Maybe im small town

by Kate Greenwell

Maybe when I was driving down I thought I was on the cusp of something.

Maybe it’s because I’m from a smaller town, where Atlanta is our New York and everything I can imagine us doing next starts there. I had my leopard print blanket, my pillow embroidered with my name on it. I was excited, buzzing to spend a week on a couch at a central Atlantean coined “unique loft” with my friends. I've already received a BFA, a BFA in May, so recently, but I've done it, an achievement, a question into what comes next. Wide eyed and bushy tailed, me and mine descended into Atlanta Art Week.

Enter …An Atlanta Biennial. It's not like I’m closed off from the art world, as fresh as we may feel we have dug ourselves into the thicket of the Chattanooga art community, emulsifying into its breadth, as shallow as it may seem we are aware of influence, of care, of programming and ultimately of openings. …An Atlanta Biennial served, to say the least. I saw familiar works, works from emerging southern artists like Sergio Suarez, Krista Clark, and Aineki Traverso... It was inspiring. It was hopeful. I saw real people's hands putting care into the works. Most gracefully painted among these was Tres Gatos Locos by Maria Korol. This work had a sense of whimsy and play, and fully removed any thought from my mind that painting was dead. It was tended to, effortless and kind. In Suarez’s installation surrounding his piece, The Invention of Meaning, the ramp alone inspired. The woody rawness of it stretching up into an entrance that had been so crafted, so capturing against the dark carvings of the woodcut matrix. To top it all off was the entrance piece by Tori Tinsley. This installation was playful, inviting, donkey. I felt welcomed into an art landscape that felt like something I had the right to dig my hands into.

Left: Maria Korol, Tres gatos locos (Just Three Cats). Right: details from Tori Tinsley’s A Lifetime of Joy and Worry.

Work-in-progress detail from Tori Tinsley’s studio visit.

Cue meeting Tori Tinsley. It was the next morning, and we went to her studio at the Atlanta Contemporary. I wore a blue sweater with a star on it. Tori was wearing platform flip flops, and I felt at home. I love horses, she paints donkeys. There was something in her work that was real and motherly. Tinsley felt like a painter’s painter. Her work stretched across walls. She used acrylic, which matched her energy. She's a fast painter, almost like she has an image ready and rearing and she needs it rendered at her own pace. Oil is no match. Looking back at the time Tinsley spent with us, it felt important to see evidence of her artist’s hand in her work during the time of Atlanta Art Week. Tori discussed motherhood in terms similar to how I have envisioned my own future. She discussed raising her kids in the city, how they had a special connection to the white alligator at the Georgia Aquarium and how it was so different from her own childhood connections with nature.

In one offhand comment she questioned “what will they grow up remembering?” One particular element of play that comes into Tori’s work is the animals. Tori explained that growing up her mom was around horses, and donkeys came into her life later during time spent on an island that was occupied by a self-sufficient group of them including a mother and son pair. She found solace in as she was entering motherhood herself. Those real experiences with animals jump into Tori’s work in the most light and gentle ways, highlighting the joy of memory.

Riding on a high, the continuation into the rigor of Atlanta Art Week was promising yet intimidating. A gentle pause in a graveyard at the heart of the city grounded me slightly. Maybe it was just seeing more than three square feet of grass, or having the cover of trees to hide the exposure the city has been forcing upon us. Whatever it was, solace was granted. Reminiscing on all the animal play from the studio visit with Tinsley, I took an extra second to pay my respects to the heavily worn concrete grave marker that may have once resembled a beloved mockingbird named Tweet.

During this moment of pause I realized that there were many elements of programming during this Atlanta Art Week that were highly praised, but that didn’t feel authentic to me. Maybe it will come to me later in better-formed sentences but I felt like Art Week was trying to prove to the masses that the idea of the unique, original thought exists.

What Atlanta Art Week failed to recognize is this: Art is an accessible space when it has no pedestal, unlike Tweety, but Tweety deserves his due.

What threw me the most during the Atlanta Art Fair was the lack of connection from art to artist. Call me naive. The peddlers, the gallerists, and the magazines reigned, which is their job of course, but the connection from art to artist that is received in a gallery opening and not just a purchasable fair was severed for me. Art exhibition jobs are so important to the community but their representation alone is not what draws a young audience in. I saw the art as a commodity and the artist as a mysterious figure. Art, to me coming out of a BFA program with a close knit cohort, is all about connection. It was those connections and communication from piece to artist to viewer, that is the connection that made art exciting.

While we were in town we visited the High Museum.

Left: Detail from Still Life with Fish, by William Merritt Chase. Center: Will and Jules in front of Untitled, by Philip Guston. Right: Tyler Mitchell, Gingham Boys, 2021, sublimation print on fabric.

I needed the sense of openness and public access seen at the High to be seen at Atlanta Art Week. And yes, I know it’s public, but the institutions as a whole are not the same. The schoolchildren in the High, the groups of art students, the families, the appreciators of art and architecture, or just a person who enjoys walking around inside! The kind of access that the general public has to museums, which is still limited, was not so easily found inside of Atlanta Art Week. Yes it is wrought with influentials and it's inspiring to see so many artists and enthusiasts in one place, but maybe throw a group of schoolkids in there. By just explaining to them the concept, explaining why they created these cubicle galleries, how all of this art exists across Atlanta, explain how to visit galleries, how to be involved, and how to support. I think Atlanta Art Week needs to reach a new set of frequenters, because inspiring work becomes disheartening when you realize the right people aren't seeing it.