Radcliffe Bailey

Radcliffe Bailey, a celebrated Atlanta painter and sculptor, died Nov. 15, 2023 at the age of 55.

His transportive and conceptually rich mixed media works commanded attention outside Atlanta and the United States. Bailey's works landed in collections at the country's most prestigious institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Smithsonian Institution.

In 2011 Bailey received a solo exhibition at the High Museum of Art, a rare occurrence for an Atlanta-based artist. The show traveled to the Wellesley College Museum in Massachusetts and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. His massive touchstone installation for that show "Windward Coast" featured an undulating sea of thousands of piano keys and a single Black man's head swept up in that current. The New York art magazine Artforum called it "an overwhelming visual experience."

Born in 1968 in Bridgeton, New Jersey, Bailey moved with his family to Atlanta in 1972 when he was four years old. He played baseball and began to gravitate toward the art world, encouraged by his schoolteacher mother - in one memorable encounter he met Jacob Lawrence at the High Museum. He graduated from Benjamin E. Mays High School and received his bachelor's in fine arts from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991.

Read more about Radcliffe Bailey on ajc.com.

A celebration of life has been scheduled for 3 p.m. Saturday Nov. 25 at Cascade Springs Nature Preserve, 2852 Cascade Road, Atlanta. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations in the name of Radcliffe Bailey Jr. to the Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta.