The Atlanta Artwork Honest (3-6 October) is the primary main industrial truthful to happen within the metropolis. It’s the most recent sign that the artwork world has set its sights on Atlanta as an vital vacation spot. Native collectors, artists and sellers say nationwide recognition for Atlanta’s artwork scene has been a very long time coming.
The Atlanta Artwork Honest is being placed on by New York-based Artwork Market Productions (AMP)—a division of selling company a21—which creates medium-sized artwork festivals throughout the US, with editions in Seattle, San Francisco and beforehand the Hamptons. AMP’s New York-based truthful director Kelly Freeman has been travelling to Atlanta for 2 years to organise the truthful.
“Speaking to the native galleries and curators, the factor that at all times retains developing is that this sense of neighborhood, like ‘Atlanta is on this collectively’,” Freeman says. “We have to make it possible for we’re supporting one another, growing this subsequent technology of collectors and instructing individuals what’s accessible in Atlanta … the one factor that I can supply is that this centralised platform.”
The inaugural truthful will host round 60 galleries, about 25% of that are native to the Atlanta space, although sellers are travelling from so far as South Korea to get in on the motion. It comes at a vital time for Atlanta’s artwork market, as the town’s inhabitants surges and the artwork scene will get increasingly nationwide consideration.
The truthful shall be held in east Atlanta at Pullman Yards, a former sugar processing plant that has been redeveloped into an occasion venue , together with filming studios and eating places. Courtesy Pullman Yards
Busy week in Atlanta
Happening concurrently is the third version of the Atlanta Artwork Week (AAW, 30 September-6 October), which brings collectively industrial galleries, museums and different areas to highlight the native scene. Sellers and advisors credit score the organisation, based in 2022 by artwork advisor Kendra Walker, for serving to to centralise Atlanta’s artwork scene and convey the town into focus to garner extra nationwide consideration. This 12 months’s AAW will host an MFA present for college kids at two Georgia universities alongside programming at native galleries, museums and a specifically curated present. For the primary time within the occasion’s historical past, AAW could have members from outdoors Atlanta, together with Ochi Gallery from Idaho, Mariane Ibrahim from Chicago and the New York images non-profit Aperture.
“It’s extremely gratifying to see the rising pleasure round Atlanta Artwork Week and to be a driving pressure within the metropolis’s evolving modern artwork scene,” Walker mentioned in an announcement.
Whereas AAW and the Atlanta Artwork Honest will happen in the identical metropolis the identical week, there isn’t a signal of collaboration between the 2 occasions. A spokesperson for AAW indicated in an e mail to The Artwork Newspaper there may be concern inside the organisation about being “overshadowed” in media studies by the Atlanta Artwork Honest. Walker, who based AAW in 2022, didn’t reply to requests for an interview.
“We weren’t capable of do as a lot collaboration as I would hoped for. We actually admire Atlanta Artwork Week. I feel that Kendra and her staff have performed such a lovely job,” Freeman says. “The objective was to be a centralised gathering house that AAW might make the most of as they needed to, and that’s one thing that we are able to develop into over time.”
All three native Atlanta galleries participating in AAW—Jackson Superb Artwork, Johnson Lowe and Whitespace—will even have stands on the truthful. Donovan Johnson, the director of Atlanta’s Johnson Lowe Gallery, sits on the Atlanta Artwork Honest’s advisory board and mentioned that whereas there’s some trepidation in Atlanta in regards to the truthful, most individuals are trying ahead to seeing the way it goes.
“This got here from the skin, so at any time when one thing like that occurs in a metropolis that hasn’t essentially skilled that earlier than, there’s at all times going to be suspicion and curiosity,” he says. “The overall type of opinion of the truthful is, ‘Okay, what is that this going to be like?’ As a result of it is one thing new, however I feel it is pleasure persons are feeling.”
“If we work all collectively and have a look at the alternatives, and attempt to work not towards one another however help each other, then it is all a hit,” says Anna Walker Skillman, the proprietor of Jackson Superb Artwork, which has helped flip Atlanta right into a vacation spot for images. “I’ve seen how artwork festivals have modified different cities, and the way vital it’s to have new markets and to create relationships.”
Shanequa Homosexual’s gateway to the south (2024) Courtesy Jackson Superb Artwork
A altering metropolis
Shelli Beermann, an Atlanta-based artwork advisor, mentioned a number of the metropolis’s strengths are how younger and open the town’s artwork galleries and establishments are, even to outsiders.
“As a result of Atlanta is an rising artwork market, there are a variety of younger individuals doing vital issues right here—not simply gallery house owners, but additionally the artists and the collectors,” Beermann says. “The worth factors are pretty accessible, and strolling right into a gallery is a straightforward and nice expertise. There are sellers who’re prepared to talk with you. There’s not a variety of intimidation out there right here. It’s extremely welcoming and really open.”
Atlanta has saved that appeal, locals say, even amid a significant inhabitants increase. Town has seen an inflow of latest residents because the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Since 2020, the Atlanta space has jumped from the nation’s ninth most populated metropolitan area to the sixth most populated with 6.3 million residents, in accordance with US Census estimates launched in March. Atlanta has lengthy been a hub for Black tradition specifically, and although the 2020 census knowledge confirmed the town misplaced its African American majority for the primary time in 4 many years, it’s nonetheless the most important ethnic group in Atlanta.
“To get Atlanta on the map, from an artwork perspective, can be an enormous boon to the town,” Beermann says. “Atlanta has a variety of tradition already, by way of there being an enormous neighborhood round music and sports activities groups, and to incorporate artwork as a part of the general Atlanta expertise can be an awesome profit.”
Atlanta’s artwork scene has for many years supported sturdy DIY galleries and benefitted from native universities and the town’s museums and different cultural establishments, Johnson mentioned. There’s a sense in Atlanta’s artwork scene that the town’s artistic historical past has lengthy been under-recognised, he provides.
“The thrill happening within the Atlanta arts neighborhood has at all times been occurring right here. This isn’t new,” Johnson says, acknowledging that giant occasions like AAW and the Atlanta Artwork Honest have helped focus consideration on the town’s cultural neighborhood. “I respect how they’ve been in a position to attract within the press (to cowl) what’s already occurring in Atlanta,” he says. “However one thing that’s by no means spoken about is the artists who’ve been dwelling and dealing in Atlanta for many years, who’ve at all times been part of the dialog, each regionally, and now regionally and nationally.”
Skylarking (2022) by Cosmo Whyte Courtesy Johnson Lowe Gallery
Creatives just like the multi-disciplinary artist Cosmo Whyte, the photographer Myra Greene and the painter Gerald Lovell had been capable of “make names for themselves past the boundaries of Atlanta … by cultivating relationships that began from inside the neighborhood”, Johnson says. “These issues aren’t actually spoken about in the identical manner that a few of these bigger initiatives are.”
What Atlanta wants, in accordance with Johnson, is to “bridge the hole” between the town’s homegrown artistic expertise and parts of the industrial artwork commerce that make it attainable for artwork and artists to flourish. The truthful may very well be a possibility to showcase what Atlanta has to supply, sellers say, and at a important time: Atlanta’s value of dwelling and actual property are comparatively reasonably priced in comparison with artwork hubs like New York or Los Angeles, however galleries within the metropolis are nonetheless feeling the squeeze amid an industry-wide softening of gross sales.
“The entire market is affected by this contraction, regardless of the place you might be, ” Beermann says. “I’m seeing it throughout nearly all of my purchasers, that everyone is seeing a dip in gross sales and a correction of the market. A few of that has to do with macro elements like rising rates of interest, it being an election 12 months, there’s recession speak—it’s a lot more durable today, throughout the board, for collectors to half with their cash and particularly to place it into one thing like artwork.”
