We’re pleased to learn that 2008 ACP Public Artists McCallum/Tarry have a retrospective opening May 4th in Baltimore at Maryland Art Place. The video they created for their ACP installation in the water tower in the Old Fourth Ward, “Within Our Gates“, will be part of the exhibition.

From the new issue of The Atlantan, where Atlantans were asked for ideas for the new Mayor, Kasim Reed.

Susan Bridges, Whitespace Gallery

“I recently went to Toronto to attend Nuit Blanche, an all-night art show. People stood in line at 3 a.m. to get into venues held in vacant buildings, grocery stores, and on tops of buildings. Everything was free and the entire city was into it. This “art show” draws about 1 million people into the streets. Atlanta has so many open spaces and so many amazing artists who want and need to have a more active and supportive community. How can we make our great city a cultural center as well? Through education and public art.”

ACP announces a request for proposals for 2010 Public Art. There’s no entry fee, a $12,000 budget, and proposals are due on January 15th, 2010.
Download ACP 12 Public Art RFP: (.doc / .pdf)

“As one component of our month-long, city-wide celebration of photography each October, ACP produces a Public Art Project. ACP’s acclaimed program of public art has featured temporary projects in a variety of diverse locations throughout Atlanta. The program is significant in its ability to reach beyond the audience of traditional art venues and expand the way its audience considers and perceives photography and “lens-based” media. We are looking for project ideas that take advantage of public art’s ability to reach new audiences. It is also important that audiences understand that they are experiencing public art. “

2010 ACP Public Art Project RFP

Check out the interview with Beth Lilly on Burnaway about ACP’s Public Art Project “Gifted”.

“You had to physically place yourself in front of someone and declare very quickly, ‘We’re doing a public art project—giving prints for FREE to the public.’ Over the 12 days, I had the patter down. I experimented with what words would quickly get the idea across fast enough for them to stop and listen. But then I found you had to be sincere and real every time—anything else smacked of sales and advertising and wouldn’t work. Like once, I held up prints and spontaneously shouted, ‘This is what public art looks like!’ That stopped about five people in their tracks who came over to see what it was about. I did that again later and no one even looked at me. People can tell when your words are sincere and when it’s just some tag line.”

Check out today’s email newsletter for details about the launch of ACP’s 2009 Public Art Project Gifted, and sign-up to have ACP news in your inbox!

ACP’s public art project this year (curated by Beth Lilly) is going to be amazing, and there are only a few days left to submit. For more info, and details on submitting, see: Curating 12 Local Photographers. And check out other Opportunites and Call to Artists!

We announced this week that Beth Lilly will be curating “Gifted”, ACP’s Public Art project for 2009. She will be including the work of 12 photographers in her project, and local photographers have been asking how to submit work for possible inclusion in the project. Here’s how!

“Georgia residents within the Atlanta Metro Area who are interested in having their work considered can email Beth Lilly at atlgifted@gmail.com. Please include your name, address and phone number in the body of the email and attach examples of your work and a resume.

1.  Send no more than 5 images to review.  Files should be 72 dpi, 14″ on the longest dimension and saved as jpegs.  Any files that do not meet this criteria will not be reviewed.

2.  A current resume/CV that details you work as an artist/photographer should be saved as a Word Document. Please make sure the file type is “.doc” not “.dox””

ACP is pleased to announce that Beth Lilly’s project “Gifted” has been selected for the ACP 11 Public Art project. Here’s our email announcement outlining the project. Beth’s project was selected by a distinguished panel of jurors, and we thank all of you who applied. We’re looking forward to bringing Atlanta another fantastic public art project for October ‘09.

Writer Jeremy Abernathy reminded me this weekend of the review he wrote for ArtVoices Magazine of the ACP 10 Public Art Project “Within Our Gates”. Have a look!

Two great notices for ACP in year-end wrap-ups. One from the AJC, the other from Creative Loafing:

“ATLANTA CELEBRATES PHOTOGRAPHY has offered the city significant commissioned public art for a decade. This year, ACP turned up the heat with Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry’s “Within Our Gates” (Oct. 5-25). Installed in the Irwin Street water tower in the Old Fourth Ward, the work was a trenchant homage to Atlanta’s history of civil rights and protest from the people. Multimedia projections, atmospheric graffiti and a circulating tide pool all served as fitting metaphors for change burbling up from below. When it came to dissecting Atlanta’s fractured history, McCallum and Tarry demonstrated that sometimes outsiders have the best insight.” — Cinqué Hicks [freshloaf]

“Public art: “Within Our Gates” in the Old Fourth Ward. Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry’s multisensory evocation of the civil rights era in an old water tower was a resonant matching of subject and site. Curated by Lisa Kurzner, it was sponsored by Atlanta Celebrates Photography, which continues to expand its contributions to Atlanta’s cultural life.” – Catherine Fox [ajc]

Following the success of “Within Our Gates“, and our last few years of Public Art projects, we’ve decided to create an Open Call for Proposals for next year’s ACP 11 Public Art Project. Entries are due January 5th, 2009.

Here’s a downloadable Word doc with all the proposal guidelines, or an html version of the same. We look forward to your entry!

ACP is looking for a few great volunteers to sign-up for 2hr shifts at the ACP 10 Public Art installation “Within Our Gates” at the Water Tower @ Auburn and Irwin.

Please click this link to sign-up for a 2-hr slot!
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pS76Fm-bRmomyp2Yb23bDMA

Thanks for your support! (Don’t forget to click SUBMIT!)

This project needs a few good volunteers. Sign-up to help out today!

The Atlanta Journal Constitution profiled Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry this weekend, focusing on their ACP 10 Public Art Project “Within Our Gates” which opens this weekend. If you’re unfamiliar with the project, Drew Jubera wrote a great piece about the artists, the site, the project, and what the installation is all about.

Atlanta Celebrates Photography

Husband-and-wife art project

By DREW JUBERA

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, September 28, 2008

After scouting sites all over Atlanta for the public art project they’d been commissioned to create, Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry both were knocked out by a 100-foot-tall abandoned concrete water tower in the Old Fourth Ward.

“It was kind of this undiscovered jewel in the backyard of the city,” McCallum said.

But staring up at it from the patchy grass out of which it seemed to sprout, the two had different notions about what to do with it.

McCallum first envisioned something displayed on the tower’s century-old exterior.

Tarry’s reaction: “You don’t expect me to climb up there, do you? As much as I’m attracted to it, I’m not climbing up that ladder.”

Yet it didn’t take long for the husband-and-wife artist team to agree on a concept: archival video and audio of the civil rights movement displayed on the tower’s interior and viewed from a platform constructed above a shallow pool of water.

The result: “Within Our Gates,” a high-profile, signature exhibit for the 10th annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a monthlong festival of exhibitions, lectures and other events throughout the metro area and beyond that opens officially this week. (For a festival schedule, log on to www.acpinfo.org.)

Both in their 40s, McCallum and Tarry have come to similar aesthetic accords many times during their decade-long artistic partnership.

“The most important part of us working together is the trust,” Tarry said from the couple’s Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, where they live with their 5-year-old son. “Even though I might say, ‘No way, Jose, I’m not doing that,’ I never 100 percent dismiss him and his idea. I always chew on it and come back to it.”

McCallum added, “There are times when we’re both moving in different directions. We try to allow each other to do that, with the sense that we’ll come back to common ground.”

The results have often prompted charged, even controversial, responses from viewers and public officials.

In their 2006 video “Exchange,” the couple — he’s white, she’s black — swap each other’s blood through transfusions to subvert the historic “One Drop Rule” of racial purity.

In 2001, they set up photographs of black worshippers from a nearby church in the pews of a predominantly white church, invoking the spirit of the black congregants who in 1820 were forbidden to sit on the main floor.

A 2000 project in New York, “Witness: Perspectives on Police Violence,” included five emergency call boxes with speakers that played the recorded voices of brutality victims and their families. Then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani panned it.

“They have this ability to interrogate complicated ideas that we often don’t have a vocabulary to talk about,” said Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, director of the Spelman Museum of Fine Art.

A group exhibit at the Spelman Museum last year included “Cut,” the couple’s symbolic and penetrating video of them wordlessly cutting each other’s hair. Brownlee said it prompted more discussion than any other piece in the exhibit. It was also the only piece in the exhibit that the museum purchased.

“When it comes to cutting-edge, contemporary art, they push boundaries that really play with our comfort levels,” Brownlee said.

Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a nonprofit dedicated to the photographic arts, has featured public projects at past festivals. But for its 10th edition, Executive Director Amy Miller said, it wanted “something with teeth, that was socially responsible.”

Project curator Lisa Kurzner approached McCallum and Tarry after hearing them lecture last year at a local gallery about their work, including the 2003 video “Endurance,” a poetically stark chronicle of homelessness in Seattle.

McCallum and Tarry saw in Atlanta Celebrates Photography an opportunity to expand on their most recent work, which grew out of research for a memorial to Malcolm X: oil-painted copies of civil rights-era photographs, overlaid with silkscreen copies of the same photos.

“We were open to just about anything,” McCallum said. “But it was when we discovered the water tower that things became exciting.”

The long-abandoned tower, blocks from the King Center, once provided water for a nearby cotton compress warehouse, now converted into Studioplex, a mixed-use artist center. The tower itself seemed converted into shelter for the homeless. The circular interior was furnished with a ratty couch, fire pits, bottles.

But shafts of light also poured from small windows around the 70-foot-tall, rotundalike ceiling. The pebbled walls were colored by leeching minerals. Booming acoustics magnified the faintest sound.

“The minute they walked in they said, ‘This is the place,’ ” Kurzner said. “It was like being in the Chartres Cathedral.”

The artists spent days going through the vast film, TV and radio archives at the University of Georgia. They avoided footage of more recognizable leaders from the civil rights era. They concentrated instead on faces, crowds, interactions.

“We’re probably the first artists who’ve used the archive in this manner,” McCallum said.

The title, “Within Our Gates,” is taken from the 1920 film by black director Oscar Micheaux, a kind of African-American response to D.W. Griffith’s silent classic “Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

“The idea of borrowing the title ‘Within Our Gates’ is saying, ‘OK, this our backyard. This is within the community. This is the kind of turbulence and struggle that was seeded here,’ ” McCallum said.

“It’s not trying to present itself as a documentary of the Fourth Ward. It’s gaining inspiration from this community as a kind of seeding place for the movement.”

Tarry sees that inspiration as “more of a meditation on asking questions. Watching people passionately involved in political decisions and asking, ‘Am I involving myself in the discourse of my day? Am I carrying on the legacy of the past?’

“Hopefully that question will be continually asked.”

“Within Our Gates”
Art installation by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, in conjunction with Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a metrowide, monthlong visual arts festival. Saturday-Oct. 4 inside the water tower at Auburn Avenue and Irwin Street in the Old Fourth Ward. Opening reception: 7-9 p.m. Saturday. Artists’ talk: Oct. 5 at 2 p.m. at TUBE Creative, 704 McGruder St., Studio N (near the water tower), 404-659-0088. For other info: 404-634-8664, acpinfo.org

This article may also be viewed at the AJC site here.

Please lend a hand for ACP on Saturday morning at the Water Tower at the intersection of Auburn and Irwin. We’ll be there at 10:30am, leveling the dirt in the tower. Here’s more info. Thanks!