Frame of Mind: Fresh Loaf, Creative Loafing Atlanta

Where did you watch 'Django Unchained'?

Rodney Carmichael — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 17:15:00 -0500

For those who are still talking about it (and many are), this is the one question framing all of the post-dialogue about Quentin Tarantino's film. And in this case, the "where" in "Where did you watch Django Unchained?" is not just an issue of geography but demography, too.…

Has the recession been good for artists?

Cinque Hicks — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:40:00 -0500

Recession? What recession?

According to conventional wisdom, Atlanta's arts scene should be all but dead.…

Art criticism must die

Cinque Hicks — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 04:00:00 -0500

For 15 years, art critic Felicia Feaster was the voice of visual art criticism at Creative Loafing. For many she was the voice of visual art criticism in Atlanta.…

Self-censorship doesn't allow for public discourse

Cinque Hicks — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:00:00 -0500

When Gary Black, Georgia's new commissioner of agriculture, takes office Jan. 10, one of his first orders of business will be to chuck art history out the window. That'll be the upshot if he follows through with his plan to banish several George Beattie murals made in 1956 from the Department of Agriculture building.…

Public art helps jolt Atlanta's street life out of its zombified stupor

Cinque Hicks — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:00:00 -0500

As far as Atlanta's street life goes, it's barely alive.

No wonder the producers of the AMC zombie drama "The Walking Dead" chose Atlanta as the setting for a post-apocalyptic dystopia where the only people out in public are either lifeless monsters or heavily armed survivalists.…

The $50,000 Hudgens Prize should be making bigger art-world ripples

Cinque Hicks — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:00:00 -0400

If you're active in the intown Atlanta art scene, there's a good chance you've never heard of the Hudgens Center for the Arts. And even if you have, odds are you've never been there.…

Castleberry Point sets an example for owners of vacant spaces

Cinque Hicks — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:24:00 -0400

In 2009, Atlanta passed a milestone that few within the arts community paid attention to: 2009 was the year Atlanta logged a higher rental property vacancy rate than Detroit. Detroit! That’s according to the U.S. census bureau, which counts up all the properties that could be rented but aren’t.

Sure, everybody knows about Detroit’s legendary ghost towns and derelict properties, which — being uninhabitable — don’t get calculated into census data at all.…

Lack of diversity in CL's 'Artists to Watch' warrants concern

Cinque Hicks — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:00:00 -0400

On Sept. 2, readers picked up an issue of this newspaper that profiled eight artists in various disciplines we considered worth drawing readers' attention to. Also known as the fall arts preview, CL's profiles included Flux Projects maven Anne Dennington, painter Ann-Marie Manker, and my own contribution, musician Jason Freeman.…

Artists should embrace Atlanta's open playing field

Cinque Hicks — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:30:00 -0400

In 1991, the erstwhile Atlanta College of Art unleashed a pair of game-changing artists into the wider art world: painter and sculptor Radcliffe Bailey and printmaker Kara Walker.

It quickly became a tale of two artists: Both received significant critical attention from the local arts press.…

Atlanta art community's generation gap

Cinque Hicks — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:00:00 -0400

At last month's Gather Atlanta, an annual conference for local emerging artists and organizations, someone in the crowd announced he intended to disturb the room.

It was Lionel Flax, general manager of Sam Flax art supplies, speaking up from the standing-room only audience of 250 during a Q&A session on "Art and the Public Sphere."…

GCA crisis reveals deeper systemic issues

Cinque Hicks — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:27:00 -0400

Last April, hundreds of art lovers armed with well-designed protest signs and a lifetime supply of face paint swarmed the steps of the Gold Dome. It was a stirring sight.…

National Black Arts Festival's unfinished business

Cinque Hicks — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:47:00 -0400

It may have been too much to hope that this year’s National Black Arts Festival visual arts calendar would be as meaty as 2008’s. That year, the festival joined SCAD-Atlanta in commissioning a film and a major new body of photographs by internationally renowned photographer Carrie Mae Weems. The people-friendly Artists’ Market held court in the Georgia World Congress Center, and Embrace, the gallery-oriented international fine art fair, occupied all 24,000 square feet of Mason Murer’s Buckhead real estate.…

Immigration and the arts

Cinque Hicks — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:59:00 -0400

One of the Beltline’s recent temporary artworks consisted of a thin, brown-skinned man who stripped himself naked, painted his body gold and inserted himself into a crevice in the hillside. There he remained until sunrise, literally becoming embedded in the Georgia earth in a performance both haunting and moving.…

Bravo's 'Work of Art' isn't as bad as you think

Cinque Hicks — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0400

I'm told the general public is more stupid than ever about the arts.

Emory University's Center for Creativity and Arts even hosted a citywide arts criticism forum last March to give all of Atlanta's arts writers an opportunity to see who among us could wag our finger the hardest about what dunces we've all become.…