National Black Arts Festival's unfinished business

• Carrie Mae Weems
• "A Class Ponders the Future," from Carrie Mae Weems' Constructing History exhibit at the 2008 NBAF Visual Arts exhibit

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. Then there was the full complement of satellite exhibitions and events at local galleries, all rushing to capture NBAF tourist eyeballs. A gush of enthusiasm from Weems, then-Executive Director Stephanie Hughley, and festival PR personnel showed that things were good and should only get better.

But as the visual arts events associated with the 2010 festival begin to wind down — the performing arts events wrapped mid-month — it’s become clear that this portion of the festival rose to nowhere near the stature NBAF would claim for itself as “one of the premier national and international celebrations of the art, music and culture of people of African descent.”