This Notebook returns to a previous Notebook’s topic of Atlanta-based artists finding adequate recognition, sometimes far along in their careers.
In addition to the examples below, it’s worth mentioning that 64-year-old Nigerian sculptor Olu Amoda, based now in Alpharetta, won the 2022 Hudgens Prize. His related exhibition will open at the Hudgens Center for Art & Learning on August 19. (This information became public too late for further discussion here.)
Myrtha Vega’s Iceberg and Glaciers Series, at MOCA GA through August 5, is a selection from a multi-year project that is still in process. Using a wide variety of painting styles, Vega set out to evoke or to document the processes by which icebergs have always been calved by glaciers, but now with a rhythm affected by climate change that has left many glaciers threatened with extinction.
That Vega continues to do this at age 90 is a testament to her commitment to a long and distinguished career in architecture. Her work began in Cuba in the 1950s and continued in the United States from the ’60s through 1999, with a first stop in 1961 at the legendary firm of Lapidus, Harle and Liebman. Her subsequent work ranged from designs for the Project Planning Associates of Montréal’s Expo 67 to the design of office spaces and hospital interiors in Atlanta.
Vega’s paintings of glaciers and icebergs from Argentina and Antarctica to Alaska are rendered in styles that capture the texture and magnitude of the natural phenomena, with a variety of brushwork suited to the occasion. Only in recent years do the paintings approach abstraction, though the forms she chooses to represent have a sculptural quality that recalls any number of works by 20th century masters.
As South As It Gets: A Sampling of Contemporary Latin American Art, at Ger-Art Gallery through August 22 (and possibly to be extended), contains work by several internationally recognized artists, including Wifredo Lam, José Bedia, Fanny Sanin and Carmen Herrera, as well as Atlanta-based artists familiar from past or present exhibitions, such as Liliana Porter and Esteban Patino.
Patino’s work is also being shown by Spalding Nix Fine Art, through September 8, in the group exhibition Thoroughfare, alongside John Dean’s abstracted photography, Corrina Sephora’s newest sculptures and Peter Essick’s remarkable photographs of the length and breadth of Memorial Drive.
But only one of the Ger-Art show’s artists, Karen Lamassonne, is currently completing a tri-national retrospective exhibition. Ruido / Noise is at Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin through September 17 after iterations at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Swiss Institute in New York.
Lamassonne, who has worked in lighting design in Atlanta since the 1990s, has had a career in art, film and music since the 1970s.
Her work was most recently shown in the United States in the group survey Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum in 2017, and a small solo show, Correspondence 2020, at Ger-Art in 2021.
The postcard correspondence from the pandemic, transmuted into lyrical mixed media pieces, gives only a tiny, possibly misleading glimpse of the fiercely individual expressions of feminine identity that made Lamassonne a controversial and sometimes censored figure earlier in her artistic trajectory.
However, there is now considerable online documentation of Ruido / Noise, the catalog of which reveals a considerably more complex oeuvre than a casual perusal of her more recent work might suggest.
On a different note, related only by the theme of current relative invisibility to Atlanta art audiences, Donald Robson’s paintings at eyedrum (through August 6) are the solo show award from the gallery’s 2022 exhibition of Georgia professors of art.
The work incorporates subtle art historical references into scenes that in some cases turn out to be derived from photographs of extras on a film set, and, in another case, excavators carrying mastodon tusks, with the subjects united by a dark, atmospheric style.
Robson has gallery representation in Los Angeles but not in Atlanta at present, despite 30 years of past representation at a succession of distinguished and now defunct galleries.
In a completely different part of the aesthetic spectrum, Ashley Kauschinger and Stephanie Dowda DeMer’s Surface of the Possible continues through July 29 at Day & Night Projects.
This is an extraordinary solstice-inspired show in which Kauschinger made one photograph of objects suggested by the season for every hour of daylight on the four equinoxes and solstices of June 2022 through March 2023, while Dowda DeMer explored online images of the moon’s surface from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The result is a strikingly poetic combination of earthly and cosmic textures. (Disclosure: Dowda DeMer is an ArtsATL contributor.)
These examples illustrate the complicated condition of Atlanta venues and artists but also demonstrate that, to quote from a radio interview with Lisa Morgan of the Georgia Association of Educators, the state is “more diverse than it has ever been.”
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Dr. Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, The International Review of African American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020, he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.
