High Museum’s “Paper Trees” traces 150 years of artists wrestling with nature’s hardest subject

For more than a century, American artists have returned again and again to a single subject that never gives up its secrets easily: the tree.

That obsession is the premise behind “Paper Trees,” a new exhibition at the High Museum of Art that takes its name from the very challenge it explores, translating the natural world onto paper and canvas. The show, on view in the Works on Paper Gallery in the Lower Level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion, spans nearly 150 years of American art through roughly 45 objects, including drawings, etchings, lithographs, paintings and sculptures.

Anni Pullagura, the High’s Margaret and Terry Stent associate curator of American art, said the tree became a natural lens for the exhibition because of how technically demanding it is to render.

“Every element in the tree, from leaf to branch to trunk to root, was so distinct, and you have to really understand each singular property to be able to communicate the whole idea of the tree as a subject altogether,” Pullagura said.

The exhibition unfolds largely in chronological order. It opens in the mid-19th century with artists working en plein air, or drawing directly from nature, before moving into the etching revival of the late 1800s, when printmakers began treating etching as an art form in its own right rather than a reproductive tool. From there, the show moves into the 20th century, when modernist movements gave artists new vocabularies for depicting the natural world.

Among the works on view is Joseph Stella’s “The American Chestnut, Obliterated by Blight,” which takes as its subject a tree species largely wiped out across the eastern United States in the early 20th century.

The exhibition also includes David C. Driskell’s “Two Pines #2,” painted in 1964, one of many works Driskell made over more than 45 years meditating on the pine tree. He first took up the subject during a 1953 residency at Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, drawn to the pine trees surrounding him there. In the decades that followed, Driskell, who died in 2020, used bold color and heavy brushwork to suggest the pine’s evergreen resilience, breaking the image into fractured shapes to convey a sense of movement. Driskell approached the tree not as a single fixed form but as something to be broken apart and studied from every angle, aiming to push past its surface likeness toward a broader sense of its presence and atmosphere.

Also featured is Bessie Harvey’s “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel,” a sculpture from around 1990 made from tree roots, paint and plastic beads. Harvey shaped the found wood into a rendering of the Abrahamic story of Jacob and the angel, with one root forming the angel’s hair and another arching backward like Jacob’s body. Harvey approached her materials as though they held a presence of their own, treating the wood less as raw material to be carved than as something already inhabited, waiting to be revealed.

The exhibition draws heavily on the High’s own American collection but also includes loans from two Atlanta institutions, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum and the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking at Georgia Tech. The Clark Atlanta loan includes an early Driskell pine study, while the papermaking museum contributed wood samples and a copy of “The American Woods,” a 19th-century encyclopedia compiled by botanist Romeyn B. Hough documenting tree species across North America.

Pullagura said partnering with local institutions felt essential for a show built around trees in a city known for its tree canopy.

“Atlanta is a city in the forest,” Pullagura said. “We want to recognize how distinctive we are as a city that is meant to protect its natural environment.”

She said she hopes the exhibition changes how visitors see the trees they pass every day.

“I hope it inspires them to create something,” Pullagura said. “Whatever might inspire you to create or to work with the medium of your choosing, I hope you’re inspired to do that in this exhibition.”

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