POETS, ARTISTS & MADMEN tlanta’s art scene is on the verge of something significant — teetering between mak- ing it and breaking it. Long Aregarded as a creative hodgepodge, the city’s poets, artists and madmen have worked tirelessly in the last year to help redefine the city’s artistic identity. They attracted international attention with the colossal grassroots street art conference Living Walls, improved our public art profile with gloATL and Art on the Belt- line, and cultivated the kind of TV- and filmmaking-friendly environment that’s allowed for the conversion of Lakewood Fairgrounds into a Hollywood-worthy soundstage, and the local filming of AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” So what does the future hold for the arts in Atlanta? Can we build on the mo- mentum we’ve recently gained? Judging tara from the last year’s creative outpouring, -LY the scales are tipped in the right direction. NNE — Debbie MichauD PI XL E Y GLOATL: Critics Pick for Best Dance Company POETS, ARTISTS & MADMEN MIKE GERMON BEST TREND IN THE ARTS BEST NEIGHBORHOOD BEST EMERGING VISUAL ARTIST Atlanta’s art scene has experienced a changing of the FOR ARTISTS LUCHA RODRIGUEZ’s examination of the body as a guard over the past couple of years: The collective has be- There’s a fairly reliable life cycle applicable to art- web of thoughts and organs manifests itself in the ethereal come king. And while the twenty- and thirtysomethings ists’ neighborhoods: In the beginning, no one gives a delicacy of her voluminous hand-cut paper installations behind the city’s nascent art co-ops, galleries and organi- shit about them, not even the artists. The architecture and the sinuous tangles and gelatinous surrealism of her zations have displayed remarkable entrepreneurial savvy, is likely old and neglected or, alternately, comprised of “Creaturettes.” She’s also got a penchant for the color and ushered in a new generation of nonprofits, they’ve also strip mall ghost towns begging for someone to reclaim pink — her artful autopsies bleed it. The Venezuela-born shown that they know how to party. ART PARTIES such as the forgotten corporate landscapes. That’s when the artist, who has a BFA in graphic design from the Art In- Dashboard Co-op’s launch event at the cavernous Blue Tower artists sneak in. Spots such as the sprawling artist co- stitute of Atlanta, and an MFA in printmaking from the Gallery, Dodekapus’ mad art show-cum-ice-sculpting-rave, op B Complex, the CoLaboratory and the mammoth Savannah College of Art & Design, wowed this year in BurnAway’s fundraising extravaganza, and round two of the Metropolitan warehouses in Atlanta’s WEST END, Encore Series at the ACA Gallery of SCAD and in Spruill underground local art and music fest ARTlantis are a mere which house dozens of studio and gallery spaces, offer Gallery’s LatinGA. Last May, Rodriguez was awarded sampling of the past year’s social calendar. The parties ring large spans of square footage on the cheap. Add to the the Forward Arts Foundation’s 2010-11 Emerging Artist with the energy of those who are making up the rules as they mix historical-turned-right-now-relevant spaces such as Award, which includes a $10,000 grant and a solo show at go. What’s more, the art is good and just keeps getting better. Hammonds House and the Wren’s Nest, and — bam! — the Swan Coach House Gallery. We can’t wait to see what We’re not saying an art show has to have fire dancers to be the latest intown art mecca is born. she comes up with next. www.love-lucha-now.org fun … but it sure as hell doesn’t hurt. Readers Pick for Best New Trend in the Arts: The Beltline. See more Readers Picks, p. 42 POETS, ARTISTS & MADMEN Public Art ... our favorite open-air creativity BEST REASON TO ry in the most typical of places. Oral his- tories from Jolly Twelve member Freddy NAVIGATE THE Styles, drag queen Billy Jones, and soft- URBAN JUNGLE ball players from the Atlanta Tomboys Forget gallery walls, this year artists informed Memory Flash’s installations have been vying for representation in pub- and performances, and created an unfor- lic spaces, most significantly as part of the gettably resonant connection between the sprawling, multidisciplinary project ART past and present. www.fluxprojects.org ON THE BELTLINE. Intended to boost awareness of the size and scope of the proposed 22-mile loop of parks, trails and BEST USE OF KROG transit, and its potential impact on you and STREET TUNNEL me and our fair city, the multipart exhibit As BP’s busted well continued to gush has featured everything from a poignant oil into the Gulf of Mexico nearly two performance art and installation piece by months after the Deep Water Horizon’s Hormuz Minina to Jeffry Loy’s glowing “blowout preventer” failed to deliver as J steel flower pods. www.beltline.org promised on April 20, a couple of locals OE took to the Krog Street tunnel to voice FF D A their frustration, painting “fu bp” above V IS BEST PUBLIC the DeKalb Avenue entrance. The best ART EVENT part, though, was the FU BP TIME- MARCH ON THE CAPITOL: Critics Pick for Best Collective Artistic “Oh, Hell Naw!” In August, more than a dozen of the LAPSE VIDEO that circulated the fol- world’s most prolific and noted street lowing day. It showed the pair working eat, and humans are consuming technology artists descended on Atlanta for LIVING BEST COLLECTIVE ARTIS- from the middle of the night into the wee at a ferocious pace. In Significance slowed its WALLS: THE CITY SPEAKS, a week- hours of the morning, ducking for cover TIC “OH, HELL NAw!” audience down enough so it could take a deep end-long grassroots street art conference When artists, arts organizations and their as cop cars pass, and quickly accumulated breath and chew on notions of origin, evolu- that included the installation of murals, supporters first learned last April that the upward of 11,000 views on YouTube. tion and interaction. 1011-A Marietta St. posters, and wheatpastes all over Atlanta, Georgia House of Representative’s proposed 404-892-5477. www.kiang-gallery.com. along with lectures on urbanism, a gal- state budget for 2011 eliminated funds for the lery show, and general art trouble/mer- BEST GRAF WRITER Georgia Council for the Arts, the response Casting a critical eye at graf writ- rymaking. If Living Walls doesn’t incite was swift. The arts community sprang into BEST PHOTO FINISH ers is a little counterintuitive. We’re not Atlanta art vandals to step up their game action to oppose the cuts, including circulat- It’s safe to say that the last five years JU- about to impose a set of rules where and keep us on the international street ing a petition that gathered more than 2,000 LIAN COX has spent as the curator of pho- they clearly don’t belong, but we do art radar, then fuck it — we’re moving to signatures in a matter of days. The protesting tography at the High have been some of the think HENSE’s works on overpasses, old Berlin. www.livingwallsconference.com culminated in a MARCH ON THE CAPI- museum’s most productive, and arguably its buildings, railroad cars, rusty signage, TOL April 19 comprising several hundred most impressive. Exhibitions such as Harry and billboards over the past 15 years people, complete with pithy signs, dancing, Callahan: Eleanor in 2007, 2008’s Road to BEST PUBLIC deserves recognition. The veteran street music, singing, speeches and generally color- Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Move- artist always turns out graceful, lively ART PERFORMANCE ful commotion. The following day, the Sen- ment, 1956-1968, and most recently, Signs of Working with an old house in the interactions that leave each urban surface ate Appropriations Committee modified the Life: Photographs by Peter Sekaer have raised historic Old Fourth Ward, a softball field, he appropriates looking truly appreci- budget, which was later approved, allotting the museum’s profile and helped pad its per- a vacant lot, and a growth of kudzu be- ated, including his bold — and autho- approximately $890,000 for the GCA. It was manent collection. For the “Picturing the hind a strip mall, JOHN Q’S MEMORY rized — Beltline mural off Ralph McGill a wake-up call for members of the local art South” series, Cox wrangled commissions from FLASH uncovered Atlanta’s queer histo- Boulevard. www.hensethename.com community, who learned the hard way that photographer Alec Soth, which now call the you’ve got to fight for your right to be arty. High home. Among the best of the nation’s photography scholars, Cox was appointed as Founding Curator of Photography for the Fine BEST ART EXHIBIT Arts Museums of San Francisco and Chief Cu- IN A GALLERY rator of the de Young Museum in July. We’re Atlanta artist Pandra Williams presented sad to see him go, but thanks to his diligent a complex and meditative study in the biol- efforts at building the museum’s permanent ogy of technology (and vice versa) with her collection in truly meaningful ways, we have moody installation “Radicis,” one of the plenty to remember him by. 1280 Peachtree St. standout pieces in her exceptional joint show 404-733-4444. www.high.org. IN SIGNIFICANCE with Annette Gates at the Westside’s Kiang Gallery last spring. “Radi- BEST LOCAL MALE ACTOR cis” — a pulsing combination of handmade A mainstay of Kenny Leon’s True Colors porcelain sculptures, laminated mulberry Theatre Company, E.