Atlanta has a bad habit of starting its history around the Civil War.
That’s not an accusation — it’s an observation from Miranda Kyle, curator of Indigenous Arts of the Americas at Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. And it’s the engine behind “Continuum,” the museum’s current exhibition featuring more than 20 works by Muscogee (Creek) Nation artists Johnnie Diacon and Hotvlkuce Harjo.
Kyle is careful with her language. She calls “Continuum” “not a retrospective” but “a re-presencing.”
“Atlanta tends to start history around the Civil War, and frame and fix Indigenous Peoples as parts of a past history,” Kyle said. “This exhibition is intended to lend its voice to the rising tide of individuals and organizations, activists and communities calling for and working to re-educate the South on the Indigenous history and contemporary life of the peoples who have been displaced from their homelands.”
The show, closing Dec. 7 before traveling to Emory’s Oxford campus in Spring 2026, fills the John Howett Works on Paper Gallery with watercolors, illustrations, jewelry, paintings, and sound — all rooted the “kin-space-time envelope,” a concept borrowed from Dr. Laura Harjo’s book Spiral to the Stars. It’s the idea that Muscogee creativity exists in simultaneity, that cultural practices and art forms made today exist concurrently with the practices of ancestors and future descendants. There’s no linear progression, no “movement” in the Western sense. Just continuum.
Re-presencing Muscogee life in Atlanta
“Creativity exists in simultaneity, not in how we conceive linear art movement decadency in the Western Canon,” Kyle said. “So, it was important to me to create the groupings so that they would not just be in conversation with each other physically in the present, but also in time.”
Walk into the gallery, and you’ll see what that looks like. A gold panel emblazoned with Continuum anchors the entrance, framed by Mississippian-inspired design motifs. Nearby, a wall-sized map traces two points: Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and Ocmulgee, Georgia — the journey from displacement to homecoming. Headphones hang beside the map, ready to play Harjo’s soundscape that reimagines the entire exhibition through audio.
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A gallery woven across kinship, and time
Diacon’s “Preparing for the Feed,” a luminous watercolor, shows a Muscogee woman in brilliant reds and purples preparing dough. The intimacy of the scene — hands busy, skirt catching light — makes it feel less like historical documentation and more like a snapshot taken yesterday. Which, in a way, it is.
“It’s always an extreme honor to represent our Mvskoke people with my art, especially in our ancestral homelands.”
Artist Johnnie Diacon
Diacon’s “Mvskoke Code Talker—Aleutian Islands Campaign World War II” hangs nearby, a study in what continuum means across generations. The piece depicts a soldier, but it’s also about an ancient language that survived U.S. Indian Boarding Schools (where it was banned) and later became instrumental in American war efforts from World War I through Vietnam. “When non-Natives view this piece, they may just see a depiction of a soldier,” Diacon said. “I hope it inspires them to discover more about us and how the ancient ways continue to be important in our society today as it was in the beginning time.
Harjo’s work sits in conversation with Diacon’s, but with a different rhythm. “Take Your Heleswv,” rendered in delicate india ink, shows two hands holding medicine — a reminder that care and healing are part of the continuum, too. Portraits of young Muscogee women, drawn with fine lines and soft backgrounds, anchor other walls. The generational gap between Diacon (born 1963) and Harjo (born 1994) becomes part of the exhibition’s structure: two artists observing their time in the world, influenced by who came before them, offering hope to those who come after.
Kyle’s advice for visiting? Walk through the exhibition once, read the labels, then put on the headphones and experience it again with Harjo’s composition in your ears.
For Diacon, showing work in Atlanta carries particular weight. “It’s always an extreme honor to represent our Mvskoke people with my art, especially in our ancestral homelands,” he said. He sees it as “a second blossoming of Mvskoke art in our ancestral homelands. It is finding its way back home.”
“Continuum” is part of a broader effort at Emory. The Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, supported by the Mellon Foundation, has partnered with the College of the Muscogee Nation on shared curriculum development, Muscogee language courses, and an annual Muscogee Teach-In. The Carlos Museum has refocused its acquisition efforts on contemporary Southeastern Indigenous art, adding more than 20 new works during Kyle’s 18 months as curator.
But the exhibition isn’t just for students or scholars. It’s for anyone in Atlanta willing to rethink what they assume about the South’s past — and its present.