New South, Ground Truth
MoCA Arlington presents Assembly 2026, the fourth edition of the museum's national biennial exhibition
Comprising four concurrent exhibitions organized by independent curators, the biennial highlights artists based across the regions that were once the 13 original colonies.
ARLINGTON, VA., August 18, 2026 – Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington announces Assembly 2026, the fourth edition of its national biennial, which will take place from October 3, 2026 to January 24, 2027. With an eye towards the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the
United States of America, MoCA Arlington's 2026 biennial comprises four separate, concurrent exhibitions. Each exhibition is curated by an independent curator and is grounded in a specific geography within the regions that made up the original thirteen colonies.
This curatorial framework provides a new lens for exploring current material and conceptual trends within contemporary art while highlighting artists and curatorial voices from across the United States. The four exhibitions that comprise Assembly 2026 together feature sixteen artists and explore four distinct regional concerns, all with national and global implications.
New South, Ground Truth
Featured Artists: Paul Stephen Benjamin, Sheila Pree Bright, Shanequa Gay, and Michi Meko
New South, Ground Truth brings together four Atlanta-based artists, Sheila Pree Bright, Michi Meko, Paul Stephen Benjamin, and Shanequa Gay, in an exhibition that reframes land not as backdrop, but as evidence. Working across photography, abstraction, painting, and installation, these artists examine the Piedmont South as a site shaped by memory, power, and unresolved history.
Grounded in Atlanta, one of the nation's most historically freighted urban landscapes, the exhibition holds two truths at once: soil marked by Indigenous displacement, plantation violence, and the unfi nished work of the Civil Rights Movement, and soil that has also carried Black communities who built, raised families, and imagined futures on the same ground. New South, Ground Truth positions Atlanta not as a regional footnote but as essential terrain in the national conversation about who gets to claim space in America, and on what terms.
The exhibition unfolds across three interlocking lines of inquiry: the landscape of history, the landscape of the body, and the landscape of imagination. These are not resolved into a single thesis but held together as a chorus: Sheila Pree Bright's documentary precision, Michi Meko's gestural cosmologies, Paul Stephen Benjamin's conceptual rigor, and Shanequa Gay's mythic figuration in productive dialogue.
About Assembly 2026
With an eye towards the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, Assembly 2026, MoCA Arlington’s 2026 biennial, comprises four separate, concurrent exhibitions. Each exhibition is curated by an independent curator and grounded in a specific geography within the regions that made up the original thirteen colonies. This curatorial framework provides a new lens for exploring current material and conceptual trends within contemporary art while highlighting artists and curatorial voices from across the United States.
Assembly 2026, MoCA Arlington's national biennial, is organized by Blair Murphy, Senior Curator + Director of Exhibitions and is generously supported by an Anonymous Donor.
