Wilay Méndez Páez: The Randomness of the Symbols

Wilay Méndez Páez has a solo show running at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta, titled The Randomness of the Symbols. It opened on Saturday, October 24, and stays up through Saturday, January 2, 2027.

Méndez Páez is an Afro-Cuban artist and an Atlanta resident. His work here is built around forging iron and steel into Egyptian and Sumerian symbols, which he says are meant to depict what history has endeavored to obliterate. He works in sculpture with found materials, but he also paints and writes poetry, so the show pulls from a few different disciplines at once.

There's a specific weight to the materials he chooses. He describes the welded forms as holding the memory of exile, war, and diaspora, and says that Blackness, migration, and marginality are still met with bars, cages, and walls built to enclose. The symbols themselves—ancient Egyptian and Sumerian—sit alongside those references to displacement and confinement, and the iron and steel he works in are the same materials used to build those very bars and walls. It's a show that looks at the things we've lost and the things that keep people apart.

If you're in the city, you've got plenty of time to catch it. It's at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia through January 2, 2027.