Atlanta art community’s generation gap

• 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.