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