I SPY Exhibit Opens at Atlanta's High Museum With 80-Plus Wick Photos

Generations of kids who squinted at tangled piles of marbles and toy soldiers looking for a hidden red button are about to see how the magic trick actually worked. Photographic illustrator Walter Wick, the visual mastermind behind the I SPY! and Can You See What I See? book series, has more than 80 works going on display this Friday at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where the exhibition will remain open through January 3, 2027.

Titled I SPY! Walter Wick’s Hidden Wonders, the show spans 50 years of the artist's career and mixes large-scale photographs with the actual three-dimensional scale models Wick builds in his studio before shooting them under precision lighting, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visitors will also find early 1970s studio experiments in which Wick played with optical illusions found in nature, tracing the roots of the puzzle-picture style that later made him famous. Featured pieces include City Blocks and Clouds, both drawn from I SPY Fantasy, a volume created in 2021, as well as Puss in Boots from Can You See What I See? Once Upon a Time, a 2026 release.

A Traveling Show With Connecticut Roots

The exhibition did not originate in Atlanta. It was organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, which acquired a core collection of 84 Wick photographs donated by the artist and his wife, Linda Cheverton Wick, back in 2015, according to the museum. The Connecticut museum first debuted this retrospective survey in 2023 before sending it on tour to other major institutions, and the show's Atlanta stop also links the local arts scene to that Connecticut connection, since former High curator Stephanie Heydt now serves in leadership at the New Britain museum.

It's not the first time Wick's studio work has toured the country. An earlier retrospective, Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos, and Toys in the Attic, originated in 2006 and traveled to 15 art museums across the United States, per the New Britain Museum of American Art. That earlier show, much like this one, gave fans a chance to see up close just how much handcrafted engineering goes into a single spread — Wick has spent as long as three weeks constructing and photographing an individual puzzle scene inside his studio.

A First for the High's Book Illustration Series

The High Museum launched its children's book illustration series in 2013, and this marks the first time that series has centered on photography rather than illustration, according to the museum. Past honorees in the initiative have included Jerry Pinkney, Faith Ringgold, Maira Kalman and Oliver Jeffers, making Wick something of an outlier — and a milestone — for a program built around family programming.

High Museum director Rand Suffolk said Wick's dense, cluttered compositions encourage “deep and long looking,” framing the same visual puzzle-solving skills required to find a hidden object as a transferable tool for examining fine art more broadly. The museum's own curator, Andrew Westover, has noted separately that many adult visitors trace their early creative development back to reading Wick's books as kids — a detail that helps explain why the show is being positioned as both nostalgia bait for millennial parents and an entry point for young readers learning visual analysis.

Where to Find It and What It Costs

The exhibition sits inside the High's Special Exhibition Galleries on the second level of the Stent Family Wing, part of the museum's Midtown campus at 1280 Peachtree St. NE, which it shares with the Alliance Theatre and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. General admission to I SPY! Walter Wick’s Hidden Wonders is priced at $23.50. Families looking for a cheaper visit can take advantage of the museum's UPS Second Sunday program, which offers free general admission on the second Sunday of every month, plus free entry for children ages five and under, according to the High Museum of Art. The museum can be reached at 404-733-4400, and further details are available at high.org.

Wick's arrival in Atlanta follows a busy 2026 calendar at the High, which hosted retrospectives for modernist designer Isamu Noguchi from April through August and portrait artist Amy Sherald from May through September — two shows Hoodline covered as part of the museum's spring exhibition lineup and its wider run of major touring exhibits. Fans hoping to meet the artist himself won't have to wait long. The High Museum will host A Conversation with Walter Wick and Andrew Wotester on September 2, starting at 5:30 p.m. in Hill Auditorium.

The Franchise Behind the Photographs

Wick co-created the I SPY franchise in 1991 with author Jean Marzollo, and the Scholastic-published series has since grown to more than 50 titles with over 75 million copies in print across 31 countries, per Scholastic. The series reportedly began after Marzollo, then a magazine editor, saw a promotional photograph Wick had created and suggested pairing his hidden-object imagery with rhyming riddles.

Marzollo died in 2018, and her sons, Dan and Dave Marzollo, have since taken over riddle-writing duties for the series, collaborating with Wick on the 2024 book I SPY Love, which wove 11 classic photographs from past books together with a newly created cover set, according to Scholastic. That multigenerational handoff means the puzzle-picture format on display at the High isn't a relic of a bygone series but part of a franchise still actively publishing new material nearly four decades after it began.