Best Visual Artist

Greg Mike has left a lasting impression on art in the city and has killed it this year between consistently painting huge murals, putting together and founding Outerspace Project, building up ABV Agency and Gallery, and locking himself in a room for two weeks this past July with nothing but black ink, brushes, and the bare necessities to fill eight walls at Restaurant Holmes. To keep the party going, he has more than 20 new works in progress. Mad props.

Courtesy of Greg Mike Art

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You're expecting us to list the Whitney Biennial artists, aren't you? Well, we'd like to recognize one who stayed home and transcended his signature style. In Spiritual Migration at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery, Radcliffe Bailey separated the layered ideas and images in his familiar collage paintings, bringing them to life at an experiential level. Bailey, who enjoyed sold-out shows here and in New York last year, has Magic City coming up this fall at the Birmingham Museum of Art and a solo show at Fay Gold Gallery. less...

R. Land's alien-inspired baseball must have been the best of the ill-fated orbs in that All-Star Ball project. The guy is a successful urban outsider (i.e., college-educated, self-taught artist) whose popular mutant images fuse pulp sci-fi, Disney and Dr. Seuss not only in flat wood assemblages and paintings, but also in clocks, lampstands and lunchboxes. less...