Assembly 2026: New South, Ground Truth
FEATURED ARTISTS: Sheila Pree Bright, Michi Meko, Paul Stephen Benjamin, Shanequa Gay
GUEST CURATOR: Karen Comer Lowe
New South, Ground Truth brings together four Atlanta-based artists, Sheila Pree Bright, Michi Meko, Paul Stephen Benjamin, and Shanequa Gay, in an exhibition that reframes land not as backdrop, but as evidence. Working across photography, abstraction, painting, and installation, these artists examine the Piedmont South as a site shaped by memory, power, and unresolved history.
Grounded in Atlanta, one of the nation’s most historically freighted urban landscapes, the exhibition holds two truths at once: soil marked by Indigenous displacement, plantation violence, and the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement, and soil that has also carried Black communities who built, raised families, and imagined futures on the same ground. Stone Mountain, which served as a central gathering site for the Ku Klux Klan throughout the 20th century, looms nearby as a reminder that beauty and terror often share geography.
The exhibition unfolds across three interlocking lines of inquiry: the landscape of history, inscribed in monuments and place names; the landscape of the body, including the lived weight of moving through space as a Black person in America; and the landscape of imagination, where myth and counter-narrative reclaim ground that dominant culture has tried to close off. These are not resolved into a single thesis but held together as a chorus: Sheila Pree Bright’s documentary precision, Michi Meko’s gestural cosmologies, Paul Stephen Benjamin’s conceptual rigor, and Shanequa Gay’s mythic figuration in productive dialogue.
New South, Ground Truth positions Atlanta not as a regional footnote but as essential terrain in the national conversation about who gets to claim space in America, and on what terms.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Karen Comer Lowe is an Atlanta based independent curator, art advisor, and professor whose work expands cultural narratives and champions artists whose voices have been historically marginalized. She is a Visiting Professor at Spelman College in Curatorial Studies, bringing curatorial practice, visual culture, and critical inquiry into the classroom while mentoring the next generation of artists, scholars, and cultural leaders.
Lowe has developed exhibitions, public programs, and cultural initiatives that bridge scholarship, community engagement, and contemporary art across museums, university galleries, and independent spaces. Her curatorial work includes collaborations with MacArthur Fellows Amanda Williams and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as projects featuring celebrated artists such as Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Hew Locke, and Radcliffe Bailey, among others. She was recently named one of the Top 10 People Shaping the Art World by Art Cube.
Lowe previously served in leadership and curatorial roles with the Spelman Museum of Fine Art, where she originated exhibitions, advanced acquisitions, and mentored emerging curators through academic and community programming. While at Spelman, she curated Silver Linings: Celebrating the Spelman Art Collection, a nationally recognized traveling exhibition that received the inaugural BridgeMaker Award for innovation and impact in exhibition practice.
In 2026, Lowe founded Red Clay Art Circle, a private membership community dedicated to Black contemporary art collecting, offering studio visits, curated conversations, and gallery programming that deepen collector engagement with living artists. Her work has been reviewed and featured in Artsy, Vanity Fair, The Observer, Pigment International, Elephant Magazine, Art Papers, and more. Through her ongoing curatorial and advisory practice, Lowe continues to build platforms, exhibitions, publications, and collecting communities, that center Black artistic legacy and expand who gets to shape the art historical record.
ABOUT ASSEMBLY 2026
New South, Ground Truth is curated by Karen Comer Lowe and takes place as part of Assembly 2026, MoCA Arlington’s national biennial exhibition. With an eye towards the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, MoCA Arlington’s 2026 biennial comprises four separate, concurrent exhibitions. Each exhibition is curated by an independent curator and grounded in a specific geography within the regions that made up the original thirteen colonies. This curatorial framework provides a new lens for exploring current material and conceptual trends within contemporary art while highlighting artists and curatorial voices from across the United States.
Assembly 2026 is organized by Blair Murphy, MoCA Arlington Senior Curator + Director of Exhibitions, and is generously supported by an anonymous donor.
RELATED EXHIBITIONS
Assembly 2026: Dusk in the Dawnland
Assembly 2026: Common Wealth
Assembly 2026: to eat out their substance
RELATED PROGRAMS
Art After Hours
Saturday / October 3 / 5pm-8pm
EXHIBITION CATALOG
View the Assembly 2026 catalog
