Monday, August 23, 2010
Frame of Mind Atlanta art community's generation gap
Better communication is needed between emerging and established artists
Posted by Cinque Hicks on Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 3:00 PM
- Joeff Davis
- Cinqué Hicks
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." Although those who spoke on the "Art and the Public Sphere" panel dissected issues of public art, marketing and connecting to audiences, Flax was unsatisfied. He rightly took the panel — and the room — to task over why no one had mentioned the public school system as part of the public sphere. "Why," he asked, "aren't artists beating down the door to work in the public schools?"
The responses to Flax's question from painter Fahamu Pecou and street artist HENSE ranged from defensive to exasperated. Why should they as artists work so hard to crack a system that in turn has so little interest in artists, they asserted. Follow-up comments from other audience members ratified the notion that artists don't work in the school system because it's an unholy stew of suspicion and bureaucracy.
The entire discussion, however, overlooked one pertinent point: There are artists working in Atlanta's public schools.
Career artist-in-resident Jeff Mather estimates there are "a couple hundred" artists who routinely work to integrate the arts into Atlanta's school curricula, some even managing to make it a full-time gig. This number is separate from on-staff art teachers and counts only real-life working artists who conduct short- and long-term art projects in schools as part of their practice. Mather is also the board chair of Atlanta Partnership for Arts in Learning, which places working artists in schools.
There's also Young Audiences, Woodruff Arts Center. Its mission since 1983 has been to provide "curriculum-based assemblies, workshops and residencies in music, dance, theatre, literary and visual arts" in Atlanta schools.
So what's going on? How could 250 people who care enough about art to pack into a tight room on a hot summer Saturday fail to produce a single hand to shoot up and inform the audience about well-established work already being done?
For all its vitality and its artists working at every level, the Atlanta visual art scene has shamefully little intergenerational dialogue. This fact became obvious at Gather Atlanta. Gather Atlanta, a collaboration between MINT Gallery, WonderRoot, BurnAway.org, and ThoughtMarker.net, skews young. There was a mid-20s vibe over the entire affair, and, according to its website, it prefers participating organizations be less than 6 years old. On the other hand, scrolling through the roster of artists involved in Young Audiences reveals that the artists skew old, or oldish. If Gather Atlanta captures the Millennial crowd, the artists already working in schools mostly start at the top end of Gen X and get older. A lot of knowledge falls through that gap.
When I spoke with Tony Kimbrell, executive director of Young Audiences, he stated several times that the organization was "open" to working with younger artists and that they were seeking ways to accomplish that goal. But as the organization Atlanta turns to for arts leadership, the Woodruff Arts Center must be more than open. It has to be as urgent in its outreach as Flax was in his insistence that artists invade the schools. Those with experience and resources are key members of the community and should be actively seeking out the very organizations that Gather Atlanta has been so successful in marshalling.
At the same time, a group of arts organizations that considers itself emerging has to stop and ask: emerging into what? There's an existing art world in Atlanta, in which lots of people have already done lots of work. Failing to connect to a more established world will doom those in the emerging art scene to reinvent wheels for the duration of their careers.
There's nothing special about emerging artists or arts organizations that makes them more deserving of the attention of the Woodruff Arts Center or the Atlanta Public School System. But a healthy creative scene must draw on the energy of artists up and down the entire ladder of development. Otherwise, emerging artists who see no opportunity for artistic growth in Atlanta will go somewhere else to find it.
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