Best Advocate for the Arts

It’s one thing to make art. It’s another thing entirely to make a living making art. Go to art school and you’ll spend plenty of time focused on creativity, but probably not too much on professional hustle. That’s why we’re lucky to have C4 here in Atlanta. The arts entrepreneurship nonprofit, which operates out of the FUSE Arts Center in Downtown, offers the classes and resources artists need to help grow their businesses, from marketing seminars to website instruction to - gasp - decent health care options through Kaiser Permanente. Sure, health care and marketing might not be the sexiest parts about being an artist, but they’re necessary to survival. And the more artists that can survive in the real world, the better off we’ll all be. less...

In March, the board of directors of Theatre in the Square voted to close the cash-strapped playhouse against the wishes of its founder and producing director Palmer Wells. Even in less acrimonious circumstances, the loss of the Marietta-based playhouse would have been a painful blow. In 1982, Wells and partner Michael Horne launched the theater, which quickly seemed to find the ideal balance between audience-pleasing chestnuts like the oft-remounted musical Smoke on the Mountain and provocative new works, including Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Richard Greenburg’s Take Me Out. Despite a 1993 dispute with the Cobb County Commission, which withdrew its funding for all arts over the theater’s production of the gay-themed Lips Together, Teeth Apart, Theatre in the Square was clearly a home away from home for its subscribers and long-time model for small local theaters. less...

When it comes to standing up for the arts in Atlanta, the key is putting your money where your mouth is. No one is in a better position to do that than LISA CREMIN, founding director of the Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund. Supporters cite her uncanny ability to target specific needs among specific arts organizations – more often in the small to midsize range – to prevent an arts community polarized into the haves and the have-nots. The feather in the cap: As a board member of the national Grantmakers in the Arts, Cremin was instrumental in helping bring the organization’s annual convention to Atlanta in mid-October. Throw in MAAF’s doling out $4.1 million to more than 60 Atlanta arts groups, and you have a true advocate for the arts. www.metroatlantaartsfund.org. less...

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

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