Image: Georgia Museum of Art, Athens
Rachel Hayes’s commissioned installation ‘Looking Through a Sewn Sky’ remains on view in the Jane and Harry Willson Sculpture Garden at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia, through July 30, 2027. The craft-based project brings brightly colored textile forms into the museum’s outdoor setting, positioning the work between sculpture, installation, painting and contemporary craft.
The installation explores the color-field tradition, craft and landscape-based art through a series of canopies and soft sculptures. According to the museum, the works may initially recall quilts, weavings or midcentury abstract paintings. Their placement in the garden also connects them with the site’s natural and built surroundings, making the relationship between artwork, architecture and landscape central to the visitor’s experience.
Hayes’s forms are designed to be encountered from multiple viewpoints. The museum describes the color-field canopies as directing attention upward toward the sky, outward toward the horizon and downward toward the ground. Visitors can move around, beneath and through the installation, while changing light casts shifting colors across the work and its surroundings. The result is an installation that relies on movement and bodily perception rather than a single fixed viewpoint.
The artist drew extensively on the Georgia Museum of Art’s collection when selecting colors, compositions and materials for the commission. The museum identifies Frank Lloyd Wright’s windows, Joan Mitchell’s ‘Close’ and Sam Gilliam’s ‘Patchwork/Terry’ among the collection works that informed Hayes’s choices. Those references place the outdoor installation in conversation with objects and ideas represented elsewhere in the institution, while retaining its distinct dependence on open air, changing light and the garden’s physical environment.
‘Looking Through a Sewn Sky’ is part of the Georgia Museum of Art’s programme at the University of Georgia. Founded in 1945 from a gift of 100 paintings, the museum now houses nearly 20,000 works of art and presents exhibitions, collection displays and educational programmes. Its current exhibitions also include ‘Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,’ on view through January 3, 2027, but that exhibition is separate from Hayes’s installation in the sculpture garden.
The Hayes installation opened on August 23, 2025, and will remain accessible during the museum’s regular public schedule. The Georgia Museum of Art is free and open Tuesday through Sunday, with hours of 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursdays; and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. The museum is located at 90 Carlton Street in Athens.
