Mid-Afternoon Reverie: A Visit to The Georgia Museum of Art’s Newest Exhibit

A visit to the newest exhibit at the Georgia Museum of Art teaches how to find beauty in ordinary things.

By fourth year Natalie Schott

When I first saw that landscape photographer Micah Cash’s collection “Waffle House Vistas” would be featured at the Georgia Museum of Art from Aug 24, 2024 - Jun 01, 2025, memories of waffles with my sisters and dad on many Sunday mornings flooded my mind. Naturally, I had to go see the exhibit for myself. If you haven’t yet experienced the wonder of eating a chocolate chip waffle with a side of hashbrowns at this American icon, I beg you to go on your next midnight rendezvous.

The exhibit is housed in a multimedia purpose room in the upper level of the museum. Before I entered the exhibit, Chash’s own words greeted me in lieu of a friendly Waffle House employee: “Waffle House does not care how much you are worth, what you look like, where you are from, what your political beliefs are, or where you’ve been so long as you respect the unwritten rules of Waffle House: Be kind, be respectful, and don’t overstay when others are waiting for a table.”

This spirit can be detected in every corner of Cash’s poignant photographs which depict “natural environments as seen in the windows of Waffle House restaurants across the Southeast.” His work is evocative and nostalgic, both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Traveling across state lines, he captured the interior of Waffle Houses whose stunning beauty reflects the incredible diversity of the American landscape. The tension between the stark uniform regularity of Waffle House interiors contrasted with scenes of rain, ongoing traffic, or cornfields makes me think of how much we all have in common.

The GMoA commissioned Cash to create a small digital work to provide an audio and video component to the exhibit. Accordingly, Cash delivered a 9-minute-long video that featured views and sounds from three Waffle Houses.

Sitting on the black benches provided in the gallery room for reflection, I find myself sinking further and further into imagined nostalgia. I am transfixed by the time lapsed motion of the cars in traffic pulling in and out of the sunbaked parking lot in an infinite loop.

Gazing at Cash’s work, I am submerged into the largeness of the world. The worries I torment myself with blissfully float away. When I am driving or riding in a car, nobody knows nor cares if I got that internship I applied for. Nobody in Waffle House needs to know that I have never received a scholarship or that I was rejected from my dream school. Maybe the only real things in the universe are mundane things: comfort food and terrible puns shared over endless cups of coffee.

The sound of a chipper voice greeting invisible customers with a “Morning ladies!” abruptly snaps me to attention and draws me out of my mid-afternoon reverie. Brain fog from a busy day of classes and lectures sweeps over me and I leave the museum, and Waffle House, behind. When I exhibit the swinging glass doors of the museum, I take with me the knowledge that beauty is found in the mundane and can be seen everywhere you look.