High Museum of Art

I went to the High on a Wednesday afternoon at the end of September to make a reel about the I SPY show, and I walked out two hours later having been handed my whole childhood back. If you ever lay on the floor with one of those books hunting for the one blue button, this is your exhibition. The sets are real. They are sitting in the room.

The High paid me to make the video and hosted the visit, so here is everything I'd tell you before you drive over, including the parts that have nothing to do with I SPY.

It opened August 28, 2026 and runs through January 3, 2027, in the special exhibition galleries on the second level of the Stent Family Wing. The High calls it the largest survey of Walter Wick's work ever put together, more than forty five works across fifty years, and it is the first show in their children's book series, which started in 2013, built around photography instead of drawings or paintings.

Here's the part that got me. Wick doesn't paint those pages. He builds them. Tiny castles, a whole village street, a shop window called the Curiosity Shop, little toy skylines on a shelf, and then he photographs them once, exactly right. At the High the actual three dimensional models sit next to the finished photographs, so you can stand there and work out where every hidden thing lives. There are blocks that spell I S P Y as tall as a second grader, and reading corners stocked with the books so the kids can sit down and play the game for real.

The show was organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, which bought eighty four of Wick's photographs from him and his wife, Linda Cheverton Wick, back in 2015. That's why it exists at this size.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1953. He started out as a commercial photographer messing around with mirrors, long exposures and composites, trying to put ideas about space and time into a single frame. In New York he began making covers and puzzle designs for Games magazine, and that work turned into the first photographic search and find book, I SPY: A Book of Picture Riddles, in 1992. Jean Marzollo wrote the riddles. Over the thirty five years since, he has put out more than twenty six titles, including the Can You See What I See? series.

The exhibition pulls in his famous images like Yikes!, Clouds and City Blocks from I SPY Fantasy, and it also shows the early stuff almost nobody has seen, his photographs of optical illusions in nature. Give the grown ups a minute with those.

The white part with the ramps is Richard Meier's building from 1983. Renzo Piano added the rest in 2005. Both of them won the Pritzker, which is the architecture Nobel, and you feel it the second you walk into that atrium and start spiraling up. I spent a good ten minutes just looking down over the rail.

The High turns a hundred this year. It started in 1926, when Hattie High gave the family's house on Peachtree Street to the Atlanta Art Association, and it holds more than twenty thousand works now. The collection is strong on American art, on folk and self taught artists from the South, on photography, and on decorative arts and design, and it runs from a Monet to a Basquiat. If you came for I SPY, budget another hour for the permanent galleries. The old paintings upstairs are older than this country.

Open Tuesday through Saturday 10 to 5 and Sunday noon to 5. Closed Monday. The last ticket of the day goes out an hour before closing, and they mean it.

General admission is $23.50, plus about two dollars in fees, and it covers the collection and most special exhibitions, I SPY included. Children five and under are free. Members are free. If you live anywhere near Atlanta, the Museum Pass is $48 for a year of unlimited daytime visits, which pays for itself the third time you take the kids.

The address is 1280 Peachtree Street NE, Atlanta, 30309. Call (404) 733-4400 if you need a human.