Cover Story: Artistic license

Felicia Feaster’s Top 10 Visual Art Exhibitions

1) New Photography, High Museum of Art — An exhibition of contemporary photography this provocative at the High Museum hasn’t happened in a long, long, long time. If this is a sign of things to come from the museum’s curator of photography Julian Cox, we say bring it on!

2) Jennifer Celio, Romo Gallery -- The diminutive delicacy of these ethereal graphite on panel drawings from California artist Celio was immediately countered by their gritty content: urban blight and industrial decay and the margins of the contemporary urban and suburban landscape.

3) David Humphrey: New Paintings, Solomon Projects -- Fanciful, wry, kitschy paintings by this New York-based artist were inspired by amateur paintings and examine material as familiar as President Eisenhower, clowns and kitties, to vignettes as hilariously “What the hell?” as an androgynous nude boy cradling a monkey in a waterfall. Humphrey manages to both inspire fits of convulsive laughter and offer commentary on the competing tendencies in American society for reverence and bad taste.

4) a year in the yards of clutter and the driveways of divestment: Tom Zarrilli and Recess Playscape: Didi Dunphy, The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center Talk about interactivity. Zarrilli’s yard-sale installation allowed viewers to browse some of the detritus of American life while offering rueful commentary on the poignant, pathos-laden manifestation of our lives in the material objects we cast away. And Athens artist Dunphy’s beautifully constructed skateboards, swings and balancing games all interactive — also brought a delightful inventiveness, sense of play and top-notch design chops to this summertime-appropriate pairing of artists.

5) Niki in the Garden, The Atlanta Botanical Garden -- An even more impressive follow-up to the garden’s record-breaking Dale Chihuly exhibit, Niki de Saint Phalle’s skulls, lion’s heads, totem poles and bodacious babes translated into an installation that took more risks and yielded enormous rewards. Interactive, feminine, playful, saucy, sexy, this was art that made you proud to live in Atlanta and in the cosmopolitan, sophisticated vision of its institutions.

6) Glennville: Photographs by David Yoakley Mitchell, Whitespace Gallery -- This Southern artist’s impressive body of photographs of old folks and trains, squared-away domestic interiors and dying downtown shops capture with heart and feeling a disappearing part of small-town life and the elderly relatives left behind who define it. The exhibit captured the complicated emotional brew of nostalgia and sadness that can define the past.

7) Ruud van Empel, Jackson Fine Art -- These sublime, hypnotic color photographs of black children surrounded by a nature of surreal beauty and menace showed both the enchanted relationship children have with nature, but also the vulnerability of children negotiating their way through life’s wilderness.

8) Serial City: Matt Haffner, locations around the city -- Public art in Atlanta can often be a drably civic affair, but this Atlanta photographer’s Atlanta Celebrates Photography project, of wheat-pasting large black-and-white photo murals around the city proved public art could be edgy, engaging and tip a hat to other public forms, from film and graffiti to culture jamming and political propaganda.

9) Happily Ever After ... Marcus Kenney, Marcia Wood Gallery -- This Savannah-based conceptual collagist cuts and pastes a plethora of old-school material culled from thrift-store archivist Kenney’s vast storehouse of cultural debris into commentaries on subjects from ecology to race.

10) Plush, Young Blood Gallery -- This adorably lo-fi installation of stuffed animals and plants, fish and anthropomorphic raindrops positioned in a soft and cuddly landscape was one of the most inviting illustrations of the dominance of craft in local art circles.

Curt Holman’s Top 10 Plays of 2006

1) Jelly’s Last Jam, Alliance Theatre — Directed by Kent Gash, this revival of the spectacular musical about the life of self-proclaimed founder of jazz Jelly Roll Morton crowned a year marked by numerous provocative plays about race, and proved to be exactly the kind of show that should be the Alliance’s specialty.

2) Keeping Watch, Theatrical Outfit — Thomas Ward’s superbly well-observed comedy/drama tracked the subtle, complex dynamic of race, class, religion and friendship in the modern-day rural South.

3) Metamorphoses, Georgia Shakespeare — The 300-gallon swimming pool helped transform Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of Ovid’s fables into an artful, sensual, abundantly theatrical experience, but the superb production would have delighted audiences even without the aquatic gimmick.

4) Yellowman, Theatre in the Square — Young actors Jade M. Lambert-Smith and Will Cobbs vividly portrayed all the roles in this intimate yet scalding portrayal of black-on-black racial animosity.

5) Brooklyn Boy, Jewish Theatre of the South — This impeccable staging of playwright Donald Margulies’ semi-autobiographical work proved so finely crafted and well-pitched that you felt like each scene could be expanded to its own rewarding, full-length play.

6) Permanent Collection, Horizon Theatre — Gary Yates and Christopher Ekholm led a strong cast in a fascinating, plausible drama about how the communication breakdown between races can lead to escalating conflicts all too easily.

7) Hamlet, Georgia Shakespeare — Daniel May portrayed the melancholy Dane in director Jasson Minadakis’ refreshing rendition of Shakespeare’s most famous play, buoyed by a particularly imaginative, cinematic first act.

8) The Pillowman, Actor’s Express — Minadakis’ swan song as artistic director of Actor’s Express (before leaving for the Marin Theatre Company) turned out to be a disturbing, occasionally comical tale about creativity in an Orwellian police state. A terrific show that happens to be one of the darkest things I’ve ever seen.

9) The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Alliance Theatre — In launching the national tour of the Broadway hit, the Alliance stage presented a delightful parody of contemporary education and adolescence. As sung by one contestant with runaway hormones, “My protuberance seems to have its own exuberance.”

10) A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, Dad’s Garage Theatre — Another musical show with youthful characters, Kyle Jarrow’s play features a cast of actual children, an approach that permits both a broad parody of Scientology and a subtle critique of how cult-type organizations can shape impressionable minds.

Politically Conscious Premieres

In 2006, Atlanta theater was in the zone. Never before have we had such a hard time winnowing a Top 10 list down from so many worthy choices. Although only one world premiere made the list — Thomas Ward’s superb Southern dramedy Keeping Watch at Theatrical Outfit — the wealth of brand-new works lends spark to the theater scene and helps raise Atlanta’s profile as a source of original plays. A strong political voice moves through many of them, including works as diverse as the terrorism drama ... ,” said Said at the Alliance Theatre Hertz stage; Robert Earl Price’s lyrical meditation on black political figures and racial assimilation in Come on in My Kitchen at 7 Stages, and Steve Yockey’s totalitarian slapstick in Cartoon at Out of Hand Theatre. Even Lawrenceburg at Dad’s Garage, Travis Sharp’s uproarious mash-up of Star Wars and “The Dukes of Hazzard,” featured a pointed critique of Wal-Mart. Perhaps no show found such a grassroots connection with audiences as Turned Funny, Phillip DePoy’s adaptation of Celestine Sibley’s memoir for Theatre in the Square.

Wit Rules

A number of Atlanta exhibitions this year, from art collective Golden Blizzard’s exhibitions of bodily fluids and bunny rabbits to Marcus Kenney’s retro-fervid collages, suggested that wry humor is the latest sanity-maintaining retort to a World Gone Mad. At Solomon Projects, David Humphrey went kitsch-crazy with his demented, amateur-painting-inspired depictions of smiling dog poop, kittens, naked youths cradling monkeys, waterfalls and Dwight D. Eisenhower, a kind of non sequitur mash-up of Americana. A well-regarded ATL artist, Ben Fain blazed a new trail and entered grad school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but not before kicking a hole through the status quo in a much-discussed, well-attended performance in the Masquerade parking lot, Gemini’s Brine, that combined showbiz spectacle and zaniness galore. At Young Blood Gallery, wit took a soft and cuddly form in an orgy of stuffed and velvety critters at this fall’s Plush group show. Even formerly wit-impaired artists suddenly integrated a giggle or two into their works, such as Mary Engel, whose new sculptures of dogs and other animals encrusted with porcelain gewgaws were a self-referential delight.

Good times and having fun have returned to the art scene with a vengeance this year. Next year: anger.

Special Effects

Thrilling theater only requires performers and a space: the stripped-down rawness of Theatre in the Square’s Yellowman proved, in its way, as exciting as the bright lights and big costumes of the Alliance’s musical Jelly’s Last Jam. This year featured an eye-opening assortment of unusual stage effects, most famously the water sports in the 300-gallon pool housing Georgia Shakespeare’s dazzling Metamorphoses. With the Center for Puppetry Arts being located in Atlanta, local playhouses tend to be old hands at puppetry, but seldom have we seen such thoughtful, affecting artistry as Bobby Box’s Anne Frank: Within and Without at the Center. The venue’s more lighthearted Halloween show The Ghastly Dreadfuls by Jon Ludwig and Jason Hines featured literally some of the finest marionette work I’ve seen in any theater anywhere. Meanwhile, Dad’s Garage amusingly tweaked the black-and-white color scheme of old movies in Reefer Madness: The Musical. But perhaps no effect was more risky or neatly executed as the child-actor casting of Dad’s Garage’s A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant. The 8-to-12-year-old ensemble proved to be at once a hoot and a source of thought-provoking thematic implications.

Castleberry Hill Undergoing Changes

Heralded by Elle and the New York Times as art ground zero in Atlanta, for a time the city’s art scene seemed to have found its epicenter. But with the artist-run studio and exhibition space 3TEN Haustudio on the block, and two significant galleries — Skot Foreman and Ty Stokes — closed, the district’s art centrality has slipped a bit.

Riding the Express

For his unforeseen swan song, Actor’s Express artistic director Jasson Minadakis directed two of the most provocative productions of 2006 — a fresh, crackling Hamlet at Georgia Shakespeare and a dark, scorching The Pillowman at Actor’s Express — before leaving to take a new job as artistic director of the Bay Area’s Marin Theatre Company. In his short, three-and-a-half-year stint in Atlanta, Minadakis established himself as a helmsman of intense, engrossing theater as a well as a champion of bold new works: The playhouse’s production of Megan Gogerty’s Love Jerry, a musical with pedophilia themes, saw picketers and became the most controversial show of the year. Minadakis is the third artistic director to leave Actor’s Express since 2000, setting off criticism and soul-searching about the limits of the Atlanta theater community. Minadakis’ has a promising-seeming replacement in Bill Fennelly, who served as associate director of the Tony Award-winning musical Jerry’s Boys and director of the vibrant country musical Violet at the Express in 2000.

Changeover at Area Institutions

Changes of fortune and position are perennial, but his year’s turnovers proved especially significant. After helping rescue the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center from financial dire straights, Executive Director Rob Smulian left this July for a new post at the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta. Another local arts institution that has at times also been on the brink of financial disaster, after six years in various positions at Art Papers, Executive Director Jamie Badoud is hitting the road this March, during a period of significant growth in terms of financial support and subscriptions for the magazine. And Bill Nigut, the executive director of the Metropolitan Atlanta Arts & Culture Coalition since its inception three years ago, is also leaving his position there for a new one as Southeast regional director of Atlanta’s Anti-Defamation League.

Getting High on Art

Though the inundation of Louvre propaganda would make you think otherwise, the really big news on the local art scene this year were two relatively new High curators: Jeffrey Grove, curator of modern and contemporary art, and Julian Cox, curator of photography, who exhibited a visible interest in what is going on in the Atlanta arts community and a desire to bring contemporary art to the High audience. With these curious and ambitious curators on the scene, there seemed to be an important sea change afoot. Grove’s exhibition of Morris Louis at the High was referenced in the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center’s cheeky Louis Morris group show, and both institutions got a dialogue going. Meanwhile, over at the High, Cox not only included two Atlanta photographers, Ruth Dusseault and Angela West, in his precedent-setting contemporary photography show New Photography, but proved a constant, visible presence on a local scene in dire need of some give and take with the gleaming high-art citadel on the hill.

Eyedrum Gets Its 15 Minutes — and $30K!

A serious endorsement of this already well-respected Atlanta alternative gallery’s importance outside of the city, this year the New York-based Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “focused primarily on supporting work of a challenging and often experimental nature,” awarded Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery a windfall $30,000, a figure double the group’s annual operating budget. The grant money provides for visual arts program support over a two-year period.

Book ‘em, Decatur!

Call it a happy case of full disclosure; this year’s inaugural Decatur Book Festival featured a frequent CL contributor (Thomas Bell) as its co-founder and a frequent CL rival (the AJC) as its main sponsor. Regardless where our allegiances lie, the festival was an unqualified success. The Decatur Police Department estimated a crowd of around 50,000 attendees for the Labor Day weekend series featuring 125 writerly types and seven full-time stages (with three used part-time). Our particular favorite: public-broadcasting man about town Ray Suarez (The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer) hawking his latest work, The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America, to a standing-room-only audience.

And on that note ...

Thomas Bell’s Top 5 Books by Local Authors

1) Between, Georgia, Joshilyn Jackson

2) There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue African’s Children, Melissa Fay Greene

3) Native Guard: Poems, Natasha Trethewey

4) Rampart Street, David Fulmer

5) Java Monkey Speaks, Volume 2, Kodac Harrison (editor) and Collin Kelley (editor)

Thomas Bell’s Top 5 Performing-Arts Events of 2006

1) In December, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra announced that recordings featuring the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra were nominated for seven Grammy Awards in four categories, including three of the five recordings nominated for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. The company has won 23 Grammy Awards since 1986.

2) The Atlanta Opera announced in May that, after four years at the Atlanta Civic Center, the company will move its performances to the under-construction Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre for its 2007-2008 season. The remainder of the 2006-2007 season will continue at the Civic Center.

3) The Atlanta Ballet announced in July that it would not renew the contract of the company’s orchestra. In order to balance its budget, the company will henceforth perform to recorded music.

4) Following the death, on Oct. 29, 2005, of longtime conductor Thomas Anderson, the DeKalb Symphony Orchestra opened its 2006-2007 season under the direction of conductor Fyodor Cherniavsky. Previously a frequent guest conductor in the region, Cherniavsky also is the broadcast recording producer for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

5) In November, after three years of collaboration with an international assemblage of artists and the Mayan people of Chiapas, Mexico, Several Dancers Core premiered Corazón Abriendo (Heart Opening), a dance inspired by Mayan weaving traditions.

Besha Rodell’s Top 4 Restaurant Developments of 2006

1) The rise of the neighborhood restaurant — With the closing of Iris at the beginning of the year, it looked like hope was dying that we might be able to sustain true neighborhood eateries (beyond cafes and breakfast joints). But at the end of 2006, neighborhoods such as the Old Fourth Ward, with its explosion of quality independent eateries, is keeping hope alive. And Shaun Doty’s decision to open Shaun’s in Inman Park rather than cozying up with the other hotshots in Midtown makes Kevin Rathbun look like a trendsetter rather than a loner.

2) The saga that is Seeger’s — OK, OK, we know … we’re all sick of hearing about the Seeger’s soap opera. The ultra-luxurious, ultra-expensive Buckhead restaurant’s owner Guenter Seeger is lauded as one of the country’s best chefs, but this year he has proven to be either a terrible businessman or just an indecisive attention-grabber. First, after it was revealed that he owed a quarter million bucks in taxes, he announced that he would be selling the restaurant and moving out of town. Then rumors buzzed that he might form a partnership and remain open. Then he announced that, no, he would close. Then, when diners scrambled for reservations before the doors shut, he announced he would stay open as long as business remained strong. Then, a bank executive who was also a fan engineered a loan to get him out of trouble, and hurrah! Seeger’s was saved! Right? Wrong. He has sold the business to Tom Catherall, of Here to Serve restaurant groups, leaving those of us who cared in the first place sapped of all our Seeger-loving energy. Seriously, it’s sad. But it should have been over and done with months ago.

3) Southern food finally gets a place on the table — Atlanta constantly strives to be the jewel of the South’s dining world. Until recently, very few of the top area restaurants actually focused on regional food. These days, Southern food is a bona fide trend, with restaurants such as Sweet Lowdown and Saga opening, which use the South as inspiration for modern menu items.

4) Linton Hopkins’ rising star — Restaurant Eugene has long been known among serious foodies to be one of Atlanta’s very best restaurants. When Hopkins really gets going, his super seasonal cooking can be breathtaking. Diehard Hopkins fans were vindicated earlier this year when Hopkins became the first Iron Chef Atlanta, after competing in a corn battle against some of the city’s best chefs, including Kevin Rathbun and Anne Quatrano. In October, Hopkins and his team traveled to New York to compete in Kitchen Stadium on national TV. The show will air in January, so we’ll have to wait until then to see how Hopkins did. But there’s no doubt that he’s a chef on the rise.

Listen as A&E Editor David Lee Simmons discusses the year in culture with critic Curt Holman.