The South got something to say.” André Lauren Benjamin (a.k.a. André 3000) uttered these infamous words while accepting the “Best New Artist (Group)” award with his bandmate Antwan André Patton (a.k.a. Big Boi) from the rap duo Outkast at the 1995 Source Awards. The Atlanta-based duo caused an upset when they beat out the favorites, Los Angeles–based group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. The ceremony, held at Madison Square Garden, occurred at the peak of the East Coast vs. West Coast debate in hip-hop that was dominated by artists Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. This moment is pivotal within Black cultural history for reasons beyond just being iconic—it also shows how overlooked contributions from the American South were across contemporary Black culture.
For audiences in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the South (and particularly Atlanta) had not culturally moved beyond the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Benjamin’s assertion signified a push to restore and remind audiences of the cultural significance that the South plays in crafting Black—if not American—culture at large. The expression also perfectly describes how contemporary Southern artists, curators, gallerists, and art advisors are reclaiming their cultural legacy and space within the global art world. This was evident in curator Karen Comer-Lowe’s 2021 exhibition of public digital art in Atlanta, which took Benjamin’s expression as its title to assert that the South still has much to say today.
In March, Atlanta’s galleries opened some museum-quality exhibitions in light of new openings, expansions, and transformations. These changes include the new gallery space for Jackson Fine Art; Johnson Lowe Gallery’s rebranding (from Lowe Gallery); and the opening of UTA Artist Space’s location in the city. These changes and the delivery of quality artworks demonstrate Atlanta’s firm grip on the art world’s microphone.
The choice of Atlanta for UTA Artist Space’s second branch will extend the mission first set in its Los Angeles location by showing works by in-demand emerging, established, and rediscovered artists. If its much-hyped L.A. opening for “Ernie Barnes: Where Music and Soul Live” in February is anything to go by, UTA’s events in Atlanta will provide exciting opportunities for locals to network with one another. The new location in midtown features an enviable showing of artworks by rising artists like Africanus Okonon, Naudaline Pierre, and Ryan Cosbert across the office walls, as well as a recording space and a downstairs gallery.
Its inaugural exhibition, “The Eyes Were Always on Us,” is a solo exhibition of new paintings on paper and canvas by Lonnie Holley. The show marks a homecoming for the multifaceted artist who also works in music. “We want to highlight more artists who haven’t shown in Atlanta before or in a long time, because it is important to show in your hometown,” said Bridgette Baldo, executive director of UTA’s Atlanta location, to me in March while touring the works. “We really want to make sure that Atlanta is at the forefront of the conversations happening in the global art world, [and that we are] bringing the conversations that are happening in L.A. and New York to Atlanta.”
Baldo further explained UTA Artist Space’s intention to broaden its collector audience not only by ensuring that price points are approachable, but also that their shows are exciting and inclusive of an audience from any background—be that art, sports, or entertainment. “We don’t want to make the gateway to entry as a collector to be intimidating; we want to really open the door and make collecting more accessible and feel like you can take something home with you,” Baldo said.
In Atlanta’s upscale Buckhead district, Jackson Fine Art stands as a premier gallery for fine art photography in the United States. Founded by Jane Jackson in 1990, the gallery has opened a new space that has been specifically outfitted for not only the display of art, but also for the conservation, registration, and housing of its extensive primary and secondary art collection. Located across the street from its previous space, the new location opened to much fanfare at the end of March with a dual exhibition of new works in photography (“The Rebirth of Us”) by Atlanta-based artist Sheila Pree Bright and photo collages (“When We Are Giant”) by the Stockholm-based duo Cooper and Gorfer (Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer).
Jackson’s work as a gallerist and art dealer established a strong and engaged collector base in Atlanta for both fine art photography and contemporary art. Jackson’s legacy with collectors lies also in managing the fine art collection of perhaps her most high-profile client, Sir Elton John. Jackson was appointed the curator of the Sir Elton John Photo Collection (also based in Atlanta) in 2003, and sold the gallery to her then-director Anna Walker Skillman, who celebrates two decades as co-owner this year with her business partner Andy Heyman.
Under Skillman’s tenure, Jackson Fine Art has remained committed to the production of photography, ensuring its vast archive of works is framed, stored, and conversed properly—critical details that are often overlooked by peers. “For me, art is about supporting the artists and connecting the artists with a collector and creating a story and conversation,” Skillman said to me earlier in March.
A Georgia native, Skillman is adamant about her pursuit to ensure that the gallery builds connections with local collectors and works with designers and advisors, such as Karen Comer Lowe, to ensure that nascent collectors can be geared in the right direction. “It’s about living with something and being able to enjoy creating your own self-portrait through the work that is around you,” she said.
The gallery’s extensive archive of secondary works speaks to Skillman’s deft curatorial skill, while the works on view at the new exhibition speak to her desire to bring Atlanta to the world and the world to Atlanta. Bright’s photographs in particular reference Atlanta’s much-mired history with slavery through its memorial to the confederacy, a large etching of the Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee at Stone Mountain.
The series began in 2018 when Bright received a call from the photo editor at the New York Times to do a piece on racism, much to her dismay. “I said, ‘Look, I’m not photographing people. I live right next to Stone Mountain and I want to photograph it to unpack its symbolic weight,’” she told me while installing the works for the show. Bright shot Polaroids to get a feel for the area first before returning to shoot the images on her Leica. “Those photos informed me how to shoot it. I wanted the landscapes to look beautiful and draw you in, to have that mysteriousness to it; that’s why I shot it in black and white.
“This work of the landscape is about the rebirth of us, about reconnecting with our ancestors, because we talk a lot about the trauma but we don’t talk about healing,” Bright added. “I want to [hold space] for trauma, but how do we reimagine and move toward healing because this is not going anywhere? And we’re going to have to use our imagination to move forward.”
Jackson Fine Art’s new space feels like a symbolic rebirth that is in step with the revitalization of Atlanta’s galleries more broadly. “The energy is here,” Skillman said. She hopes with this new space to recommit her support to the Atlanta art community through events and gatherings.
“We’re already disconnected because of the distance between each space.…The art world can feel so exclusive but it is at its best when it is collaborative,” she said. “I feel like this decade is bringing a shift that I haven’t felt before, and it’s going to come from us working together and supporting one another’s works.”
Founded in 1989 by Bill Lowe, Johnson Lowe Gallery is similarly undergoing a rebirth. Following Lowe’s passing in December 2021, the gallery relaunched in March of this year as Johnson Lowe Gallery under the leadership of Donovan Johnson, a former partner. Its opening show, “The Alchemists,” is co-curated with Seph Rodney, and features a wide array of museum-quality works by emerging and established Black artists working in abstraction, including Mark Bradford, Ebony G. Patterson, Ashanté Kindle, and others. With this rebrand, Johnson proves that he is not afraid of art that pushes the limits of aesthetic and sociopolitical boundaries.
Johnson remains firm in his aim of amplifying Lowe’s legacy as a key champion of Atlanta-based artists, including Thornton Dial and Todd Murphy, and dealers like Fay Gold, Eve Mannes, Marcia Wood, and Vaknin Schwartz. But he will also use this rebrand as an opportunity to expand Lowe’s existing roster and collector base. “While our previous vision did not limit the diversity of our program, of the more than 45 artists we represented, only 17% were female artists, and 11% were artists of color. Our intentional curatorial decisions moving forward will allow us to reconcile this imbalance, seeking also to expand the range of media we exhibit beyond painting and sculpture,” Johnson said.
Johnson speaks enthusiastically about the inter- and intra-community support that Atlanta galleries are building, knowing that collective support is needed in order to be visible in the global art sphere. He also emphasizes how necessary it is for the art world to direct its focus on the American South in light of legislative laws being passed against abortion, trans youth healthcare, and critical race theory in schools. “For far too long, the area which constitutes the American South has been overlooked; simultaneously, the infrastructure to support the artists who are living and working in the South has been underfunded,” he said.
“Currently, there are more eyes on the cultural output of the ‘art world’ than ever before; nevertheless, our city wistfully invests less in the arts than most others across the country,” Johnson added. “These individuals, who largely hail from larger metropolitan cities, are used to the arts having a larger, more remarkable presence. This has resulted in an increase in private support for arts philanthropy that I hope will change the tide in the coming years.”
Johnson’s ambition for the gallery is to continue to play a larger role in facilitating meaningful connections between its artists and a global audience, while also expanding its collector base. In particular, Johnson is passionate about breaking the barriers for young collectors to emerge in the art world by offering complementary programming such as educational talks and panels for exhibitions. Additionally, Johnson wants to push established collectors to engage with more genre-defying, museum-quality artworks that support emerging artists of color while having a sociopolitical message.
“If I made decisions based on where people already were and not where they are maybe hoping to go, then I would not be the right fit for this role [as] I would be perpetuating an antiquated system of art,” Johnson said. “This is why [spaces like] UTA exist here because there is a void left. There haven’t been as many galleries [showing] challenging works of contemporary art that are about issues of our time, which means we are missing out on a vast collector base and underestimating them.”
This desire for collaboration and community initiatives extends beyond the local galleries and continues with institutions like Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts and advisors like Kendra Walker, the founder of Atlanta Art Week, which hosted its inaugural edition last fall. Speaking with the young advisor at a local café near Jackson Fine Arts, Walker’s ambitions for Atlanta radiated from her persona. “My reasoning for organizing [Atlanta Art Week] from traveling to other cities for art fairs for work and seeing how the city [comes alive]. I thought, ‘Why doesn’t Atlanta have something like this?’—something to unite the city and amplify it,” she told me.
At Spelman College, Karen Comer Lowe is continuing this practice of communal support with her co-organization of “Black American Portraits,” which features new additions specific to Atlanta’s history. This includes a commissioned painting by Calida Rawles, who celebrates her 25th anniversary as a Spelman alum this year. The painting Thy Name We Praise (2023) references the school’s color—blue—and takes its title from the first line of the Spelman hymn. “I have Spelman girls who come in here and when they see that title they start to cry,” Comer Lowe said during a walkthrough.
These connections demonstrate how supportive and uplifting Atlanta’s art community is to one another. Johnson said it best: “If music and politics are any indications of the effect Atlanta or, better yet, the South can have on culture within our society, the art world should take note of what is happening here.”
