Opinion: Graffiti wars

Just north of Ponce de Leon Avenue, behind the Spot for Dogs canine day care facility, a low retaining wall runs 90 feet along a disused, cement-covered, urban railroad trough. As of late May, the wall’s been painted battleship gray and is now punctuated by a series of small tile mosaics depicting colorful graphic flowers. Some of the flora is native to Georgia. Some is exotic. All of it is cheerily rendered.

The mural is “The Global Garden Project,” the work of Atlanta artists/coordinators Megan Dunkelberg and Karen Cleveland and one of 31 new visual art works commissioned by the Beltline as part of its Art on the Beltline initiative. (Full disclosure: I sat on the panel that selected the performing arts components of the Beltline’s art initiative.) The mosaics were constructed and installed by young people from Refugee Family Services, a local support organization for refugee women and children. The young artists’ names are inscribed to the far left and far right of the mosaic panels in the sort of naively jumbled script that announces “Kids made this.”

“The Global Garden Project” is lovely and innocuous. It’s the sort of incontestable, therapeutic art that foundations and governments have fallen over themselves to fund in the last few decades: nice, press release-friendly ideas with a mild social service veneer untainted by all the naughty stuff that caused so much trouble in the ’80s. That the mural nevertheless finds itself at the center of a minor art-world scuffle has to come as a surprise to the surely well-intentioned artists.

Continue Reading “Opinion: Graffiti wars”

(Photo by Nick Allin)