Public art, private

Inside the Arts

Camille Russell Love

Camille Russell Love

Love has been executive director of the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs (@atlantaoca) for more than two decades.

For many of us who grew up in or relocated to a major U.S. city, public art is something we take for granted. One thinks immediately of New York City’s Graffiti Hall of Fame, Philadelphia’s “We the Truth” mural painted by the late Keith Haring, Chicago’s West

Over the past two decades, Atlanta’s public art scene has exploded. Initially confined to the fringes of the city, most notably the Krog Street area, one can barely go a few miles without seeing a mural, a bike rack, an installation, a sculpture, or some other form of artwork. It truly is phenomenal. But who pays for all this amazing art and how are the artists supported?

To significant fanfare, railroad giant Norfolk Southern opened its new headquarters in Atlanta in November 2021. The company’s website references “Thoroughbred Art” – art that supports industry, is innovative, and is inclusive. Norfolk Southern corporate culture has long supported art, as they feel it is important for employees to enjoy it and feel proud of their workplace. Moreover, the artwork that hangs in the new headquarters embodies the company’s values and represents governing principles developed by its art committee: persevering, dynamic, principled. In addition, Norfolk Southern created an artist-in-residence program. Beginning this year, the artists selected will enjoy a twoyear residency and have studio space on Norfolk Southern’s 3.4-acre Tech Square campus. The catch? Each artist must create a piece of art for Norfolk Southern.

Loop neighborhood, the Market Street community in San Francisco, Seattle’s Center Mural Amphitheatre, the famous “Hi, How Are You?” mural in Austin, and, of course, the proliferation of public art along the Atlanta Beltline.

In its purest sense, public art was born at the same time the country was founded. Early architecture (vernacular and traditional), monuments (sculptures, fountains, and the like), and more mundane artifacts (streetlamps, door knockers, hitching posts, boot scrapers, etc.), defined a certain aesthetic unique to the period. In their totality, these objects – conceptualized, designed, and executed by individuals of the era – at once reflected and influenced the citizenry. The same remains true now. That aside, the term public art, and more specifically the field, came into its own in the 1960s. Today, public art includes not only architecture and sculpture, but also includes painting, stained glass, ceramics, mosaics, tapestry, earthworks, assemblages, performance, and installations.

As is true in many cities across the country, Atlanta is home to several Community Improvement Districts (CID) – nonprofit entities funded by area property owners through special assessments paid on commercial properties. And while a key responsibility of CIDs is to tackle issues of importance to property owners, CIDs also bring together public and private monies to benefit the public good. One such partnership is that between the Midtown Improvement District (MID) and Midtown Alliance.

As office workers isolated at home during the height of the pandemic, Midtown Alliance worked with commercial real estate owners to spearhead a program that made use of vacated office space. The result was a program that transformed those offices into artist studios. Midtown Alliance also commissioned seven artists in 2020 to create site-specific, temporary art installations in vacant storefronts in office buildings along Peachtree and 10th Streets. The artists, Shanequa Gay, Fabian Williams, Melissa Huang, Kaye Lee Patton, Chiomma Hall, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, and Kristan Woolford, represented Atlanta’s diversity both as individuals and artistically.

These initiatives are two of four included in Midtown Alliance’s Heart of the Arts Program. Other activities included under the Heart of the Arts umbrella are public space installations and community programming. Heart of the Arts is an important example of how private money interfaces with public good.

When Whole Foods decided to establish a presence in Midtown Atlanta, the property into which it moved, Icon Midtown, was built by The Related Group. Even before Related broke ground, the company’s Founder, Chairman & CEO, Jorge M. Pérez, reached out to local artist Alex Brewer (aka Hence), to begin conversations about public art for the property. Pérez, a serious art collector and for whom one of South Miami’s leading contemporary art museums is named, was committed from the beginning to ensuring that the project would contribute to Atlanta’s arts community and be a force for public good. Brewer’s piece, Connect, is over one hundred feet tall and makes a powerful statement in one of Atlanta’s premier locations.

With an eye to the future, Atlanta is poised to build on its ever-developing blueprint for how to turn what some might see as urban sprawl into aesthetic goods and concrete resources for the city’s residents and artists. Atlanta’s most beloved hole in the ground, the Gulch, is such an opportunity.

Gulch developers, Centennial Yards, enlisted Courtney Hammond, creative director of Dash Studios, to create a large-scale art installation in December 2021. Hammond and her team of 35 artists created Heartbeat ATL –a unique, interactive art light display that is a direct reference to the area’s historic role as the heartbeat (or hub) of Atlanta. From 1905 to 1970, the site was home to Atlanta’s iconic Terminal Station. The 1971 demolition literally tore out the city’s heart, as Hartfield-Jackson Airport had yet to emerge as the new hub.

The artists created a work of art that signals renewed life, new opportunity, and growth. Hammond said that she wanted to create a piece that demonstrated how technology and artistry can coexist – the two are not mutually exclusive. And everfaithful to the city’s symbol, the Gulch is a Phoenix, of sorts, rising from its ashes to reclaim its past glory while leading Atlanta into yet another future.