Poets, Artists & Madmen

In the Owly series of graphic novels published by Marietta’s Top Shelf Productions, Lilburn native ANDY RUNTON gives “wholesome” a good name through the black-and-white, family-friendly adventures of a young owl and his nature-loving pals. Despite the simple stories, Runton’s work achieves surprising emotional depth and, given the lack of dialogue, narrative sophistication. Runton’s Owly even makes “cute” kind of cool, without being kitschy. ‘’www.andyrunton.com .
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Local artist and craft fan Garth Johnson has one of the most impressive artsy-craft-centric websites going, period, at www.EXTREMECRAFT.COM. Its visual panache is matched by erudite, ballsy, often blissfully obscene writing and intelligent connections forged between technology, lowbrow, handicraft and conceptual art. Extreme Craft should be a daily destination on every smarty-pants hipster’s surf.
www.extremecraft.com.

Though we’re slightly concerned that they may have emboldened our enemies, we loved Brooks & Company Dance’s ominous take on unquestioning allegiance in THE LOTTERY. Choreographer Joanna Brooks reworked a canonical Stravinsky/Nijinsky ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, thrusting Nijinsky’s angular, jolting choreography into the plot of Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” giving new meaning to the original ballet’s ritual sacrifice.
404-454-1032. www.brooksandcompanydance.com.

The short stories of Jack Pendarvis find security guards watching over a shock jock buried alive, an unemployed man spying on sinister squirrels, and a very, very bad writer attempting to write the history of America. In THE MYSTERIOUS SECRET OF THE VALUABLE TREASURE, Pendarvis’ words are as wild and possessed by the same mad genius as his characters.
$21. MacAdam/Cage. 187 pages.

Atlanta author Joshilyn Jackson puts a new twist on the family feud in BETWEEN, GEORGIA, in which the biological daughter of one family is raised by that family’s sworn enemies. As an adult, only she can keep the two families from killing one another. No pressure. Set in a fictionalized version of the real town of Between, the novel adeptly mixes cold-blooded creepiness with lyric love and loyalty.
$22.99. Warner Books. 304 pages.

With his quick wit and smooth delivery, DREW THOMAS has become a force in Atlanta’s comedy scene. Aside from hosting the weekly open-mic night at the Twisted Taco on Tuesdays and regularly performing at other venues across the city, Thomas recently headlined at the Punchline. He’s toured nationally to perform with the likes of Bill Bellamy, Aries Spears, D.L. Hughley, Bill Burr and Ron White. And, in the fall, he will be appearing on Robert Townsend’s “Partners in Crime” on the Black Family Channel.
‘’www.myspace.com/bigdrewthomas
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Dancers are plenty familiar with people not eating, but this time they danced to fill others’ tummies. Pamela Dionne’s CityDance Ensemble brought together nine Atlanta companies for MOVING FORWARD, a dance festival to benefit Second Harvest’s efforts to feed the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. It was a great cause and a great show, too.
524 Plasters Ave. 404-877-0005. <a href=”http://”www.studiodionne.com”>www.studiodionne.com.

Winner of this year’s prestigious Santa Fe Prize for Photography, SHEILA PREE-BRIGHT is an enormously talented Atlanta Contemporary Art Center studio artist. She has created a host of revealing, stereotype-busting work examining the phenomena of the hip-hop fashion accessory of grills, the black middle class and black female sexuality, and she promises more fascinating peeks into contemporary identity to come.
www.sheilapreebright.com.

With an important public art commission for the City Court of Atlanta this year, an ongoing installation at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport’s baggage claim, and a screening of his animated antiwar film “Pass the Ammunition” at Get This! Gallery, JOSEPH PERAGINE is a much admired Georgia State University professor and working artist. He manages to keep making accessible and smart work that appeals to the young’uns as much as to the art establishment.
www.solomonprojects.com/.

How can we miss her when she won’t go away? Coriolis Dance Project artistic director Elizabeth Dishman recently moved to New York, but she keeps coming back to create new work. Lucky for us, she’s stuck on Atlanta. In FLYPAPER DANCES, she used Velcro, ropes, bullying bodies and flypaper to investigate sticky attachments in all the ways they hold us and, sometimes just as disconcerting, let us go.
404-931-0212. www.coriolisdance.org.

OK, maybe reconstituted thrift-store clothes and witty handbags don’t exactly jibe with the traditional macho, street-art, culture-jamming definition of “guerrilla.” But with the second annual INDIE CRAFT EXPERIENCE in Atlanta rating a mention in the New York Times Magazine, the ladies-and-lads who craft proved creativity isn’t just limited to galleries. And they upped the profile on nontraditional art-making in the city.
www.ice-atlanta.com.

Arc the Finger Records once again brought the “true school” to The Loft for the A3C INDEPENDENT HIP-HOP FESTIVAL, the indie alternative to the big-name bling-and-bass hip-hop orthodoxy. MCs, DJs, graffiti artists and breakdancers performed, competed and discussed the craft and its politics. Smart and lots of fun.
www.arcthefinger.com.

In a town that has been fighting to get its fair share of public art, the Atlanta Botanical Garden has been quietly shaking things up with its own large-scale temporary exhibitions, first with the impressive, record-breaking Chihuly in the Garden exhibit. But NIKI IN THE GARDEN, with its joyously interactive sculptures and ebullient charm, has gone Chihuly one better and proven that there is a mainstream audience for imaginative art in Atlanta.

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In numerous recent roles, YVONNE SINGH achieved the goal of any theater artist: to make the artifice of stagecraft appear real. Singh brought grounded credibility to roles as dissimilar as a noble tribal leader in 15th-century Africa in Essential Theatre’s Leaving Limbo; a snaky, Satanic ringmaster in dreadlocks and ringmaster gear in 7 Stages’ Come On in My Kitchen; and several service-industry laborers in 7 Stages’ Nickel and Dimed. Singh faithfully demonstrates the ability to bring the most abstract material or highfalutin’ ideas down to earth with the rest of us.

www.TheaterATL.com

We cramped our brains a little trying to figure out whether it still counts as “spoken word” if you print it in a book, but whatever it is, we enjoyed JAVA MONKEY SPEAKS, VOLUME 2, an anthology of poems by poets who have performed at the weekly open mic at Decatur’s Java Monkey. Edited by Kodac Harrison and Collin Kelley, this second edition has some serious poetry power.
$12. Poetry Atlanta Press. 90 pages.www.poetryatlanta.com.