“Everywhere I Go Is Home” is on view now at Huagabrooks Gallery in the Historic Sweet Auburn District. (Photo courtesy of John Stephens)
Home, both as a concept and as a place, has long been the subject of artistic inquiry. From Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table series to Do Ho Suh’s ongoing series of textile reproductions of domestic spaces, “home” takes many forms and is interpreted many ways.
Home can be a place to rest your head or a gathering place for family and loved ones. It is sometimes the place one feels most comfortable while also the site of domestic labor. Home is all of these things and more, an inexhaustible subject central to humanism, immigration, identity politics and feminism, among others. This impossibly complex net of connotations and denotations is the focal point for three exhibitions in Atlanta at South River Art Studios, the Avondale Arts Center and Haugabrooks Gallery.
At South River Art Studios, Catalina Bellizzi-Itiola presents her solo exhibition MAMA (until July 12). Zeroing in on motherhood is nearly as impossible of a task as zeroing in on a singular definition of “home,” and this exhibition reflects exactly that. A largely autobiographical exhibition, in MAMA, Itiola presents some dozen paintings depicting the emotional effect of motherhood.
As could be expected, the paintings are abstract, with many of them morphing into entirely non-objective compositions. Cocoon Mush (2025) depicts a dense cluster of blue and yellow shapes and marks set against a crimson ground. Despite the almost frenetic energy of the knot at the center, the colors remain largely undiluted, staying close to jewel-toned. Composed of the three primary colors — red, yellow and blue — Itiola seems to allude to motherhood as a chaotic cluster of mixed messages. In spite of this, it holds something elemental. Motherhood is a foundational tenet, one which, while perhaps difficult to define, is not difficult to identify.
At the Avondale Arts Center, American Asian — a large group exhibition (through June 21) curated by Nicole Kang Ahn — explores the diverse manifestations of Asian American identities. While the process of immigrating to a new country necessarily causes turmoil and divorce from ancestral grounds, this exhibition shows that this trauma need not be totally disaffecting.
In Jessica Lee’s She’s a spicy kitty (2025), a rug depicts what appears to be a landscape. I am uncertain precisely what the rug depicts because, as it is presented on the wall in the gallery, it has collapsed in on itself. Taking the form of a crumpled piece of paper, this textile sculpture is both frustrating in its lack of legibility and beautiful for its complexity.
With this sculpture, the artist refuses any kind of intelligible depiction of home, perhaps instead offering a mirror to the artist’s own understanding of their Asian ancestry. In addition, the sculptural qualities of the artwork thwart whatever functional use it may have had. While the disruption to both form and content work against an easy understanding of the work, I found that to be its most powerful quality, for what is home to immigrants if not a concept that resists easy understanding?
At Haugabrooks Gallery, Sierra King curates a group exhibition Everywhere I Go Is Home (through June 25). As seen in the exhibition text, this collection of works “investigates the relationship that we have to cultural artifacts in the homes of friends and loved ones. Specifically, paintings that were marketed to African Americans through local galleries, art fairs, exhibitions and massive print sales which were painted during periods of racial segregation through the Civil Rights Movement.”
Based on this introductory text, I expected to walk into an exhibition portraying the ways in which the home can serve as the foundation for radical political thinking. Instead, what I found was a collection of artists, two of which merely depict houses, while the other two seem completely erroneous.
Undercast (2025) by Candace Caston is a painting of the side of a house. Painted in high-key lighting with moderately realistic style, this house seems to be a literal portrait of a place: a still life depicting a house. But this piece does not contain any of the layered symbology found in historical still lifes; instead, its interpretation seems to begin and end with the brush — there is not much to interpret beyond the application of paint.
Elsewhere, Fresh Set (2022) by Ariel Dannielle depicts a pair of manicured hands hovering over a person’s chest. Cropped to show just the hands and surrounding torso, the subject of this painting is clear, self-adornment. While practices of adornment are rich in history, particularly in Black culture, I fail to see how this set of nails has anything to do with segregation.
Given what is present, the exhibition seems to focus more on the home as a site of daily praxis; a familiar place where one can be oneself. Had the exhibition offered this framing, it might have been more meaningful. As it stands, the theme of the show and its contents read as almost painfully dissonant.
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Leia Genis is a trans artist and writer currently based in Atlanta. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, Frieze, Burnaway, Art Papers and Number: Inc. Genis is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design and is also an avid cyclist with a competition history at the national level.
