Exhibit explores African design

ATLANTA — An exhibition opening in Atlanta encourages visitors to abandon their preconceived notions about Africa and explore the creative efforts of people using design to bring about change on the vast continent. Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design opens today at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, with more than 200 works by more than 120 artists from 22 countries.

The exhibit focuses on people who use design to provide solutions, High Museum curator of African art Carol Thompson said.

“I want people to see Africa in a new way and appreciate the creativity of artists on the continent, past and present,” she said.

One of the most captivating pieces in the exhibition is a collaborative project by South African artist Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse. It captures Ponte City, a 54-storey circular apartment building in Johannesburg, South Africa. A posh address when it was built in 1975, it has become rundown, though still inhabited, since the end of apartheid.

The two artists photographed every television set, door and window view in the building between 2008 and 2010 and put the 600 photos in three tall lightboxes in the same order as they were in the building.

The exhibition, which was organized by Vitra Design Museum in Germany and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, runs through Jan. 7 at the High. It is also slated to be shown at the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico, Feb. 3 through May 6, and at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, Oct. 14, 2018, through Jan. 13, 2019.