 2021. Archival pigment print, 24 × 30 inches. Collection of the artist.
Emerging from Micah Cash’s photography series and photo book of the same name, this exhibition focuses on the built and natural environments as seen through the windows of Waffle House restaurants.
Louise Heron Blair (American, 1905 – 1972), “Self portrait,” 1929. Oil on board, 23 1/2 × 18 5/8 inches. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Gift of Martha Randolph Daura. GMOA 2013.203.
Captured from locations across the southeastern United States, these images contemplate the physical and social environments and commerce that surround each location of the southern cultural icon. The natural landscapes beyond the windowpanes are as diverse as the perspectives and stories of each guest at the tables. Yet the similarities of the restaurants’ interiors echo across states and time zones. The images look out from the restaurant’s iconic booths, past the signature midcen- tury pendant lamps and make viewers newly conscious of buildings so commonplace they often go unseen. Each guest, waiting for their hashbrowns, becomes witness to the intertwined narratives of economic stability, transience and politics. The familiar, well-worn interiors make us think about what we have in common. Yet the differences in environment call to mind the different ways we experience structures built and felt. This exhibition includes a newly commissioned time-based media component of the series. This video realizes Cash’s directive to “look up” through prolonged footage of views and sounds from three Waffle Houses. The video and its soundscape disrupt the nostalgia of the still photographs, which the audience animates with actual or imagined memories of a Waffle House meal. Instead, they emphasize a long, time-based vision of the surrounding landscape and architecture.
During the first four decades of the 20th century, American women made crucial contributions to the vibrant creative milieu of Paris.
Drawn by a strong desire for independence, they crossed the Atlantic to pursue personal and professional ambitions in a city viewed as the epicenter of modernity. “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900 – 1939” features approximately 65 portraits of remarkable women (including Josephine Baker, Isadora Duncan, Zelda Fitzgerald, Loïs Mailou Jones, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anaïs Nin, Gertrude Stein, Ethel Waters and Anna May Wong) in a variety of mediums and highlights the dynamic role of portraiture in articulating the refashioned sense of self and the new conceptions of modern female identity that resulted from the interventions of American women in Parisian life. It recaptures the experiences of these unorthodox women who found in Paris the freedom to blaze new trails in a variety of fields, including art, literature, design, publishing, music, fashion, journalism, theater and dance.
This exhibition has been organized by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Curator: Robyn Asleson, curator of prints and drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (in-house curator: Nelda Damiano, Pierre Daura Curator of European Art, Georgia Museum of Art)
Curator: Kathryn Hill, associate curator of modern and contemporary art
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