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!

in 2006, ACP commissioned local artist Matt Haffner to create a public art installation for ACP 8. The project was curated by Joey Orr, and this video was filmed/edited by Chris Downs. We wanted to make sure it was viewable here on the site, and available to all.

There’s a great showcase of ACP 8 Public Artist Matt Haffner in the June 2008 issue of The Atlantan, written by Felicia Feaster. Matt also has a new blog.

Yesterday’s Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund luncheon featured ACP’s public art project from last year, “Paper Placemats (ATL)”. It’s great to see the placemats having a 2nd life! (And it was fun to see people peeking under their plates to see what they were.) Below, examples from Mike Slack, Tim Davis & James Hall.

Our APC 9 Public Art project “Paper Placemats (ATL)” were found on the tables at Mill Springs Academy, a school for special needs children in Alpharetta. Mill Springs had their annual Family dinner and Arts Auction, and the ACP placemats were a part of the festivities. Mill Springs Parent and Association Treasurer Sharon Davis said, “I can’t tell you how many people commented on the placemats, reading the backs for the photographer information, asking questions, etc. I was more than happy to point out to everyone that these mats were generously donated by Atlanta Celebrates Photography for use by our school.”

We’re glad we could take part. Thanks, Mill Springs!

ACP Announces 2008 Public Art with McCallum/Tarry from Atlanta Celebrates Photography on Vimeo.

Please see the press release for more information.

ACP is pleased to announce that we’ve purchased a complete set of prints from Matt Haffner’s “Serial City” public art project, and the prints will become part of MOCA GA’s permanent collection. Mr. Haffner’s wheat-paste cutouts were ACP’s Public Art project in 2006, curated by Joey Orr. In purchasing the series, ACP deepens our committment to supporting local artists, and insures that our Public Art projects will continue to live in the archives of a local museum.

ACP thanks Joe Massey and the Joe Massey Foundation for making this purchase possible. We share a commitment to supporting local artists, and we’re pleased that the purchase strengthens ACP’s relationship with a local arts organization.

Creative Loafing Arts staff writer Felica Feaster, an enthusiastic supporter of “Serial City“, has posted about the purchase on Creative Loafing’s PopSmart Blog.

It’s fantastic to see even more coverage of Jason Fulford’s curated “Paper Placemats (ATL)” public art project for ACP 9. This is from today’s “Art Where You Least Expect It“, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, by Kirsten Tagami:

Customers at West Egg Cafe are used to seeing art on the walls, but lately, they’ve also seen it under their food.

Forty different color and black-and-white photographs were made into paper place mats and set out at 13 metro Atlanta restaurants last month as part of Atlanta Celebrates Photography, the annual citywide fall photo festival.

The folks at West Egg enjoyed the program so much, they’re continuing it this month and are looking for ways to make it a permanent feature, said owner Jennifer Johnson. “People were wandering around the place like it’s a gallery and peeking at the other tables,” she said. “One girl was going back to college and wanted to take a whole set. People have loved it.” (Sets or individual placemats aren’t available for sale, but those who eat at the restaurant are allowed to take them. Customers can also contact an artist or gallery to purchase prints.)

Photos by Hyosub Shin/AJC

Paper Placemats (ATL), our public art project curated by Jason Fulford, has been a big success during ACP 9, and there are a few restaurants in the area that are dedicated to exhibiting/showing/using the placemats into November.

We can confirm that as of this morning, Oct. 31st, these restaurants currently have placemats on hand. There may be others who still have them, as well; if you don’t see the placemats out, just ask!

West Egg Cafe (Howell Mill)
Thumbs-up Diner (on Edgewood)
Crescent Moon (Decatur)
Watershed (Decatur)
Dynamic Dish (on Edgewood)

And many thanks to all the businesses who participated in this year’s public art project, including Aprés Diem, Canton St. Cafe, Flying Biscuit Cafe (Midtown & Candler Park), The Globe, Havana Sandwich Shop, Perk Place Coffee Shop, Ria’s Bluebird, Village Pizza, and WASABi.

Here’s a Google Map of Paper Placemats (ATL) locations.

A few views of Paper Placemats (ATL), currently on restaurant tables at lunchtime in Atlanta. See acpinfo.org for more info, or read more about the artists and venues.