Mo-Aye-Tee-El

A SLO*MO MEDIA PRODUCTION

Editor’s Note

It’s been a hot minute since Atlanta had a great alternative weekly newspaper.

You know: those free publications that report on local news, food, culture and more — from a fun, frank and raw perspective. Over the years, Atlanta has been home to several alt-weeklies like that. Hell, I even used to work for one. I served as the first Black editor-in-chief of Creative Loafing both here in Atlanta and in Charlotte, N.C. Working for the Loaf was a dream come true, but the glory days of alt-weeklies in the ATL are pretty much over … until now, that is, with the publication of the paper you’re currently reading: Mo AYE-TEE-EL. A production of locally based Slo*Mo Media, Mo AYE-TEE-EL is designed to — for one special issue — capture the voice, flavor and energy of our favorite alt-weeklies from back in the day, while breaking new ground by providing robust representation of the Black and Brown people that fuel Atlanta. To that end, we assembled some of the city’s best-known editors, writers, photographers, graphic designers and more, along with newer editorial voices, to craft some super-dope content. And, thanks to Keith Pepper and the good folks at Atlanta Intown who graciously let us appear in their pages, we’re able to give readers all over the metro area a small taste of what we can do with this format. All that said, keep in mind this is just a one-time publication … sort of a preview/pilot issue. But if you dig Mo AYE-TEE-EL, share your thoughts on our IG page (@slomomedia).©TRIPmedia Group, Inc. For more maps, visit TRIPinfo.com Oh, and a big thank you to the folks who’ve generously donated to this project’s crowdfunding campaign. If you’d like help us raise funds to publish more issues, donate to our GoFundMe page: www.gofundme.com/f/the-new-atlanta-altweekly-project. OK, that’s enough from me. Here’s hoping you enjoy what we’ve cooked up. Thanks for reading, and thanks for your support! — Carlton Hargro Co-Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

Contributors

Terra Coles is a multifaceted creator who’s first love is being behind the lens.

Author of the newsletter Holy Sip, Shannon S. Evans covers the intersection of food, beverage and well-being.

Chad Radford is an Atlanta-based music journalist with 20 years of experience in writing, editing, and podcasting.

Juliana Ramirez is a parent, political scientist, interpreter, and nature-loving Latinx feminist living in the diaspora and navigating its joys and challenges one day at a time.

Born in China and raised in the American South, Feifei Sun is a writer and editor now based in Atlanta.

Paula M. White is an Atlanta-based writer whose work has appeared in Essence, Black Enterprise and Atlanta Magazine. Mo AYE-TEE-EL is a publication of Slo*Mo Media. And the folks behind Slo*Mo Media include:

Carlton Hargro, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher Larmarrous Shirley, Creative Director and Co-Publisher Chante LaGon, Content Director Cover photo by Terra Coles Follow us online at: www.slomoatl.com facebook.com/slomomedia www.instagram.com/slomomedia

For the debut edition of Mo AYE-TEE-EL, we decided to devote the entire issue to highlighting notables that (we predict) will make an impact on Atlanta this year. To that end, we hit up a bunch of our favorite writers and thought leaders, and they offered up their picks for some of the city’s most significant artists, organizations, events, trends and more. So, flip through, and dive in to see who and what you need to keep your eyes, ears and other senses peeled for in 2023.

Oronike Odeleye

By Paula M. White

The making of an art revival is underway — and it’s going to be a big one if Oronike Odeleye has anything to say about it. (Spoiler alert: She does.) As the newly appointed artistic director of the National Black Arts Festival, Odeleye’s vision is to return the festival to its heyday; she’s boldly frank about what it’s going to take to make that happen.

NABF entered Atlanta’s cultural landscape in July 1988 and will be celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. It was conceived as a biennial summertime event to celebrate the best and brightest Black artists in visual art, literature, theater, dance, music and beyond. In its early years, it hosted esteemed talent like Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte and Wynton Marsalis, among many others. For more than a decade, hundreds of artists and attendees from across the globe converged on Atlanta for this nine-day celebration of Black excellence that took place in venues all over the city.

When it started out, the event was largely funded by local and state government, as well as foundations and corporate donors. The organization’s budget was not as reliant upon community/individual donors. Then, economic turbulence hit. Funding shifted and/ or disappeared, and NABF organizers had to get creative. The bigger, broader nine-day festival was shortened to just a few days. Ultimately, it was transitioned to its current schedule of programming spread through the year, a model that Odeleye plans to modify to bring more visibility and impact as she and the NBAF team work to build out the funding.

“NBAF has gotten a lot of flak over the years for not doing the festival, but my response to people who always bring that up is: ‘When was the last time you donated to do a festival?’” says Odeleye, the former festival director for ONE Musicfest who has more than 20 years of experience as an arts and entertainment administrator. “They didn’t stop doing the festival because they wanted to stop doing it. It’s just a huge undertaking. We really have to build toward having a funding base that supports it, an audience base that supports it, a city and a state that support it in order to get it back up. … I’m very excited about the challenge of it.”

Creatively, one of her top priorities will be stabilizing NBAF’s programming schedule.

“Right now, we do a lot of programming to speak to a lot of the different artistic disciplines, but all of the programs are one-off, happening randomly throughout the year,” she notes. “It makes it hard for our audience to know what to look to NBAF for. They don’t know exactly what it is that we’re doing, when we’re doing it and things like that.”

Odeleye and her team have selected Black History Month and Black Music Month as starting points for an annual cadence of programming with hopes to gain traction toward a bigger festival; these will be immersive, interactive and interdisciplinary oneday events that Odeleye will build upon as NBAF works to grow its loyalty and capacity back. But she’s candid about the fact that her initiatives need support. “I tell everyone that I feel really blessed to be in this position, and I’m excited about this job,” she says, “But, I didn’t just get a new job, we all just got a new job. It’s going to take all of us as a community to help with this task.

“And, we’re accepting all resources, help, money, funding — all the things — so that we can build this back. It’s a big lift, and we need to absolutely know our community is behind us.”

Atlanta’s diverse indie art scene | By Feifei Sun

On an unseasonably warm Sunday in December, at the exhibition opening of Being Ourselves held at The 3120, I watched six Asian-American artists sharing the same stage as they talked about identity and their work: how the two things are intertwined … and how they’re not.

It was an astonishing sight for me — a Chinese-American woman, part of the 1.5 generation — not least because of how rare it is to see this kind of representation in metro Atlanta or elsewhere. And I wasn’t alone. “It was special to be on stage with so many Asian-American artists, and to see so many people from the community come out,” says Aineki Traverso, whose work explores memory, movement and materiality (“the act of painting itself,” as she describes it). “It’s not an everyday experience, and it’s a community I haven’t had a lot of access to in the past.”

That these artists were in a conversation moderated by Crystal Jin Kim — an Atlantaborn, Korean-American artist, filmmaker, and curator who helped make Being Ourselves (which was sponsored by the Asian Cultural Empowerment organization) a reality — made it an even rarer happening. A few miles up I-85 at Gallery the J, Kim’s own two-part group show, Traversing Home, was also on display. The exhibition examines the many ways Asian-Americans traverse: across cultures, identities, physical locations.

It also reflects her own experience and that of the many Asian-American artists she’s met since returning to Atlanta after attending college in Chicago. “The community felt disjointed at first, but as I started meeting more and more artists with experiences like mine who were making amazing work, I simply felt more people should get to see it,” Kim says.

The gathering that Sunday was just one scene in the larger portrait of the city’s diverse independent art community, which is having a moment. And momentum.

In the past year, the city saw Guardian Studios open as an artist community in an old factory building and the exhibition space Echo Contemporary Art open within it. Elsewhere, Jess Bernhart and Tareq Al Salaita launched Volatile House two hours south of the city as a creative retreat, with ongoing programming and rooms for artist residencies. Traverso participated in a residency in December.

Volatile House is an expansion of Bernhart’s project, Volatile Parts, an artist residency and publishing project she ran out of her Capitol View home from 2019-2020. “Both are experiments in hospitality and the overlaying of public and private. And both, most notably, have taken place in my own home,” Bernhart says. “I think we’re in a moment when we have to reimagine what an ‘art space’ is or can be. As artists and organizations get priced out of more traditional venues, the scrappy, homemade, DIY scene is essential. For us, that means turning our actual home into an artist residency.”

Watching the local art movement thrive in this way is always meaningful. But it feels especially poignant that it’s happening at a time when this kind of success feels increasingly out of reach.

To Bernhart’s point, not a single county of the 13 that comprise metro Atlantaqualified as an affordable housing market in 2021, according to the Federal Reserve. Beloved neighborhood small businesses continue to close, including Highland Row Antiques, which shuttered in December after nearly two decades in business as owners faced a 450 percent rent increase. All the while, high-rises continue to populate the skyline and big-box brands continue to anchor mixed-use developments.

All of this underscores the importance of Kim’s work and those like her. “None of the work is something I’m being compensated for,” she says. “I do it for the work to be seen — and for others to connect.”

Artist Crystal Jin Kim

Upchuck

Upchuck came out of the gate strong in 2018, bringing chaos to the stage with whiplash punk, hip-hop, hardcore, and psychedelic indie rock fury. The hard-charging energy the group delivers is amplified by Atlanta’s young and rambunctious crowds, desperately in need of an outlet to transform their modern-world anxieties into an ecstatic, communal celebration. Singer Kaila “KT” Thompson, guitarists Mikey “Spuzz Dangus” and Hoffdog, drummer Chris Salado, and bass player Armando Arrieta deliver a full-throttle blow out at every show. With the arrival of 2022’s debut album, Sense Yourself (Famous Class Records), Upchuck is primed to spread its Southern punk riffs and riotous shows to the world. — Chad Radford

Ruwa Romman

Ruwa Romman still remembers her classmates laughing at her and calling her home a “bomb lab” when she was 8. Today, she may very well represent some of those classmates as state representative for District 97, which includes residents in Berkeley Lake, Duluth, Norcross, and Peachtree Corners. Romman, along with State Senator Nabilah Islam, make history this year as the first Muslim women to represent their respective chambers in Georgia. Romman is also the first Palestinian-American to hold public office in the state. Ever. Representation—a term so frequently tossed around of late that it has practically been rendered useless—can feel hard to celebrate when the victories feel overdue for 2003, much less 2023. Romman and Islam remind us of why we should anyway. — Feifei Sun

PHOTO BY MARLON GARCIA The Abolitionist Teaching Network

One does not need to be an educator or an expert in the field of education to notice some of the vicious practices of racism that continue to infiltrate schools in Atlanta and across the South. The harmful disciplinary approaches to keep Black and Brown students “on track”, the decline of funding in redlined districts, and the imposing of ineffective sanctions to underperforming schools cannot and should not be dismissed or overlooked. The Abolitionist Teaching Network was born with this reality in mind and with the goal of “developing and supporting those in the struggle for educational liberation.” The work they do — centered around healing, advocacy and affirmation of children and communities of color — is powerful, radical and necessary. — Juliana Ramírez

The bar at OK Yaki | By Shannon S. Evans

It took me awhile to make it over to OK Yaki. I was familiar with the restaurant concept from their pop-up that started in 2016, but I hadn’t heard much about the cocktails.

Then, one by one, I kept hearing about different women who I knew in the industry flocking to OK Yaki’s bar team. These are women that I respect and believe will be the next generation of great bartenders in Atlanta.

Over the summer of 2022, I made the trek over to East Atlanta to check out the restaurant. I went with a couple of friends, and we took up three of the eight bar seats tucked in the back. While intrinsically linked to the rest of the space, it felt like we were in a different world. I’ve always heard that stepping into OK Yaki is like discovering an authentic corner in Japan. And it is. Additionally, stepping to the back bar feels like you’ve stumbled onto Shinjuku, Tokyo’s famed street with alley bars. It’s energetic, laid-back and playful with technical cocktail making. Pure magic.

Bartender Yesenia De La Paz, one of the women that I mentioned earlier, greeted us when we sat down, and she said: “Everything on the menu is great. Tanner [Pierce, the bar manager and cocktail wizard at OK Yaki] is a genius.” I was excited by her excitement.

The first cocktail that I ordered was the Colada. After the first sip, I was struck by its elegance and simplicity. This was a great cocktail. It was rich, but delicate. Every flavor came through with each sip. No ingredient overpowered the other.

By the time I stumbled out, we’d tried every cocktail on the menu. This probably wasn’t the wisest of decisions, but it allowed me to have a very holistic view of their offerings. The only comparison that seems apt is that it felt like listening to a really great album: Each track built on the next, and when it was finished, it told a beautiful story — a complete story. In the cocktail world, we always talk about the mark of a good cocktail being one that is balanced. These went beyond that. They were complex but effortlessly controlled.

On subsequent visits, I’m always surprised at which industry veteran will walk in while I’m at the bar. When talking to my friends, everyone agrees that the team at OK Yaki is currently making some of the best cocktails in the city. But, while industry folks agree that the cocktails are top notch, it doesn’t seem like the rest of the city knows enough about it.

What it leads to nationally is Atlanta being disregarded when great cocktail cities are discussed. And that’s a pity because some of the best cocktails I’ve ever had and my favorite bar seats are in this city.

Tanner helms from Kimball House, another one of our great cocktail establishments. If this were any other city, people would be flocking to OK Yaki for this fact alone. In 2023, I believe this will change. In addition to this being the year that they shine, I hope that this is the year that all of our great Atlanta bar programs shine — especially those programs that are able to mentor women and people of color and make them feel welcome and excited.

Ladrones

Since 2017, singer Valeria Sanchez and guitarist José Rivera have called Georgia home, after Hurricane Maria left their hometown of San Juan, Puerto Rico in a state of disaster. Over the years, the two — as the band Ladrones — have continuously fleshed out a body of wailing and high-energy garage punk and rock ‘n’ roll, tearing up stages from The Star Bar to The Earl and Boggs Social & Supply. Backed by a current lineup featuring guitarist Warren Bailey, bass player Paul Hernandez, and drummer Sam Adams, the group is heading into the new year with plans to unleash a brand-new 7-inch via longstanding Atlanta garage-punk dealer Die Slaughterhaus Records. — Chad Radford

PHOTO BY DAVID PARHAM

Latino LinQ

The frustration of seeing and experiencing a lack of legal, educational, and health services for Latinx LGBTQ folks prompted a group of Latinx activists to found the nonprofit Latino LinQ in 2015. Since then, the organization has provided hundreds of events, including HIV testing, participation in health fairs and radio shows, know-your-rights trainings, mental health discussions, and workshops and conferences on sexual and reproductive rights and justice. Despite the challenges that the organization has faced throughout the years, including a reduction of funding and services during the pandemic, Latino LinQ remains strong. And with the steady support of the community, the organization will be able to continue developing trainings, workshops and testing; and consolidating key partnerships with other social justice organizations this year and beyond. — Juliana Ramirez (Full disclosure: Juliana has been affiliated with Latino LinQ as a member of the board of directors since 2018.)

Live soul music

The year 2023 is set to be a packed one for fans of soul music. A butt-load of notable local and national acts will take the stage in Atlanta in the coming months, including: Avery*Sunshine (February 9 at City Winery), ATL Collective Presents Sade’s Love Deluxe (February 13 at City Winery), Anita Baker (February 14 at State Farm Arena), Zo! and Tall Black Guy (February 18 at City Winery), Lalah Hathaway (February 21-23 at City Winery), Teedra Moses (March 3 at City Winery), Durrand Bernarr (March 7 at Center Stage), Masego (April 12 at The Tabernacle), Snarky Puppy (April 28 at The Eastern) and Jill Scott (May 6 at Cadence Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain Park), among many others. On top of all that, Atlanta soul icon Anthony David will be on hand to get christened with his very own eponymous holiday on May 26 in Fulton County. Our advice: If you like good music, start saving your coins, homies. — Carlton Hargro

Soul vocalist/musician Anthony David