For Art’s Sake - Summer sizzles
Art events are bountiful this season
June through August is usually a notoriously dry spell for the arts, but summer 2004 may be an exception, with enough lectures, symposia and enticing shows to make you rethink a vacation.
Carrie Mae Weems, whose much admired multimedia art has often dealt with issues of gender and race, will lecture July 17 (6 p.m. at Spelman’s Cosby Auditorium) in conjunction with her solo show Carrie Mae Weems: The Louisiana Project and Dreaming in Cuba, at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, on display July 15-Sept. 25.
And in keeping with a local trend toward collaborative exhibitions, Jackson Fine Art and Solomon Projects are teaming up for Home Grown, two shows dedicated to work by regional artists. Jackson will feature Atlanta-based photographer Angela West’s portraits of Southern belles, and Oraien Catledge’s sensuous, tender photographs of the opposite end of the economic spectrum, down-and-out Cabbagetowners (through Aug. 21).
Like the tendency to perpetually claim Julia Roberts as our very own resident movie star, the Solomon Projects phase of Home Grown (through July 31) fudges a little with the local angle, since only two of the six artists represented are actually based in Georgia (others have lived here at some point), with the rest assumedly just having Georgia on their minds. Some of the work is especially memorable, like Ridley Howard’s exquisite, poster-sized drawings and Tyler Stallings’ creepy, kitschy bug-eyed people.
You try to be open-minded when you venture outside of Atlanta. But let’s be frank. It can be scary out there.
All the more surprising then, that a show like Redefining Georgia: Perspectivas en Arte Contemporáneo showed up at the Columbus Museum (www.columbusmuseum.com), smack in the middle of Columbus, where questions like, “You’re not from around here, are you?” serve as a friendly greeting. The exhibition of Georgia-based Latino artists organized by curator Erica Mohar runs through Aug. 22 and features Alejandro Aguilera, Arturo Lindsay, Richard Lou, Mario Petrirena, Rocío Rodríguez and Jaime Valero.
The show documents the work of Hispanic artists in Georgia, an exhibition with special relevance since the U.S. Census Bureau reports that Latinos are the largest minority group in the country, with especially large growth in Georgia.
But it was impossible not to wonder, after a brief survey of the sleepy Southern town, what locals make of artists like Lou. Currently chairman of the art department at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Lou provided photo documentation of his 1992 project Voices: From the Conquered in which friends and fellow artists painted incendiary graphics related to the conquest of the Americas on his shaved head.
Cuban-born, Atlanta-based Mario Petrirena provides more inspiration in an installation of fragmented, fractured photographs of the artist from childhood through adulthood that examines his dual heritage as a Latino and an American. From the shards of shattered glass on the gallery floor, juggling those two circumstances looks to be a difficult task. Atlantans can get a taste of Petrirena’s work in a solo show at Sandler Hudson Gallery through July 10.
If you go to Columbus to see Redefining Georgia, don’t miss a chance to gawk at the lunch boxes. Columbus is home to Allen Woodall’s pricelessly homespun Lunch Box Museum, housed in the steam bath attic of the River Market Antique Mall. The museum features thousands of lunch boxes whose battered skins are like the familiar flesh of one’s own kin. They’re all here: the freakishly distorted prettiness of “Charlie’s Angels,” the blow-dried redneckery of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and that pioneer folky Holly Hobbie.
Some collect childhood memorabilia. Some collect “Piss Christs.” Just what drives the collecting impulse? A sampling of acquisitive Atlantans will ponder what and why they collect in an enticing panel discussion Collectors on Collecting, July 14, 7 p.m., at the High Museum’s Rich Auditorium, sponsored by the Atlanta Gallery Association and the Atlanta College of Art. Local collectors on the panel include (among others) Alston & Bird managing partner Ben Johnson, and Erik Schneider, whose collection includes contemporary works by internationally known artists Vik Muniz, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia and William Eggleston, as well as works by a number of Atlanta-based artists.
David Byrne, who dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design in the ’70s to become a musician, was in Atlanta for a recent performance at EarthLink Live and stopped in at Emory’s The Tumultuous Fifties show to marvel at the original manuscript of Kerouac’s On the Road. But he saved his highest praise for This is the Future at Saltworks Gallery. In his online tour diary, Byrne noted, “The work is fresh and fun, the wall labels are hilarious (Hope Hilton’s is written from the future, when she returns to Atlanta and does good works) ... I like Andrew Ross’ pieces involving tree roots that miraculously spell out words — possibly due to the similarity to my Lead Us Not/Young Adam CD cover.”