June 21

The Voloshin Gallery in Miami has emerged as an interesting art program, attracting attention for its unique exhibitions and connection to Latin America. The gallery's inaugural group show, "No Gray Zones," showcased abstract paintings and installations that explored suppressed histories and unspoken traumas. The gallery has also hosted two consecutive shows titled "Haunted," featuring different artists and interpretations of the theme. The first show focused on historical losses, while the second took a more spooky approach. Meanwhile, John Gott's solo exhibition, "Foreign Correspondent," at Sybil Gallery in New Orleans, explores travel, the meaning of home, and the beauty of everyday objects. The exhibition features sculptures made from various materials, each with its own poetic and symbolic meaning. The artworks are priced between $3,000 and $20,000, with consideration given to the concept of currency and the value of objects in different contexts. This program is intended for a print-impaired audience and is brought to you by the Georgia Radio Reading Service, GARS. Welcome to Metro Arts for Friday, June 21st. I am Kristen Moody for the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Metro Arts is brought to you by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. For our first articles, we go to the Burn Away publication online for Haunted One and Haunted Two at Voloshin Gallery, Miami, by Douglas Markovitz. Galleries in Miami have become increasingly global. Multinational art dealers like Zilberman and Opera Gallery have set up shop in the city. Colombian gallery La Cometa opened a fourth outpost in Miami. Even New Yorkers like Ross and Kramer Gallery are being wooed down, though most of the blue chip operations like Aquavea Galleries and Pace Gallery seem to prefer Palm Beach. Out of all these newcomers, Ukrainian Voloshin Gallery has emerged as one of the more interesting programs, not least of all because of the harrowing story of how they came to the city. The gallery had been exhibiting a one-off show in a temporary space in working class Alapata, a quick, gentrifying neighborhood that is becoming a hotspot for galleries and museums when Russia invaded Ukraine. With a return home unfeasible for owners Maxim Max Voloshin and Julia Voloshina, they settled in and opened a permanent space in late 2023. Back in Kiev, their existing gallery space has become a rallying point for local art lovers keen on defying the Russian invasion by embracing normalcy. Max recently showed me photos of a full house at their last closing in the Ukrainian capital. In Miami, they're a bit of a curiosity, injecting sobriety into a scene that tends to embrace flash and pop. Their inaugural group show in the Miami Gallery, No Gray Zones, felt like an appropriate thesis statement. Abstract paintings by Alicia Comenco resembled shrapnel flying and men in military fatigues. A floor-placed installation by Kay Yoland let viewers peer down at a military training camp in California captured with satellite photography. More recently, however, the gallery has been deeping into Miami's strong suit, its connection to Latin America. They invited two prominent Miami-based curators, Jean Moreno of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami and Omar Lopez Chahut, Artistic Director of Untitled Art Fair, to put together a pair of consecutively running shows titled Haunted. Haunted 1, which ran from April 6th to May 29th, maintained the gallery's stark aesthetic voice but applied it to another geographic canvas, recruiting Christian Legada, Harold Mendez, Minia Biobani, and Jonathan Sanchez Noah to illustrate suppressed histories and unspoken traumas from across the Americas. Black and white photos by Spanish artist Christian Legada feature wooden stick tent frames set in barren scrubland as if what was once a shelter or home had been stripped to its skeleton. Both the environment within the photos and the people that might have populated them have vanished, leaving only traces of what was. Moreno and Lopez Chahut's curation put a strong emphasis on materials and their origins. Works crafted from fabric and natural materials, particularly Cuban tobacco by Havana-born Jonathan Sanchez Noah, hang from the walls. Alongside is a sculpture by Legada, consisting of a pair of tires hanging from a metal chain. All of these pieces are made with materials taken from the earth, rubber for the tires, steel for the chain, and their juxtaposition speaks to the violent extrative processes used to craft them. The tobacco wall hangings may at first appear handmade and less hostile than the sleeker and industrial processed tires and chains, but of course plantation labor was used to harvest tobacco as well. Moreno told attendants at the Haunted One opening that Part Two might be more startling and surprising. How right he was. Haunted Two once again convenes four artists, but the interpretation of the titular theme is vastly different. The first one was a little bit more haunted by historical facts or historical losses, Moreno said at the opening. This one, this haunting, is more of the spooky type. In Italian artist Matteo Calegari's photorealistic paintings of venomous snakes, one sees repeated patterns of luridly colored striped segments, reminiscent of Max Ernst or Frantis Cupca. A nearby video work by Calegari shows him chasing down centipedes and other creepy crawlies in the Peruvian Amazon. Animals are a focus of Aneta Grzegorska's photo series, Selfie with the Dog, 2023, in which a scruffy dog chews up a rubber form of the Polish artist's fingers and face. It is a contrary take on humanity's treatment of the earth and its animal residents, Mother Nature taking revenge through beloved pets. Grzegorska is the only Eastern European artist in the show, Moreno says, they had intended Haunted to serve as a dialogue between Europe and Latin America across both installments, which ultimately didn't come to fruition. Haunted Two feels less coherent than Haunted One. The works clash stylistically and some don't fit the theme at all. A group of colored pencil drawings by Lorenzo de Los Angeles doesn't give the requisite creepy factor. I was most drawn to a drawing by Harold Mendez, born in the US to parents of Mexican and Colombian origin. Mendez was featured in both shows. Against a backdrop resembling a concrete floor or signal static on an old television, a silhouette of the back of a man's head is outlined. Holes have been punched cleanly in the figure's skull and neck. It is a ghostly after image with a long title. At that point, at the final place, at that extreme where the act of being doesn't even matter or rather it isn't really certain that it's true. After Reynaldo Arenas, by way of Jose Marti, 2024. The work speaks to a certain sense of fatality, which is more fear inducing than snakes or vengeful pets. Haunted One was on view from April 6th to May 29th, 2024. And Haunted Two is on view at Voloshin Gallery, Miami through July 20th, 2024. That was Haunted One and Haunted Two at Voloshin Gallery, Miami by Douglas Markovits. Next, John Gott, Foreign Correspondent at Sybil Gallery, New Orleans, by Emily Ferranto. John Gott's current solo exhibition, Foreign Correspondent at Sybil, is journey both exotic and familiar, an exploration of travel, the meaning of home, and the devastating beauty of everyday objects. Each piece rewards long looking and active curiosity. The list of works offers access to essential information, titles, materials, and even prices provide pathways into the work. From the doorway, the viewers encounter a large bamboo structure open on all sides and roofed by cardboard on which there is a mud crater seen only from the balcony. The language of the show leans tropical, bamboo, turtle shells, from the perspective of a traveler, postcards, ships, and anchors. Many of the sculptural works are situated on the floor like islands seen from an aerial viewpoint. Entering the exhibition is like arriving in an unfamiliar country where the first task is to exchange money into local currency. I've been thinking about the show through the lens of economy and various functions of the term. The sculptures composed of two or three objects rely on a poetic economy that reminds me of a William Carlos Williams poem, each word precise and sound and the capacity to hold meaning beyond its literal definition. The most economically bold works are made of a single object. While you were sleeping, 22 to 2024, a beloved dog's toy buried for years in the yard is now situated in phosphorescent green light on the gallery floor. Poetic but more lyrical and dense are the ships that resemble junk drawers, each ship named for one of the artist's cousins-in-law in Peru. Your love boat is drifting in the dark, Rosa Elena, steamship Glorita, and cargo barge Fabiola. In another work, an oriental tobacco tin holds three actual dollar bills that have been partially consumed by aquatic snails the artist keeps in his studio. Below the tin on the steel shelf is a digital clock telling the time on Desolation Island, which according to the artist, is the closest landmass opposite Sybil on the other side of the earth. The price of Antipodal Clock is listed, market value determined by live tide height data at Port-au-Francais, Carilion Islands. Though the artwork costs less at low tide, as earth's oceans rise, the artwork's value also rises. These dollar bills made lacy by the dining habits of the snails are beautiful and unique objects certain of their own rarity. There is nothing economically conservative about the artwork's full title, which is Antipodal Clock, the time in Desolation Island, French Southern Territories. Our time is your money. Our snail economy is the best in the world. The works in the show are priced from $3,000 to $20,000. They Were Wrong So We Drowned is a large flat rock on the floor. A pile of bamboo, sawdust, twine, and other debris has been swept up, beached against the rock. They Were Wrong is priced at $3,000, the artist told me. The pricing for everything was a big consideration in the overall conceptual design. I was thinking about traveling between places and how that is reflected in currency. I wanted to play with that, but also fuck with the system of commerce and art. How much was the rock worth in Ohio? How much is it worth now? The canon of conceptual art is full of ordinary objects whose extrinsic value is established by backstory and context. But Gott's work doesn't seem mind-based the way a lot of conceptual art is. It seems driven by feeling rather than thought. The artist admits his experiences are profound feelings, even empathy towards things, a perspective that typically fades in early childhood. Per the artist's instructions, all sweepings from the gallery floor will be left in front of, on the beach of, this one or that other sculpture. Sweeping the gallery, the artist said, I observed lots of other sediment, material that was clearly left over from past projects. He wanted that to have a place too, to be part of it. Foreign Correspondent is not really a vacation from the cluttered landscape of a life, but it brings the ordinary into some ethereal light. Halfway through viewing the exhibition, I felt suddenly sad, or maybe melancholy is a better word, and inexplicably tired. Art can do this, moves us into a new physio-emotional space, rendering the subsequent hours elevated in some way, humid with meaning. Leaving the exhibition, I thought of Paul Goglin in Tahiti and his painting titled, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? This existential freakout of a title could have been repurposed for this exhibition, or it could be what you write on one of the postcards, one of five images by John Gott printed on postcards, each in addition of 50, yours for $3, before you leave the strange and moving archipelago of the show. John Gott, Foreign Correspondent, is on view at Sybil Gallery in New Orleans through June 30, 2024. That was John Gott, Foreign Correspondent at Sybil Gallery, New Orleans, by Emily Ferranto. Next, we move to the Atlanta Magazine Online for National Center for Civil and Human Rights expands its museum and national impact. As the center celebrates its 10th anniversary, a new expansion will soon offer an enhanced look into the history of civil rights in the American South by Tess Malone. When the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, NCCHR, opened in 2014, it was a groundbreaking look into how Atlanta and the South as a whole shaped the civil rights movement in America. With interactive displays like a recreation of the sit-in at Woolworths, visitors didn't just learn about history, they experienced it. A decade later, NCCHR is now expanding by 24,000 square feet to offer an enhanced look into the history of civil rights in the American South, adding more event and classroom space to continue to engage with the community. Throughout construction, which started in March, the center remains open with only a brief closure planned in 2025 before the new space is unveiled. The expansion has been in the works since 2019. After five years of operation, NCCHR knew they needed to enrich the experience to reach their full potential, according to NCCHR President Chief Executive Officer Jill Savitt. In those first five years, we were really operating more as an attraction and museum, she said, but to grow into a national cultural organization, we needed to make some changes. Savitt took over in 2019, although she had been involved with the center since 2010, when she curated an exhibit on global human rights. With the expansion, visitors can expect a family gallery to serve children 12 and younger. This learning play space enables children to tap into their power to change the world. Activities teach vital concepts like empathy, fairness, inclusion, and equity. A maker space allows children to create art projects devoted to messages of change. A gallery focused on the history of the Reconstruction era. To understand the Civil Rights Movement as the second Reconstruction, you need to tell the story of the first Reconstruction and how resistant to it was part of an absolute subjugation, Savitt says. Atlanta's part in this is a focus with features on convict leasing, the race massacre of 1906, and segregation. The exhibit emphasizes the history of progress and backlash so that visitors are invited to break the cycle. More than 5,000 square feet of event space, including classrooms, training venues, and event and performance space. The center offers DEI training for workplaces and human rights training for police departments. In addition to the new elements, NCCHR is enhancing current exhibitions. The Martin Luther King Jr. gallery is moving to a more central location. The Civil Rights Gallery now notes the Black Power Movement. We're hoping it's a more fluid space that isn't just a museum experience, but a place for conversation, Savitt says. We can be a leader in this movement of how to talk about our past in ways that help liberate all of us. That was National Center for Civil and Human Rights expands its museum and national impact by Tess Malone. Next, Colundra Smith's debut play, The Wash, delves into the 1881 strike that stunned Atlanta. The play follows the lives of several fictional black laundresses in 1881 Atlanta, all at crossroads in their personal lives and willing to fight for higher wages by Jim Farmer. Back in 2017, Colundra Smith visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. to write an article for a now-defunct magazine. While in the historical galleries, she saw a section on post-Civil War reconstruction and an exhibit that documented the Atlanta washerwomen's strike of 1881, an event she had never heard of despite growing up in the city. Smith finished her assignment, but the events of the strike stayed with her and ultimately led to a deep dive into the subject with what was then a new venue for her, playwriting. As a prolific arts and culture writer for Atlanta Magazine, Arts ATL, and other publications, as well as the managing editor of American Theater Magazine, Smith had no ambition to be a playwright. She was content being a journalist and a critic. Playwriting was not even in my purview, she says, but there were stories that I wanted to tell as a journalist that I just knew I wasn't going to get an assignment to tell. What really solidified Smith's interest in the event was a satirical article she had read as part of her research. It was a funny snarky piece about how these washerwomen had left white people in Atlanta completely inept, says Smith. The tone was, how will these white people survive without these black women washing their clothes? The city was smelly, there was a ball, and people were in dirty clothes trying to disguise the funk on their ball gowns. That made me laugh, and I thought there was something here. One evening during a storm after a long commute home from a former job, the play's first scene came to her. Smith sat down and wrote the first 34 pages by hand, then wrote on and off until the start of the pandemic. She staged a virtual reading with actor friends in 2020, did more fine tuning, and was ready for the first official reading in 2022. Two years later, The Wash is set to have its world premiere June 7th to 30th at Synchronicity Theater, then July 10th to 28th at Hapeville's Academy Theater as a co-production of Synchronicity and Impact Theater Atlanta. This play follows the lives of several fictional black laundresses in 1881 Atlanta, all at crossroads in their personal lives and willing to fight for higher wages. One of the largest labor actions in the post-Civil War era, the Atlanta washer women's strike of 1881 began with 20 black women, then ballooned to 3,000 women within three weeks. It means a lot to Smith that this play is being staged at a moment in our country when unions are under attack and workers who try to unionize are fighting for their rights. The conversation is so similar in 2024 as it was in 1881 that it is scary, she says. The term essential workers is not new. The laundry women in letters to the mayor described themselves as essential workers saying we provide an essential service to the sanitation of this city and we should be allowed to set our own rates. Working as a laundress in 1881 was back-breaking work. There was no electricity in most houses especially in the south and post-Civil War Atlanta was still a wasteland after having been burned down, Smith says. Most homes didn't have running water so washer women had to use wells and pumping stations. The process of doing their job involved picking up the laundry from clients by either walking there or using a streetcar, soaking the clothes in warm water, using paddles and washboards to get the dirt and stains off, hanging, drying, ironing, and folding the clothes and then delivering them and doing it all over again the next day. Smith has now written five plays, one younger, an imagined prequel to A Raisin in the Sun had a reading at Kenny Leon's True Colors Theatre Company in 2022 but The Wash is her first to receive a full production. It's part of a trilogy she is writing about black triumphs in Georgia during the reconstruction era. The Wash was a finalist for the National New Play Network 2024 National Showcase of New Plays, one of three plays by southern playwrights on the list. After its world premiere in Atlanta and Hapeville, the play will be produced at the Black Rep in St. Louis and Perceptions Theatre in Chicago. Smith now sees herself more as a storyteller, no matter the format she uses. The story picks its medium, she says. For me, seeing this piece find its footing on stage is the icing on the cake. I wrote it so I could sleep at night and see it hopefully resonate with people in a positive way and inspire them to fight for their own rights. I want audiences to imagine possibilities for themselves and to know where you are is not where you are stuck. That was Kalundra Smith's debut play The Wash delves into the 1881 strike that stunned Atlanta by Jim Farmer. Next up, we move to Arts ATL for Artemis Jenkins Stays Grounded at Hidden Gallery 333 by Charles Stevens. The title of Artemis Jenkins' second solo show at Hidden Gallery 333 in Castleberry Hill may be They Should Have Never Gave You N Word Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice, but the show is also in part about golden apples. The apples are referenced throughout the exhibition, running through July 3rd, grounding his perspective on Atlanta with Atlanta, a linguistic sleight of hand and nod to the legendary African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. In Greek mythology, Atalanta loses her way after being seduced and distracted by her desire for golden apples and is ultimately cursed for desecrating a sanctuary. This cautionary tale, letting us know if you're distracted by greed, bad things may come to you, becomes a kind of manifesto for Jenkins and his show. His repetition and referencing of golden apples, gold shops, ATM machines, gambling, pleasure, business, commerce, storefronts, and dollar signs reinforce this, even as he satirizes, subverts, and plays with meaning. The show consists of about 20 mixed media works, towering collages, including street photography, images from the artist's extensive archives, and cutouts. He also uses paint, pastels, even pieces of maps to tell the story that he's seeking to express through his art. W. E. B. Du Bois seems to haunt the show as ghost and muse. Jenkins invokes his retelling of the golden apple myth in the souls of black folk and amplifies Du Bois' warnings to the city of Atlanta about embracing materialism, consumerism, and a lust for gold. A Baltimore native and Tuskegee University alumnus, Jenkins moved to Atlanta in the aughts and has worked as a multidisciplinary artist. He's won acclaim in photography and film, collecting a trove of local art prizes, a cultural catalyst award from Reimagine ATL, and an idea capital grant among them. Jenkins has the artistic curiosity for things that none of us born and raised in Atlanta might sometimes take for granted. He's an artist who can not only make the mundane interesting but also deconstruct meaning. His work is playful but respectful. His work is irreverent but not cynical. His use of collage throughout the exhibit is an effective documentary strategy to express several concepts while managing to land on a singular point, materialism versus a deeper sense of joy and community. In Be Her Peace, we see this excellent use of nostalgia and innocence contrasted with consumption and materialism. This threads his larger message around consumer culture and its emptiness versus family and friendship. The piece, a series of cutout images on a canvas forming the collage, is rich with symbolism. One image is of three boys playing on some steps. In another image on the canvas, we see a group of people gathered around a blue table with beers, communing. At the edge, an adult wearing yellow holds the hand of a little girl wearing a hat and a beautiful blue dress, the sun beaming down on them. Toward the center at the top, in place of the gold apple, we see a woman holding up a gold chain. His collages aren't composed of pictures of black suffering for artistic clout. In his work, even as he depicts some of the most distressed streets and spaces in the city, he manages to capture joy, a group of boys looking away, humor in the obsession with buying gold, a day party in Buckhead, a pack of Newport cigarettes. Though his lens may land on the marginalized, his work doesn't feel exploitative. There is an intimacy to his gaze that resists the social realism to poverty porn pipeline. The work continues to challenge us to look deeper, implying that what's on the surface, no matter how seemingly superficial, always has deeper meanings and layers. Even when presenting the article on full display, like the cutout of an image of four eyelashes set on a bare surface in South of the North, North of the South, another Duboisian reference, there is always a level of subtext, nuance, and layers. Here they are related to beauty and adornment in work about a city that seems to always be reconstructing itself, repairing itself in an attempt to beautify and perfect. His sprawling collages provide a strategy to further complicate and shatter narratives, even as he seeks to build new ones. In Baby Gotta Eat, we get among the symphony of images, cutout pictures of three children, the little girl with her hair divided into two puffs, wearing a pretty blue dress and looking upward as a plastic container piled with food, the kind of container you would get from a certain kind of takeout place, sits beneath her alongside the hand of a parent holding a white plastic fork. Perhaps they're at a picnic, a family reunion, a festival, or the repast after a funeral. Other images include the fragments of a photo of a purple flower and a picture of an ATM machine. This commentary on consumerism, contrasted with parent and child, children and food, is ongoing but never quite repetitive. This is continued in the Cash for Gold sign in No Mo Fishing for Yo Fish, the title a reference to legendary Atlanta hip-hop group Goody Mob's cell therapy, and in the image of We Buy Gold in a full day's supply. Jenkins has referenced hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar. A recent YouTube video he posted asks, what if Kendrick Lamar wrote essays and Du Bois wrote diss tracks? But Jenkins' work also brings to mind early Goody Mob videos as a creative, if not aesthetic, ancestor. Their video for Soul Food opens in stark black and white visuals. We see Cee Lo Green sitting on the ground next to a man who we are to read as unhoused. The camera pans to a sign he's holding with the words, we'll wrap for food, written neatly on a torn piece of cardboard box, a line that is somewhat humorous, but also extremely poignant and unforgettable. This is a visual image that Artemis Jenkins is extremely fluent in, the contrasting of a seemingly bleak, even dystopian backdrop infused with humor. Jenkins, ever the documentarian, even the ethnographer, ever the folklorist, doesn't present his work in a didactic way. The pieces in the show seem to avoid overt political commentary. The work instead invites the viewer to question, to interrogate, but also to laugh. At Atlanta, as Greek myths and Atlanta, the social reality of a city, are represented by Jenkins to implore us to peel back the surface, reach deep and find something far more powerful and gratifying than the limited pleasures of the material. Through Jenkins and his playful lens, fragments and snapshots, he makes the warnings of Du Bois and the lessons of At Atlanta, consumerism at the cost of our humanity, vivid and urgent. That was Artemis Jenkins Stays Grounded at Hidden Gallery 333 by Charles Stevens. Next up, Cullum's Notebook, Sense of Place is Melting at GSU and JARE Art by Jerry Cullum. Two exhibitions currently on display in Atlanta illustrate the growing number of world cultures represented in the city. They also illustrate the difficulty of complete cross-cultural comprehension. Daria Fard in Lizzie Storm's Myth Material at Georgia State University's Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design Gallery through August 29th, involves the theme of, in the words of the exhibition's wall text, how acts of revolution can not only bring about unpredictable change, but also a melting of our sense of place in the world. Fard, the 2024 Edge Award winner from the Forward Arts Foundation, holds an MFA degree in drawing, painting, and printmaking from Georgia State University, and MA and BA degrees from educational institutions in Tehran, Iran. Her multidisciplinary installations grounded in Persian culture, but addressing contemporary aesthetic and philosophical concerns, led curator E.C. Flamming to ask her to collaborate with Storm, whose work deals with parallel themes. The immersive installation includes prints arranged in various sculptural configurations, from individual freestanding hangings to linked ribbons of imagery. Images on the wall serve as a projection screen for Fard's videos of dance performances. A soundtrack accompanies the installation, the result of a collaboration between Fard and musician Ishan Gunai. The fact that the musical instrument used in the soundtrack is hard to identify illustrates the problem of what theorists might call cultural competence. Despite a modest familiarity with Persian art and classics, my knowledge of musical instruments used in Persian culture is pretty much limited to the oud. The installation rather brilliantly induces disorientation, but I am uncertain how much prior knowledge might assist viewers in retaining their sense of place in the world. However, the aesthetic conventions or cultural codes of contemporary art practice are uppermost in this exhibition. J.R. Art Gallery continues to present Karen Lamassone's uncontainable Trego de Toto through July 20. Based on the retrospective exhibition presented earlier in Berlin, New York, and Medellin, the show covers Lamassone's artistic career from cinematic collaborations with the avant-garde groups of artists and filmmakers in Cali, Colombia in the 1970s and early 1980s to recent works made in Atlanta during the pandemic. The exhibition demonstrates Lamassone's versatile range of media, from easel painting to unsettlingly unconventional sculpture. For example, the Mano Peluda hairy hand series, with some of her short video pieces presented in a side gallery installation. There will be a screening of Pura Sangre, Lamassone's 1982 debut cinematic collaboration, on July 13. Although eroticism and female desire have always been a component of Lamassone's aesthetic, she states that her emphasis on non-erotic frontal nudity made her work unwelcome in the commercial galleries she approached when she arrived in Atlanta in the 1990s, after working in Colombia and New York. Despite her inclusion in museum shows in New York and Los Angeles in 2017, her au voir remained mostly overlooked in her current city of residence until her three-country retrospective was highlighted in J.R. Art's As South As It Gets. Just as Fard's art uses the visual vocabulary of contemporary art making to transcend cultural barriers, Lamassone's subject matter largely requires no translation. A notably neutral 1979 series simply documents every aspect of a bathroom, both in use and unoccupied. On an unrelated note, the many admirers of Kate Javin's monumental portrait style paintings of animals will be delighted to learn that Good Neighbor, her first similarly scaled portrayal of human subjects, has been extended by Marshallwood Gallery to June 28th. Javin's emotionally compelling paintings are actual portraits of individuals who have faithfully performed volunteer service in the upper Manhattan community in which she lives. But she regards the work as also representing the more universal people around you who save your life every day, the people who show up, who you trust, who live lives of service, and frankly, it's all of us. That was Cullum's Notebook, Sense of Place is Melting at GSU and J.R. Art by Jerry Cullum. Next up, City Springs Conservatory Gives High School Students Center Stage by Luke Evans. In the City Springs Theater Conservatory pre-pro company, performers meet the standards of a professional musical long before they are professionals. Every adult who works in theater remembers their high school theater days. These were the years that fostered our love of the art form and gave us our first taste of what it means to be artists. The responsibility of shaping these feelings is not taken lightly by those at the City Springs Theater Conservatory, which will stage a student production of The Wedding Singer, June 27th through June 29th. Each year, City Springs Theater produces a summer musical for high schoolers as part of its ongoing educational programming. Last year's production was All Shook Up, a jukebox musical featuring the songs of Elvis. This year's performance will be the 2006 adaptation of the 1998 film starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore about a wedding singer named Robbie Hart who falls in love with a waitress at the reception hall where he performs. Director Christine Reese, who teaches classes at City Springs, is excited to be taking on this very pastiche comedy. It's a musical comedy, but specifically, it's an Adam Sandler comedy. There has to be a tempo. You have to be a bit over the top with it. She is even more excited to give the students she works with all year the chance to show off all the skills they have been honing. The City Springs Conservatory, which is an umbrella term for the theater's entire educational wing, aims to provide multidisciplinary training for young performers in the Atlanta metro area. Its largest program, and the one most connected to the summer production, is the Pre-Pro Company, a year-round, audition-only intensive that aims to prepare students for full-time careers in theater. Taught by Reese and numerous other professionals, Pre-Pro focuses on what Reese describes as triple threat or multi-hyphenate training. Students take classes in acting, singing, and dancing, being placed at both different levels for each course based on skill, experience, age, and maturity. This makes a point to highlight the intensive nature of these courses. I emphasize the word rigor, and I think that's a positive thing, she says. I've only ever seen people get better inside and out because of this rigorous training. Recently, the program has begun incorporating technical theater classes for students more interested in behind-the-scenes work. Summer productions, such as The Wedding Singer, have proven integral to these courses as they afford students the opportunity to work on sets, costumes, sound boards, and lighting rigs alongside industry professionals. They're doing very advanced things for The Wedding Singer that they would not know how to do without the Pre-Pro training, says Education Director Jenna Gammerl. Due to schedule constraints, the production will share a set with an oncoming production of Jersey Boys, and students will have the chance to work on more elaborate sets. All of this underscores the professional standards to which the summer musical production is held. I mean no disrespect to high school theater, says Reese, because I'm actually a big advocate of them being a part of their high school shows. But this is not your typical high school show. We're doing a professional show, but with high schoolers. This perception is shared by City Springs audiences. Reese and Gammerl both spoke with pride of the numerous times patrons have attended conservatory productions under the impression they were part of the theater's main stage programming. Then they were pleasantly surprised to learn the performers were high school students. Of course, students do not stop learning once they are cast. Several times a day, I'm finding opportunities to sneak in teachable moments, says Reese. Whether it's explaining why we do specific warm-ups, providing hair and makeup tutorials so they understand the basics of stage makeup, or teaching kids who aren't in the pre-pro classes what it means to cheat out. We take a little time out of rehearsal for that, but that's okay. That's what they're here for. Meanwhile, Gammerl outlines several ways students are encouraged to take leadership roles. In addition to choosing a dance captain, they also select vocal captains and department heads for each behind-the-scenes crew. Depending on the students and their interests, they even had students come on as assistant directors. These student leaders also help to guide and support castmates who are not a part of the pre-pro company. While Reese estimates that up to 25 cast members in The Wedding Singer have taken pre-pro classes, are open to any student of high school age. We really feel like we are training the next generation of performers, and we want that to be open to anyone who wants to learn, says Gammerl. We want people to know that you don't have to live in Sandy Springs or Marietta to be a part of our programming. Reese echoes this statement. People always say, be the change you want to see in the industry, and I genuinely feel like we're doing that. The kids we're teaching are tomorrow's Broadway stars, and I feel really lucky to get to be a part of that journey. That was City Springs Conservatory Gives High School Students Center Stage, by Luke Evans. Next up, What to See, Do, and Hear, Lyric Jackson Dance, Spalding Knicks, Aurora Theater, and more, by Arts ATL staff. Dance. Lyric Jackson has taken up the charge of bringing along the next generation of contemporary dancers, both in her work as a dance instructor at Spelman College, and in her Lyric Jackson Dance Company production work. On Sunday, Jackson's company will present the Chrysalis Exhibition and Performance Art Installation, a multi-sensory immersive work combining the visual art of Kyoko Takuchi with the movement-based work of the company's pre-professional dancers. This event takes place at the Bee Complex on Atlanta's southwest side. Named for the stage of a caterpillar as it is morphing into a butterfly, the piece hints at themes of transformation and beauty. Tickets start at $12.50, Sunday only. Music. Now in its 34th season, Concerts at First presents dozens of concerts every year at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta, in the heart of Midtown. This Saturday, the New American Sinfonietta debuts in partnership with Concerts at First, performing a concert of the staples, Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn. Under the direction of maestro Michael Palmer, the ensemble is made up of musicians from throughout Atlanta, including members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Free, Saturday only. Art and design. The world is denser and curiouser. When Alice fell down the rabbit hole in the Lewis Carroll classic, she landed in a world of magic, contradiction, and absurdity. Spaulding Nick's fine art has channeled some of that hallucinatory dreaminess in All in the Golden Afternoon. Four artists, Susan Habel, Marina Dunbar, Guy Robinson, and Shelby Little, deliver color, whimsy, and pictures that break their own rules. Show runs through July 12th, free. Ongoing. Tyler Mitchell was born in 1995 and first created a stir in the art world when he became the first black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue in 2018. The subject of that shoot was Beyonce. Since then, Mitchell has continued to turn out more fine art and fashion photography. Tyler Mitchell, idyllic space on view at the High Museum through December 1st, peeks into the photographer's work so far, exploring his notions of utopianism, domesticity, and black family lineage. Tickets are $23.50 for general admission. Ongoing. Theater. If you missed Father's Day, you might consider bringing dad to some good, clean fun at HALA, a comedy experience. Featuring the Blacktop Improv Group, whom we have featured on Arts ATL, the event promises to deliver laughs but without the usual stand-up comedy vulgarity. Doors open at 7 on Friday at Peace Baptist Church in Decatur. And because it's not a party until a color scheme is involved, organizers suggest colorful linen attire. Tickets are $25 with group discounts available. Friday only. Aurora Theater in Lawrenceville will close its 28th season this weekend with the final performances of Sister Act. This fun adaptation of the beloved 90s Whoopi Goldberg movie stars Jasmine Renee Ellis as Dolores Van Cartier, along with a full cast of gangsters and nuns. We gave it a review in a previous article, runs through Sunday, June 23rd. Tickets start at $21.00, tonight through Sunday. Yes, and. Those in the know will recognize that phrase as a classic improv comedy move. For the real classic improv effect, check out the Whole World Improv Theater's The Classic Show on Fridays and Saturdays in Midtown. Now is your chance to find out what happens when two mice become accountants in a Bollywood musical. This show is for adults only. Go again next week on Thursday, June 27th for the group's Laugh Out Proud show in celebration of Pride Month. Ongoing. Film and TV. Atlanta has no shortage of film festivals for adults, but there's one for kids as well. The Atlanta Children's Film Festival will wrap up this weekend with multiple activities, including Film Festival Family Day on Saturday at Emory University. Presented by Kids Video Connection, Inc., the festival boasts workshops, webinars, showcases, and of course, a full roster of films that appeal to the younger set. Kids can attend in person, online, or both. Family Day is for all ages. Tickets start at $5.00 for individuals, Saturday only. P.D. Parker's artwork at Echo Contemporary examines an interplay between Christianity, primarily the Catholic faith, and black American culture, exploring where identity and spirituality cross. Fittingly, Parker and collaborator Emef Griffin this Sunday will screen The Book of Clarence, a fantastical biblical comedy-drama that has Lakeith Stanfield crossing paths with Jesus and the disciples. Griffin's On God will also screen in the gallery. Free with reservation, Sunday only. That was What to See, Do, and Hear, Lyric Jackson Dance, Spalding Knicks, Aurora Theater, and more by Arts ATL staff. Next up, for Darius Wallace, Frederick Douglass is the North Star by Charles Stevens. After years of challenges with depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, Darius Wallace looked to a certain abolitionist to inspire both his life and creative work. Actor Darius Wallace knows a thing or two about iconic black figures and their historical reputations. In his portrayal of 19th century black abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass, Wallace continues his grand artistic exploration of black historical figures on a stage. Having previously portrayed Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, his muses often share a key characteristic. Their lives were transformed by the power of the written and spoken word. Frederick Douglass was the Jimi Hendrix of his time, says Wallace. Wallace's path in bringing Frederick Douglass to stage began in 2001 with The Starry Road to Freedom, a show specifically for elementary and middle school kids. I wrote the show for young people first, he says, to let them see someone who was born into limitations that they didn't ask for, chattel slavery. His artistic vision and motivation to create the show was inspired by the triumphant story of Douglass and what he had to overcome to achieve greatness. Being a constant innovator, Wallace would transform the show, eventually performing it at colleges and universities, museums, theaters, and for Douglass's own descendants. His passion for acting was sparked early on, along with an interest in martial arts. I wanted to be Bruce Lee, he says. At the age of 13, he found himself at a critical juncture. I was a prime target at a very dangerous period in Flint, Michigan, history for gang life. And I did get involved. Of that time in his life, he says he saw and experienced things that he shouldn't have. Then one day, he got into trouble at school and was called into the vice principal's office. According to Wallace, the vice principal gave him three options. You can either go the way you're going and end up in jail or juvie, or I can tell your daddy, or you can do what I know you love to do, which is theater. He struggled at first because he had a hard time remembering his lines. But a supportive theater teacher who saw young Darius's potential was able to help him. He took words away, and he started teaching me how to speak and how to move on stage without speaking, which is miming. And I did that. And I was comfortable with that because I was a martial artist. An impressive theater pedigree followed, Interlochen Arts Academy, State University of New York's Purchase College, though he would leave after his sophomore year, and then the Michigan Shakespeare Festival. Wallace would go on to develop an enviable body of work on stage and screen over the years. But it's playing Frederick Douglass that has been the rush. The show explores the question of what freedom is, a subject Wallace relates to his past personal struggles with anxiety and depression. I struggled with it for years. And I would say only over the last decade have I found some joy. He's also candid about his past alcohol addiction and hopes it will help others. Today, he's about 15 years sober. Wallace's academic experiences also helped him prepare for the role. I'm very thankful for the training, the speech training, the vocal training, the movement training, the acting training. Tapping into my emotional life on a regular basis has really contributed to the success of me being able to do it for so long. Wallace hopes people get a sense of empowerment and courage from his show. He wants audiences to be inspired to make their lives what they want them to be. For fellow actors, his advice is to write your own content and to be entrepreneurs. He encourages actors and artists not to wait for opportunities, but to create their own. We're living in a very competitive time, he says, more so than when I first started acting. Wallace will continue to tour the show and also has two upcoming film projects, a mystery thriller called Queen Rising and Damaged Goods, which he describes as a black exploitation film noir. Frederick Douglass, The Lion of Freedom will be at the Conyers Rockdale Council for the Arts CRCA Black Box Theater, June 21st through June 23rd. That was for Darius Wallace, Frederick Douglass is the North Star by Charles Stevens. Next review, Natalie Stutzman, ASO Soar in 2023-24 Season Closer by Jordan Owen. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra brought its 2023-24 season to a thundering close with Stravinsky's Firebird Suite Thursday night, even though the evening began with soporific overtones. With the June 6th ASO concert being something of an oddity, Thursday's program turned out to be a satisfying crescendo for the season. The concert commenced with Beethoven's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major and featured guest soloist Veronica Eberl. She's a capable and enjoyable player who does justice to the 1693 Stradivarius with which she's been entrusted, but there was a sense of reticence throughout the piece. It felt as though soloists and ensemble alike were afraid to fully commit to the concerto's underlying intensity. For a composition that leans on soaring displays of virtuosity, this apparent lack of enthusiasm blunted the impact. Before she began to play, Eberl moved on stage as if in a trance, with eyes closed and swaying dreamily to the music. It's a pleasant bit of showmanship and one that continued Thursday when she started playing. That kind of display would work well in the light joviality of Tchaikovsky, but for the carefully measured eruptions of fire and fury in this concerto, it fell just short of feeling satisfying. Her silky tone was wonderful in the piece's more melodic moments, but didn't resonate as well in the more aggressive passages. In Beethoven's day, cadenzas, short improvisational segments added to a larger works to further feature the soloist, were commonplace. They gradually fell out of fashion in general, but it remained an ongoing staple of performances of Beethoven's violin concerto throughout the years. Eberl sought to maintain the tradition by commissioning several cadenzas from German composer Jorg Widmann, with mixed results. The cadenzas were technically dazzling, but added little to the overall musical content and felt more like distracting punch-ins than evolutions of an existing masterwork. The opening half of the concert was disheartening, but through it all was the cool determination of conductor Natalie Stutzman, who, with precision, beat out a metronomic pulse that transcended the languid mood. That resolute command proved to be a guiding light on the horizon that beckoned the audience into the evening's second half, where Stutzman's unwavering guidance paid off. The Beethoven was followed by two works by Ravel, Menuet Antique and Alborada del Gracioso, presented as a single work. Presented in that form, the works captured Ravel in all his varied shades, from light and whimsical to the scorched-earth wrath of an invading army. The composer's most famous and famously overplayed work, Bolero, is a study in this exact phenomenon. Pairing these two pieces together felt like a successful attempt to capture that same ever-advancing ominousness. It was in this latter aspect that the ASO not only salvaged the night, but achieved a potential that the orchestra has seemed to be yearning toward in recent years. Former conductor Robert Spano's conservative approach often revered the orchestra unduly restrained in terms of its volume and delivery. On Thursday, the ensemble delivered a booming brilliance born of Stutzman's unyielding ferocity. Finally, the sound of this once subdued orchestra was allowed to storm through the concert hall like an advancing guard of janissaries with their menacing parade orchestras. The final piece, Stravinsky's majestic Firebird Suite, was music to be felt in the sternum as much as heard. This stunning display of brute force by way of volume never moved the orchestra out of balance. The horns blasted without becoming distorted, and the strings soared at full volume without becoming shrill. It delivered the kind of rush normally only felt at a rock concert. Someone in the packed auditorium screamed euphorically the instant the suite ended, and the entire audience joined in. Lost as they were in the joyous eruption, the crowd abandoned all pretense of being a prim and proper classical audience. This was no time for a smattering of cultured applause. The moment demanded cheers, whistles, decorum be damned. Season is giving the orchestra the shot in the arm it needs to reach new dynamic heights. This is a new orchestra, one imbued with a youthful vigor it hasn't had in years. What was a fitting close for the season was also a promise of even greater things to come. That was Review, Natalie Stutzman, ASO, Soar in 2023-24 Season Closer by Jordan Owen. That concludes today's Metro Arts program, which is brought to you by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. This has been Kristen Moody for GARS, the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Thank you for listening to GARS.