As a wide-eyed 8-year-old, Atlanta native Nadia Scott was fascinated by history and art. A quick Google search launched her dream of becoming an art curator.
Now a Spelman College senior, Scott spoke at the opening of Crisscrosses: Benny Andrews and the Poetry of Langston Hughes, one of dozens of events that took place during this year’s Atlanta Art Week. It was her first exhibit in the role of her dreams.
Scott was smiling big and snapping selfies with friends and classmates — many from the Atlanta University Center Art History and Curatorial Studies Collective – after her gallery talk. The exhibit continues through December 10 in the Works on Paper Gallery in Emory University’s Carlos Museum.
Founded by art adviser Kendra Walker, the second annual Atlanta Art Week put a wide lens on the local visual artscape, from smaller galleries to the city’s acclaimed legacy arts institutions.
The kaleidoscope of exhibit openings, campus art tours, artist talks and industry panels nurtured economic opportunities for artists and put Atlanta on the international art stage.
The week also built community across a sprawling metro area whose arts spaces are often siloed.
“Art Basel didn’t exist in Miami, then it was the biggest thing in the world within five years — that is because of the synergy created by bringing all those galleries together,” says Mark Karelson, owner of Mason Fine Art.
He has seen fine art develop locally over his 30 years in the creative space and is proud of his friend Walker for bringing her Art Week vision to life.
“We’ve been advocating for people coming together as an industry in Atlanta for 30 years,” he says. “We all move forward when we collaborate, and we move backward when we try to keep things to ourselves.”
Though Atlanta’s establishment as a center for fine art has been slow to mature, gallery owners say they’ve felt growth in recent years with such developments as Art Week, the United Talent Agency’s opening of an artist space in Midtown, the growing racial and age diversity among art collectors and Art Market Productions’ inaugural Atlanta Art Fair coming in October 2024.
As in other sectors, like sports, medicine and entertainment, Karelson says, the backing of a local billionaire or two would make all the difference.
“It takes visionary individuals with deep pockets,” Karelson says. “(The late) Ann Cox Chambers was that person for many years.”
“The Art Fair is very telling of the growing respect for Atlanta as an art city and how the outside business and art worlds see the diversity, the energy and the opportunity to make money,” says Marcia Wood, 40-year art veteran and owner of her eponymous gallery on Miami Circle in a space she shares with Mason Fine Art. “When I heard about the Art Fair, I told Mark I never thought I would live to see the day.”
Many of the Art Week shows had themes based in culture, identity, introspection and human relationships with nature. At Mason Fine Art, the centerpiece exhibit is a somber experience.
Abezash Tamerat’s If Our Skin Has No Value, then Our Bones Must be Gold (through November 4) — a grievous exhibit of synthetic flesh, the gold bones of her missing sister and symbols of the judicial system, challenging its promise of liberty — reflect the pain of overcoming sexual abuse. Abezash, an Ethiopian-American SCAD graduate who now lives in Spain, says her world crumbled when their case against their father was dismissed on a technicality here in Fulton County.
Karelson says he aims to show diverse artists, “outsider” artists and those with transformative work, like Abezash.
“It’s a difficult story. There’s no positive ending,” he says. “Sometimes, that’s what art is. This is the kind of art that human rights museums should be interested in.”
Karelson, Wood and gallerist September Gray, who used to share space with them in Miami Circle but recently moved to the Old Fourth Ward, all saw packed houses during their Art Week events.
Wood’s gallery was a festival of light and color by Gregg Renfrow and fanciful love songs to forest creatures by Maria Korol (both exhibits run through November 11.) Gray’s sip and stroll highlighted Shirley Woodson’s vivid collages and paintings that celebrate her heritage and cultural resilience in the exhibit Connections: A Key to Something Else, which closes October 27.
“My whole goal is visibility, giving voice to African American artists who continue to push the envelope and have the talent to intellectually engage,” says Gray, a former singer who has been in the arts for 48 years. “Our voices were always left out of larger institutions.”
That goal is also foundational to Walker’s work. Gray applauds her for taking on the mammoth task of Atlanta Art Week.
Across town, the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta also fills a void by amplifying Black artists throughout the Diaspora.
The museum opened Black Gaze, Black Bodies: Black Masculinities and Hip-Hop (through October 30) with a curator talk at its Pittsburgh Yards home. In this exhibit, Paris-based Ghanaian curator Essé Dabla-Attikpo challenges the stereotypes of masculinity in hip-hop in this 50th year of the genre’s existence.
Instead of just a nostalgic look back at hip-hop history, the exhibit celebrates the anniversary by demonstrating the music’s depth and global impact.
“Part of Essé’s work and research is to bring the humanity to artists,” says Stephanie Fleming, who identifies as the village chief. (The museum defines itself as a village and named Fleming chief in 2022.) “We’re conditioned to see the roughness, the edge. This is not to exclude or dismiss any of that but to have an added perspective on their lives and experiences.”
Dabla-Attikpo, who ARTnews hails as the “curator at the center of Ghana’s exploding art scene,” curated the show as part of the Diaspora museum’s Bridge Residency, which fosters cultural exchange by bringing artists, curators and scholars from various countries in Africa to Atlanta.
“Having these diverse images continues to complicate our narrative, which ultimately becomes a way of humanizing us,” says Dr. Fahamu Pecou, founder of the five-year-old museum. “We’re not allowed to express ourselves or move in the world with any degree of comfort or safety because there’s all of these projections onto our bodies that don’t allow us the full breadth of our humanity. But hip-hop is poetry. There’s irony in that.”
These events, along with Spelman senior Scott’s curation experience, illustrate how Atlanta Art Week opened doors to the city’s future as an art hub.
“It’s been great to see how museums are trying to evolve as our political landscape changes, too, especially so close to home,” Scott says.
“I can’t rave enough about the collective and how we’re sharpened by these opportunities. As we get closer to graduating, we realize that we are the future of art in many ways. We’ll be the colleagues working on these kinds of events, wherever we are, and Atlanta will always be special for bringing us together.”
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Angela Oliver is a proud native of old Atlanta who grew up in the West End. A Western Kentucky University journalism and Black studies grad, daily news survivor and member of Delta Sigma Theta, she works in the grassroots nonprofit world while daydreaming about seeing her scripts come alive on the big screen.
