The Alchemists, on display through April 29, represents a spectacular new beginning for the renamed and reconceived Johnson Lowe Gallery. At the same time, it keeps faith with gallery director Donovan Johnson’s pledge to maintain the spirit of Bill Lowe Gallery, even as it opens up the space to new dimensions of vision and ambition.
The gallery has had a complex history since its inception as founder Bill Lowe, who died in 2021, was a flamboyant, paradoxical character. He became known for creative financial irregularities as much as for theatrically presented art exhibitions, leaving a singularly multilayered legacy in the wake of the widely documented denouement of his legal difficulties in 2017.
Johnson’s imaginative and often astonishing reset takes the gallery in directions that preserve something of the flamboyance while introducing, with this exhibition, a new level of engagement with contemporary issues.
Johnson has partnered with the distinguished independent curator and art writer Seph Rodney on an exhibition that combines work by Atlanta-based artists with museum-quality works by internationally known artists too seldom exhibited here in a gallery setting. Overall, The Alchemists illustrates how Black artists from all backgrounds have engaged in processes of literal and metaphoric transmutation, succeeding where the medieval alchemists failed.
We may, in Dr. Rodney’s statement in the gallery’s press release, “look to Black artists of the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries to find real, lived models of people taking debased and quotidian materials and making objects that breathe life back into our culture.”
At its most provocative moments, the show defends this thesis by juxtaposing artists from opposite ends of the spectrum of age and career development. These include the celebrated self-taught Alabama artist, Thornton Dial, whose work has achieved global recognition, and Masela Nkolo, an emerging artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nkolo came to Atlanta five years ago from a refugee camp, having previously created artworks with a collective of street artists in Kinshasa.
It is, however, far more significant that the exhibition blends so seamlessly the work of some of Atlanta’s most recognized Black artists with that of internationally famous figures such as Mark Bradford, Lyle Ashton Harris, Leonardo Drew, Renee Stout, Ebony G. Patterson, Trenton Doyle Hancock and several more distinguished figures.
The range of individual aesthetics and topics of analysis — from history to gender to Afrofuturism — are literally too many to list. So too the list of Atlanta artists.
In every instance, the work on display is accompanied by an explanatory wall label that adds context and frequently explains why this or that work and not some other has been selected for The Alchemists. A case could be made for the creation of a full-scale catalogue, but given the reality of gallery budgets (and, increasingly, of museum budgets), we should be grateful that we have these individual annotations.
Many of the works are recent, such as Mark Bradford’s monumental painting from 2022, but a number of well-chosen works in the show date from as far back as a decade ago. They give no sense at all of being anomalous outliers, because the exhibition is not meant to be a simple survey of new work.
Shanequa Gay’s wall-filling mural expanding on her 2015 painting get that doe . . . is one of many visual highlights. In its own way it is as attention-capturing as Ebony G. Patterson’s spectacular yet subtle below . . . , a 2021 combination of mixed media on jacquard woven photo tapestry and custom vinyl wallpaper that occupies one of the gallery’s largest walls.
Numerous other works, from actor and filmmaker Danielle Deadwyler’s 2013 video Kitchen Installation 2 (above) to Cosmo Whyte’s 2023 untitled work on paper, are spectacular in their own multiplicitous right.
The Alchemists is an imaginative, groundbreaking show and deserves more extensive consideration than one review can give it. Hopefully there will be later critical analyses devoted to analyzing this and other exhibitions in historical context, where much more can be said, in much greater detail. What is important is that the exhibition is available for viewing and provides adequate material for viewers to appreciate it.
