Airport Art Program

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Welcome to Hartsfield-Jackson’s Art Program

 The Airport Art Program develops and integrates art exhibits and performances into the fabric of the airport environment for the benefit of passengers and employees. The Art Program has three major components including commissioning artists to create site-specific artwork for sites throughout the airport, presenting rotating exhibitions and scheduling performing arts series. All of the program areas are linked to the Department of Aviation's goal to provide unsurpassed levels of customer service and become the world's best airport. Art Program

 

Permanent Exhibits

The Zimbabwe Exhibit

Zimbabwe's stone-covered landscape might easily explain the important sculpture movement that made this exhibition possible. Huge rocks rise up in the hills just outside the capital city of Harare, where hidden caves hold paintings by ancient bushmen. The sprawling stone ruins of the Great Zimbabwe, a massive thousand year-old palace, have become a national shrine. Matopos National Park is an amazing world of granite outcrops. Even the country's name venerates stone. In the local Shona language, "Zimbabwe" means "stone houses." Despite all the natural reasons for stone sculpting, the medium has only recently been reclaimed as a means of artistic and cultural expression in Zimbabwe. Joram Maringa, one of the first modern Zimbabweans to demonstrate the potential of carving native stone, initiated a workshop with a handful of pupils in 1958. Since then, emerging artists have learned sculpting techniques as apprentices to more accomplished sculptors. Some go on to study art abroad, returning to apply global influences to their work.

Zimbabwean sculpture has become internationally known through exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. Sculptors in Zimbabwe bring tons of rock from the mountain quarries to their outdoor studios, where they use hand implements to shape a variety of different stones. The poetic and whimsical forms that the artists create are drawn from life and myth depicting, for example, mother and child, a bird embracing a man, a water spirit, women in conversation and a traditional greeting. While tied to Zimbabwean culture, they speak of universal themes: the role of family, the relationship of man to nature and the importance of the spiritual. For this sculpture walk, twelve artists have carved a series of dynamic stone figures. The sculptures invite you to celebrate the source of their beauty Zimbabwe, a land rich in nature and culture.

-- Cathy Byrd – Atlanta-based art critic and curator

 

This permanent exhibition of contemporary Zimbabwean sculpture is located in the Transportation Mall between the moving sidewalks along the pedestrian corridor that connects Concourse T to Concourse A.

Rotating Exhibits