When the 2026 High Museum Atlanta Wine Auction opens its doors at Pullman Yards on March 27 for Palette & Pour, guests will find more than wine on offer. Works by 10 local artists are woven into the silent auction happening during Friday’s event, a move that plants creative work squarely inside one of Atlanta’s most storied fundraising weekends.
Together, they represent the breadth of what Atlanta’s art community is producing right now.
The addition reflects something the High’s team has been deliberate about this year. “We’ve introduced really exciting new lots that are a little more dynamic, one-of-a-kind experiences,” said Bridget Baldo, the High’s associate director of individual giving and strategic partnerships.
With values ranging from $500 to $7,000, the art featured in the 2026 High Museum Atlanta Wine Auction offers accessible entry points for first-time collectors alongside more significant acquisitions, making the event as much an opportunity to start a collection as it is to add to one.
Read More:
• Annual wine auction benefiting High Museum moves to Pullman Yards for 2026
• In Spruill Gallery’s ‘Night Swim,’ Hannah Ehrlich and Thomas Flynn II wade into memory
Fiber and textile: making the body visible
Two of the 10 artists work in fiber. Both are doing some of the most compelling work in that space in Atlanta right now, and together they show how far the medium has traveled from craft category to fine art.
Honey Pierre creates richly textured punch needle portraits. Her subject is Black and Brown life in moments of rest, joy and everyday intimacy. She uses blue for skin tones deliberately, reclaiming a color historically wielded as an insult and turning it into something expansive and liberating. Her solo exhibition “I’m Just Living Some Life, Okay?” recently closed at Impossible Currency in Atlanta.
At Palette & Pour, Pierre shows “Recharge” (2025), a 48-by-48-inch work in yarn, acrylic paint and oil pastel on wood. The piece draws from the writing of the Nap Ministry, an Atlanta-based non-profit that centers rest as resistance. Pierre writes in the 2026 High Museum Atlanta Wine Auction catalog: “Rest isn’t just a luxury after hard work; it’s essential for our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.”
Like Pierre, Hannah Ehrlich builds her practice around materiality and memory — though she arrives there through an entirely different set of tools. Ehrlich works across weaving, painting, sculpture and installation. She uses paint, dye and bleach on upcycled fabric to transform material from its original state into something that invites both touch and reflection. Her work has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, among others.
Ehrlich’s catalog entry, “I Replaced the Flowers That Blew Away” (2026), draws from the ritual of refreshing flowers at a loved one’s grave. She coats the surface in paint as an attempt to “preserve” the memories of what has passed.
Painting: surrealism, history and the figurative tradition
Three of the five painters in the group root their work in figuration, history and the political charge of the painted image. Together, they represent some of the most recognized names in Atlanta’s contemporary art scene.
Janine Monroe brings three works to the auction. Born in Kingston, Jamaica and educated at Georgia Southern University, Monroe calls her work “Sculpted Paintings.” She builds each piece from recycled wood, acrylic polymers and pigments, creating dimensional surfaces that engage the viewer physically as well as visually. The three works range from “Intersections” (2024) at $4,000 to “Darkness in the First World” (2024) at $6,500. A third, “The Burdens We Bare Through Perseverance” (2024), incorporates collaged Dutch-wax cloth alongside upcycled sawdust. Lot value: $4,500.
Where Monroe builds outward into space, María Korol works inward into history, memory and the unsettling power of narrative. The Argentine-born, Atlanta-based painter teaches as an assistant professor of art at Morehouse College. The New York Times called her paintings “wickedly surreal.” Artforum awarded her a Critic’s Pick, with critic Sean J. Patrick Carney noting her work injects “bestial tableaus with humanity’s patently unfunny pecking orders of class, gender, and race.” Korol brings three oil-on-linen paintings: “Rapiña (Rapine),” “Nocturno con Elefanta (Nocturne with She-Elephant)” and “Bíblico con Señora (Biblical with Ma’am),” all 2024.
Rounding out this group, In Kyoung Chun was born in Seoul and lives and works in Atlanta. Her practice moves between painting and site-specific installation. She explores belonging and the shifting sense of home, structures that are, as she describes them, open and inclusive yet fragile and impermanent. The High Museum of Art and the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs both hold her work in their permanent collections. Chun contributes “Nightly Bloom” (2023), a watercolor on paper.
Painting: abstraction, light and ecological thinking
The remaining two painters push the medium toward science, technology and the natural world. Their approaches differ, but both are asking questions about what painting can hold that other mediums cannot.
Sean Crim was born in Atlanta and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He combines acrylic and oil on canvas with neon and LED to visualize emotional states. His method draws on color psychology and neuroscience-informed abstraction. His auction entry, “Pieces of Renewal” (2025), uses Georgia red clay sourced from his Atlanta studio and childhood home. The work deconstructs a larger composition informed by brainwave data. It traces a journey from his first experience of renewal to his evolving understanding of it today. A larger series opens at Construct Gallery in Atlanta on April 16.
Similarly invested in what materials can reveal, Heather Bird Harris builds an interdisciplinary practice across painting, social practice, film and curation. Her work bridges critical ecology and reparative history. Harris has shown at Louisiana State University, Stoveworks in Chattanooga and apexart in New York. Her catalog entry, “Planetary Membranes / What We’re Made Of” (2025), uses walnut dye and water on cotton canvas. Rather than imposing a composition, Harris lets the materials behave according to their own ecological logics. The result, as she describes it, explores “the affordances of matter that defy and undermine imperial logic.”
Photography: Atlanta through the lens
Two photographers round out the group. Both work from a deep investment in Atlanta — one documenting its margins and underground spaces, the other centering the Black experience within the broader photographic canon.
Jackson Markovic grew up in Atlanta and still shoots on analog film using a 4×5 Monorail camera. His practice reactivates obsolete technologies and derelict spaces. He documents the pulse between public performance and private ritual. His catalog entry, “Sun Bitch” (2026), uses a large-format camera to draw with multiple exposures. Each dot spelling the word is a separate image of the sun, recorded on a single piece of film and presented as a unique contact print. Markovic currently serves as a Teaching Artist Fellow at the Atlanta Center for Photography.
In contrast, Chip Moody works in the daylight — though what he finds there is no less charged. Moody lives and works between Atlanta and Chicago. His practice centers on inserting Black narratives into the photographic canon. He brings two prints from his “Untitled (Tree as Body)” series (2026) — unsigned artist proofs presented as archival pigment prints. The catalog statement grounds the work directly: “Trees occupy space within our western society, not only as a witness to our history but as a testament to growth, autonomy, and change despite history.” Moody earned his MFA from Georgia State University, where he received the Welch Fellowship. He currently serves as the 2024–2025 Emerging Artist Fellow at the Atlanta Center for Photography and teaches photography at Georgia State.
Sculpture and printmaking: building meaning across materials
Ato Ribeiro closes the group — and in some ways anchors it. Born in Philadelphia, he spent his formative years in Accra, Ghana before settling in Atlanta, where he now works as a member of the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta Contemporary. His practice bridges his West African heritage with his African American identity. He employs the logic of collecting, joining and refining natural materials to honor layers of African cultural heritage. Major institutions have collected his work, among them the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Phoenix Art Museum and Cranbrook Art Museum. The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation named him a 2024 Biennial Grant awardee. His catalog entry, “Untitled (Wooden Kente Quilt 43)” (2022), builds from repurposed wood and wood glue.
The 2026 High Museum Atlanta Wine Auction Palette & Pour takes place March 27 at Pullman Yards. Tickets are available to the public at the High Museum’s website.
