Wilay Mendez Paez: The Randomness of the Symbols
12pm - 5pm
2025/2026 Working Artist Project
This round of the MOCA GA Working Artist Project was curated by David Brenneman, former Director and CEO of the Telfair Museums of Art
About the Exhibition
La aleatoriedad de los símbolos [The Randomness of the Symbols] forges steel and iron into fragments of African, Sumerian, and Egyptian symbols — an alphabet of ancestors reassembled to hold what history has tried to erase. In these welded forms live the memory of exile, war, and diaspora, and the truth that Blackness, migration, and marginality are still met with bars, cages, and walls built to enclose. I make this work so that spirit outlasts confinement: so that even scattered, even arbitrary, our symbols remember us home.
About Wilay Méndez Páez
Wilay Méndez Páez is an Afro-Cuban artist whose work explores the intersections of everyday life, urban space, and human connection through the lens of his identity as a Black Hispanic Caribbean man. Born and raised in Cuba, Méndez Páez has exhibited widely in Havana and across the island, as well as internationally in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Since relocating to Atlanta in 2019, his work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. From 2020-2022, he served as an artist in residence at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, where he deepened his engagement in the city’s cultural and historical landscape. His art bridges geographies and communities, offering an intimate yet critical vision of urban life shaped by race, displacement, and creative survival.
Major funding provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, PNC Foundation, The Antinori Foundation and The Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.
Above Image: Detail of Campo de batalla [BattleField], 2026, welded recycled metal, 19.7 x 9.7 feet by Wilay Méndez Páez
2024/2025 Working Artist Project
This round of the MOCA GA Working Artist Project was curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, senior curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art
About the Exhibition
Runaway Universe is an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Corrine Colarusso. From the shaggy landscape of the Okefenokee Swamp to her ordinary back yard, she has used landscape and observations of weather conditions, to map cycles of the day and seasons, as parallel worlds linked to our inner selves. Her paintings are restless creations depicting a moving and dissolving landscape. Like adventures in time passing, these clusters of reeds and grasses, towers of air and twilight, provide an arena for the meandering gaze, a channel to the everyday spectacular and a way to know the fugitive world.
Especially now, because we live in a time when technology seems increasingly natural to us and nature itself less so, her work connects us to the patterns and signals found within the language of rocks, reeds and vistas that glow. Her paintings suggest that behind every common weed and vine lay a wild and remote hinterland very much like our own.
About Corrine Colarusso (www.corrinecolarusso.org)
Corrine Colarusso was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was a Fellow at Yale Norfolk, Summer School of Art and Music and received her MFA at Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia. In 1975, she moved to Atlanta to teach at the Atlanta College of Art (now SCAD) where she became a tenured Associate Professor 1975-1996. In addition to the many ways she contributed to the college, she created the visiting artist program and served as head of the Painting department for several years during her tenure.
She has been the recipient of several grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment Grant, and a Fulbright-Hayes research and travel grant to India and Nepal. She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, and artist in residence at the University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy, MacDowell, and the Ossabaw Island Project, Ossabaw Island, Georgia. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions for 5 decades and is included in numerous public, private and corporate collections such as the High Museum of Art and the Nasher Museum at Duke University, the Macon Museum of Art and Science, and MOCAGA, among others.
Major funding provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, PNC Foundation, The Antinori Foundation and The Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.
Above Image: Detail of A Way to Know the Fugitive World, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 76 x 66 inches, by Corrine Colarusso
*Runaway Universe will be accompanied by a catalog and include an essay by Walker Mimms. At the completion of this exhibition in Atlanta, a selection of paintings and works on paper will travel to the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN. January 30 through April 30, 2026.
Photography by Mike Jensen
Mark your calendars for this one-night-only program event to purchase affordable works of art by local artists. Artists keep 100% of the proceeds. This is a great opportunity for both emerging artists and budding art collectors! Enjoy drinks, snacks, and see the great talent on display! Admission is free for Members or $25 for non-members. Enjoy $5 off any level membership with the code PINUP2025
All artists must be current MOCA GA Members to participate in the sale of one work of art.
MOCA GA will ONLY accept credit cards for purchases. A fee of $3 plus sales tax will be added to all credit card charges by buyers. Artists will be paid by check the full amount of the sale price before fees and taxes within 3 weeks following October 3rd.
Artist Drop-off Guidelines
Participating Artist Requirements
- All participating artists must be MOCA GA members (at any level) or become members of MOCA GA to submit work in Pin-Up Show + Sale 2025. Please purchase a membership online prior to dropping off work. Use the discount code PINUP2025 to take $5 off.
- All artists must be 18 years or older to participate
Artwork Requirements
- Only one artwork may be submitted by each participating artist
- All artistic media accepted
- Artwork must be no larger than 20 x 20 x 4 inches (including any mats, frames, or borders)
- Artist must be able to hang work on the wall with no more than 4 standard push pins provided by MOCA GA
- Artwork must be priced at $500 or less
- Artist’s name must be printed on the front or back of the artwork
Drop-off Times:
- Friday, September 26th and Saturday, September 27th | 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Release Form
Fill out the Pin-Up Release Form (download below to save time at drop off) and bring it to check-in. If someone other than you is authorized to pick up unsold artwork, you must list the authorized person on your Release Form. Photo ID required for pick up. This signed form releases MOCA GA from claims arising out of any loss or damage. Artist assumes full liability for their artwork.
Pick Up Unsold Artwork
Artwork may be picked up after 8:00 PM following the event or October 10-11 from 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM. Unclaimed work will be discarded after Saturday, October 11th.
Join us as we mark a major milestone! You’re invited to our 25th Birthday Celebration at the Goat Farm. We’re celebrating 25 years of bold, Georgia-grown contemporary art, and we want you there! Enjoy music, sweet and savory treats, a full bar, rooftop vibes, and an exciting rooftop view of the construction of MOCA GA’s future home as it comes to life.
Free and open to the public.
Whether you’ve supported us since day one or just discovered MOCA GA, this is the perfect moment to celebrate and connect. Support us by purchasing a membership at the celebration!
The Goat Farm | Blue Room
Sunday, August 3 | 4PM to 7PM
Free and open to the public
Parking Limited | Rideshare encouraged
Come for the party, stay for the future of MOCA GA.
We can’t wait to celebrate with you!
RSVP now to join the celebration!
2024/2025 Working Artist Project
This round of the MOCA GA Working Artist Project was curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, senior curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art
About the Exhibition
“Preservation is not simply survival—it is continuity, awareness, daily resistance, care and righteous imagining. Saving Our Sacred Selves examines how we preserve our individual and collective selves and what should be carried forward or relinquished.
Grounded in the artist’s introspective inquiry, the exhibition straddles the tension between what the world forgets and what we fight to remember—our stories, our legacy, and the unseen, but critical, bonds that shape who we are. The work draws upon the prophetic frameworks of Black women writers and thinkers—most notably Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison— as reminders that imagining is a radical act, that predicting what’s ahead can be practical, and that what we tend to with care, survives. This exhibition offers large-scale narrative paintings, tonal portraits, landscapes, and domestic objects that emerge to present a visual and spatial introspection of daily life and the translation of those moments to the larger narrative of cultural exploration. Throughout this intergenerational investigation and dialogue, nature herself bears witness.
This exhibition, and all that is good within it, is dedicated to the memory of loved ones lost and the other 92%.”
–Ayana Ross
About Ayana Ross
Ayana Ross (b.1977, Savannah, GA) is a Georgia native, currently living and working in the metro Atlanta area. Ross is a figurative oil painter whose work explores the intergenerational impact of social themes, including topics of identity, race, equity, and the broader evaluation of our value systems. She combines traditional oil painting techniques, using figurative realism, with decorative elements and design. Ornamentation and patterning serve to establish a visual language that evokes nostalgia, elevates her subjects, and provides historical and cultural context—functioning both aesthetically and symbolically.
Ross received a Master of Arts degree in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design (2021). She has been recognized as the 2021 winner of the Bennett Prize, the 2022 recipient of the NBAF Horizons Award in Visual Arts, a Spring 2024 Mellon Arts and Practitioner Fellow through Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, a 2024 Eben Demarest Award recipient, and most recently, the 2026 Duncanson Artist -In -Residence at the Taft Museum. Her work is included in public and private collections, including The Bennett Collection, Savannah College of Art and Design permanent collection, the Muskegon Museum of Art, and the Reading Public Museum.
Major funding provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, PNC Foundation, The Antinori Foundation and The Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.
Above Image: Detail of When She Is Lifted, 2025, oil on canvas, 72 x 84 inches, by Ayana Ross
Photography Credit Walker Bankson
This exhibition features works by emerging artists from the MOCA GA 2023/2024 Working Artist Project. WAP Fellows José Ibarra Rizo, Jane Foley and Namwon Choi mentored these carefully selected Studio Apprentices during their award year.
THE 2023/2024 WAP STUDIO APPRENTICES ARE:
Horacio Arias-Rodriguez
Chase Chamberlain
Brayan Enriquez
Camden Hunt
Lucy Luckovich
Erin Palovick
Noah Reyez
ABOUT The Working Artist Project
The Working Artist Project (WAP) is an awards program to support established visual artists of merit who reside in the metropolitan Atlanta area. This initiative provides an unparalleled level of support for individual artists, expands the Museum’s mission, and promotes Atlanta as a city where artists can live, work, and thrive. A guest curator selects three visual artists to receive the Award. Representing our city’s best and brightest; these artists are supported with an exhibition, promotion, studio apprentice(s), and a major stipend to create work over the course of the year. Major funding for this program is provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, PNC Foundation, The Antinori Foundation and The Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.
ABOUT The Studio Apprenticeship
Each established artist selected for the WAP program mentors one or more emerging artists over the course of their fellowship year, creating partnerships in which both mentors and mentees can benefit from sharing knowledge, skills, ideas, experience, and the potential for creative collaboration. Through the WAP program, the apprentices each gain paid working experience with the Fellows and an exhibit of their work at MOCA GA during a group exhibition at the end of the following year.
Featured Image: Detail of I’m Recording All of This by Erin Palovick, 2025, Smoke and graphite on paper, 8 x 6 inches
Be there when we announce the 2025 Working Artist Project Fellows! Guest curator David Brenneman, Director and CEO of Telfair Museums of Art in Savannah, Georgia, will announce the top three working artists.
About the Working Artist Project
The Working Artist Project (WAP) is a year long fellowship program at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia that supports established visual artists of merit who reside in the metropolitan Atlanta area. This initiative provides an unparalleled level of support for individual artists, expands the Museum’s mission, and strengthens the arts and cultural component of Atlanta. Each year a guest curator selects three artists who represent our city’s best and brightest.
Major funding provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, PNC Foundation, The Antinori Foundation and The Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.
Continuing our year-long celebration, marking 25 years since the signing of MOCA GA’s articles of incorporation and 501C3 status, we look back at our mission and collecting initiatives. Over the years MOCA GA has been favored by wonderful supporters who have donated or purchased work for the permanent collection. In doing so, we have had opportunities to collect works by a number of artists in depth.
One very important Georgia Artist of which MOCA GA is proud to have a significant number of works is James Herbert, a filmmaker and painter who taught both mediums at the University of Georgia for 45 years! Two of his paintings, Windmills, 1978 and Spirit Man, 1992 were part of the founding collection and upon retiring from teaching in 2006, the Artist himself donated an early work on paper titled Pyramid Scheme, from 1973. Between 2013 and 2020 MOCA GA received eight additional works from a number of donors.
Collecting initiatives that span an artist’s entire oeuvre or simply bridge a number of years, give more robust insight into an artist’s development with regard to style, process, and themes. Additional archival acquisitions such as collateral exhibition materials, statements, reviews, sketchbooks and correspondence serve to deepen our understanding of an artist’s intent as well as the public’s perception at a particular moment in recent history. In early 2003 for example, MOCA GA’s Film/Video: Georgia exhibition included a viewing of an early film by James Herbert in conjunction with artwork.
Image above: Detail of James Herbert’s Whirling Man, 1999, Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 91.5 inches, Gift of the Artist
2024/2025 Working Artist Project
This round of the MOCA GA Working Artist Project was curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, senior curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art
About the Exhibition
Fire, in its perpetual becoming, does not only consume: it also reveals, transforms, and leaves barely legible marks in the sliver of the visible. Traces of an Unseen Fire, Sergio Suárez’s solo exhibition at MOCA GA, is an exercise in speculative archaeology—a cartography of the sacred that seeps through layers of time, matter, and language, where printmaking, ceramics, and cosmological imagery intertwine to question the possible futures buried within the present.
Suárez operates in the porous boundary between the sacred and the corporeal, between ancestral gestures and the contemporary gaze. His prints exist halfway between devotional iconography and astral schematics; they are thresholds to cosmologies sedimented in strata of cosmic memory. Illegible liturgies that remind us all narrative constructions are provisional.
Each crystallized wave and every ceramic fragment is a topography of touch. In the constellations of forms—evoking both funerary archaeological traces and the geometric patterns of a collapsing star—lies a visual syntax that does not distinguish between the metaphysical and the empirical, between clay and pixel: a syncretism that is not reconciliation but a controlled erosion of the boundaries between categories.
At a historical moment when the future appears to us as a horizon in flames, Traces of an Unseen Fire reminds us that fire is not a metaphor but an agent of chemical metamorphosis. It does not purify; it transmutes. And that we must transmute the rubble of history into a narrative that allows us to inhabit chaos without domesticating it—an ontology of the residual that understands the past not as origin but as an active geological layer where time does not only dissolves, it will also solidify the begining of something else, something we may not yet know how to name: traces of another world.
About Sergio Suarez
Sergio Suárez is a Mexican born Atlanta based visual artist and printmaker. His work explores how materiality and semiotics influence notions of the body, metaphysics and various cosmovisions. He is a B.F.A graduate of the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA.
His recent solo exhibitions include Pale Fire Projects, Vancouver B.C.,KDR, Miami FL; Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN; Hawkins Headquarters, Atlanta, GA; THE END Project Space, Atlanta, GA & The Consulate General of Mexico in Atlanta, GA. Suárez has exhibited at group exhibitions at Johnson Lowe, Atlanta, GA; Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, GA; MOCA GA, Atlanta, GA; and at Pasaquan & the Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus, GA; and Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA. His work was included in the Haugesund International Relief Festival in Norway and the Ionian Arts Center in Greece. Suarez’s work is included in the SGCI archives of the Zuckerman Museum in Kennesaw, GA. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. He has held residencies at The Penland School of Craft, Bakersville, NC; Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN; The Hambidge Center, Rabun Gap, GA; and The Ionian Center for the Arts. Forthcoming residencies include The Bemis Center in Omaha, NE. He is the director of Eso Tilin Projects and was part of the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta Contemporary from 2021 to 2023. He lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. He has two cats.
Major funding provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, PNC Foundation, The Antinori Foundation and The Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.
Photography Credit Walker Bankson
Continuing our year-long celebration, marking 25 years since the signing of MOCA GA’s articles of incorporation and 501C3 status, we reflect on the first 10 years of exhibitions and collecting. The years between 2002 and 2012 saw nearly 600 new acquisitions to the permanent collections encompassing a wide variety of artistic mediums and a diverse group of Georgia artists. True to the mission of the museum, these exhibitions focused on Georgia artists and often included curators and scholars specializing in the contemporary art of the state. In April of 2002, for example, MOCA GA’s first exhibition to explore Georgia art history, Artists of the Heath Gallery: 1965 to 1998, honoring veteran Gallerist David Heath, opened to the public and was curated by Emory University Professor and Contemporary Art Curator John C. Howett, long-time Arts Administrator, Laura Lieberman and former High Museum Director Gudmund Vigtel.
To further highlight and promote Georgia’s artistic talent, several of the more than 100 exhibitions held between 2002 and 2012, showcased fantastic corporate, municipal, and private collections as well as local arts foundations which had been supporting Georgia artists and collecting artwork, for many years. Some of these exhibitions included Selected Work from the Georgia State Art Collection; Focus: Corporate Collections; Dark Roots: The Atlanta University and Atlanta Life Insurance Company Annuals; and Forward Arts, recognizing the Forward Arts Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award Program. Several of these exhibitions were held at Sun Trust plaza, which served as a satellite gallery for the Museum between 2005 and 2007.
During this period The Last TABOO, exhibition commemorated the influence of an exceptional group of gay artists, their talent, and activism throughout the 1990’s. MOCA GA houses both permanent collection artwork of Taboo artists and materials from the TABOO collective within its extensive Georgia art archives. Additionally, the 2006 exhibition Artists Photographing Artists established MOCA GA’s artist portraiture collection, documenting Georgia’s talent through the eyes of Georgia photographers.
In 2007 as MOCA GA staff prepared to move from the original 1447 Peachtree space, to the Museum’s new home in the Tula Art building, MOCA GA announced a new legacy initiative… the Working Artist Project or “WAP,” which was to be funded by a grant from the Charles Loridans Foundation. Currently in its 18th cycle, and still funded by Loridans as well as The Antinori Foundation, with additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, 51 artists have become WAP Fellows. Each of these exceptional artists contribute work from their WAP solo exhibition to the MOCA GA permanent Collection.
Shortly after relocating the collection and Education Research Center to the Tula Building, Phase II of demolition/renovation on an additional 10,000 square feet for MOCA GA was completed. Larry Walker, Surface, Spirit Voices and Other Secrets: The Wall Series in Transition, both the first WAP Exhibition and the first of over 180 exhibitions to come, opened in June of 2008, and shortly after, the Museum catalogued the first work from the Working Artist Project into the permanent collection.
2009 -2012 continued with additional new programming 14 more Working Artist Project shows and associated acquisitions. Woven throughout these exhibitions were artist and curator talks, offsite studio tours, pin-up shows, fundraising Galas/auctions and celebrations, MOCA GA produced catalogues, oral histories and documentaries highlighting Georgia Artists… and of course, the continued its acquisition of some of the best contemporary artwork that Georgia has to offer.
Above Image: Detail of Freddie Styles Study in Black and White and Silver, Group II #4, 2002, Mixed media on paper, Gift of the Artist, 2005.053