ACP Auction Gala 2026: Common Threads

Photographs aren't created in isolation. An image carries forward what came before it, creating a way of seeing passed from one generation to the next. This year's Auction Gala, Common Threads, traces those throughlines: the cross-generational connections that bind ACP's artists to one another and to the larger community advancing lens-based media in the American South.

Atlanta Center for Photography supports this work by positioning Atlanta at the front of lens-based thought and practice. Common Threads celebrates the relationships that make that possible: the threads linking established and emerging artists, longtime supporters and new collectors, the organization's history and its future.

Join us at the FORTH Hotel for an evening that begins with cocktail hour, followed by a three-course dinner and a presentation honoring this year's honorees, Justine Kurland and Mary Stanley. The night continues with an After Party hosted by some of Atlanta's most influential artists and tastemakers. 

Take Home a Piece of the Gala: The ACP Limited-Edition Poster Series

New this year, everyone can take home a piece of Atlanta Center for Photography's Auction Gala.

For the Atlanta Celebrates Photography Festival in 2010, Jackson Fine Art organized Post-Her, a poster exhibition with an accessible angle that became one of that season's most talked-about shows. This year, we're paying homage to the exhibition's democratic spirit and spearheading an exciting new collaborative project of our own.

Sixteen years later, we've gathered sixteen artists to create an ACP Limited-Edition Poster Series. Each artist has contributed a single image to a limited-run poster collection we're releasing exclusively at this year's Auction Gala on October 2 at the FORTH Hotel. Every image is produced as an edition of just ten, printed by hand in ACP's Digital Media Lab and issued with a certificate of authenticity.

At $500, each poster is an invitation to begin a collection, expand your taste, and become part of the community helping photography thrive in the South. Editions are limited and numbered. Claim yours first at the Gala.

About the Honorees

Mary Stanley is an independent curator, private art consultant, and artist representative with an international reach. Since founding Mary Stanley Studio in 2004, she has offered collectors and designers a bespoke alternative for sourcing contemporary artwork and executing custom collaborative projects.

Driven by a passion for arts education, Mary established the Young Collectors Club in 2006, providing over 300 young professionals with a platform for social networking and contemporary art connoisseurship. Her commitment to the arts community is further reflected in her leadership roles, including positions on the boards of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Lamar Dodd School of Art (UGA), and the Atlanta Center for Photography, as well as her work with the Idea Capital Steering Committee.

Justine Kurland is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her early work comprises photographs, taken during many cross-country road trips, that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering a radical female imaginary in its place. Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers through destruction and reparation.

Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pennsylvania; Getty Museum, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others. She works with Higher Pictures in New York.