Lack of diversity in CL’s ‘Artists to Watch’ warrants concern

• Joeff Davis
• Cinqué Hicks

On Sept. 2, readers picked up an issue of this newspaper that profiled eight artists in various disciplines we considered worth drawing readers’ attention to. Also known as the fall arts preview, CL’s profiles included Flux Projects maven Anne Dennington, painter Ann-Marie Manker, and my own contribution, musician Jason Freeman.

All eight perform at a high level given their relative youth. All deserved attention. But CL’s super eight artists reflected an arts scene deeply at odds with the Atlanta in which most of us live and work: Our chosen artists all were white.

Not surprisingly, many readers were P.O.’ed. And rightly so. As commenter “L.Shaw” said, “We live in a multi-racial, multi-cultural city. Inclusion should be in our DNA.”

But the Sept. 2 issue of Creative Loafing shows that it’s not in our DNA, and that it’s not safe yet to dismantle the watchtower of racial justice in the capital of the New South.

Unfortunately, some have already begun to view this matter in the hackneyed terms of the 1980s culture wars: Namely, that achieving diversity in the arts is a chore that the majority culture must guiltily undertake for the benefit of everyone else. That zero-sum view is false and distractingly out of date. It’s a viewpoint that says the pie is only so big, and every advance by an artist of color displaces a deserving white artist who otherwise should have had the spotlight. How else to explain one commenter’s distaste at the idea of “substituting” one artist for another in terms of race?