PopSmart

(Courtesy Carla Aaron-Lopez)

The (relatively) new kids on the block strut their stuff at Vaknin Gallery’s SCAD ON THE EDGE, continuing Wed., MARCH 5. The dizzying array of work encompasses photography, watercolor, drawing and more by undergrads and graduate students. Prices range from $375 to $5,050 for one of Whitney Stansell’s large paintings dealing with her mother’s childhood, incorporating sewing and a heavy dose of angst. Photographer Carla Aaron-Lopez cites the influence of Nan Goldin’s snapshot aesthetic and close-to-the-bone content in her fly-on-the-wall images (pictured). Meg Aubrey’s paintings of stripped-of-detail suburban neighborhoods “speak to the perceived perfection of the owners’ lives.” If this show doesn’t get you excited about Atlanta’s next wave, nothing will. Through April 4. Free. Vaknin Gallery. Wed.-Sat., noon-6 p.m. 905 Juniper St., Space 109. 404-513-0169. www.urivaknin.com.

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(Rocio Rodriguez)

It’s easy to get lost in ROCIO RODRIGUEZ’s paintings. The Cuban-American artist’s vast canvases filled with looping forms and snaking circuitry suggest maps and city grids. For Painting’s Conundrum, her sixth solo show at Fay Gold Gallery, continuing Wed., MARCH 4, the longtime Atlanta artist has created works that depict the flux and chaos of the modern world. Her dark and rich palette of Tootsie Roll brown and Army fatigue green creates a pleasing balance of color, inviting onlookers to linger. Through March 29. Free. Tues.-Sat., 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. 764 Miami Circle. 404-233-3843. www.faygoldgallery.com.

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Brian Newman, who many moons ago was the director of IMAGE Film and Video, has just taken a quantum leap forward in supporting directors and artists working in film.

Check out Brian’s blog here.

IndieWire and Variety both carried stories today about Newman’s new job as the CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute, an East Coast version of the Sundance Film Institute. The $5.5 million nonprofit TFI will address the growing lack of funding for indie film artists by offering financial support for filmmakers and new media artists.

I last saw Brian back in 2006 when he pegged me for the 2006 Media Arts Fellowship panel. That experience, helping dole out funding to a variety of filmmakers and artists, made me appreciate in a very practical way how many talented filmmakers there are out there so deserving of support.

Right now TFI is looking for a new home that will also feature exhibition space, screening space and studios.

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(Photo courtesy bldgs)

What a great surprise to open the New York Times magazine Sunday and find Pilar Viladas’ profile of David Yocum’s and Brian Bell’s West End architectural firm, bldgs.

There are so many amazing people and places in the city, you wonder if the culture vultures of the world will ever find them all. I’m not holding my breath.

In the kind of three degrees of separation that defines the enmeshed lives of Atlantans, Yocum and Bell worked previously with Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam, the architects whose Buckhead Library has been much in the news lately. For those of you following the Buckhead Library situation, check out my initial article.

(For now, fortune has favored the library. The Atlanta Fulton Public Library system voted not to allow developer Ben Carter’s offer of $24 million to buy and level the award-winning library to tempt them. But the building’s ultimate fate will lie with the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. But I digress …)

Yocum’s and Bell’s firm is an amazing high-design space tucked into a desolate stretch of the city. It reminded me of those thick metal doors and grimy hallways in New York City that open up to reveal incredible, secret loft spaces. But there is a Southern edge to bldgs, too: The embrace of rust and time and industrial spaces has something in common with the work of local artists like E.K. Huckaby or filmmaker Milt Thomas, who have also treasured the shabby, the old, that patina of the past in their work.

I can attest to the building’s magic, having attended a particularly lovely and poetic wedding in the space this fall. The time-marked elegance of the space meshed with the rooted, artistic alt couple exchanging their vows. The space was graced with the ghost of the authentic, and seemed a great harbinger of a blessed marriage.

I almost broke my leg negotiating the uneven sidewalks outside the studio several glasses of wine afterward. But the building wove a spell. My son watched a line of ants in the courtyard march in a military column into the office space, embracing the architectural mantra of erasing the line between inside and outside. We went crazy over the bathroom floor composed of beach pebbles. Great architecture, like great art, is supposed to re-envision the world, make you think about space and life in new ways. It did.

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(Photo courtesy Margaret Mitchell House)

There were some past and present Creative Loafers in the crowd last night for an evening chat at the Margaret Mitchell House with “The Wire’s” Felicia “Snoop” Pearson (that’s her, posing at Margaret Mitchell’s typewriter. Man, is she cute). Mara Shalhoup, currently working on her St. Martin’s Press book about the Black Mafia Family, was in attendance, along with former Loafer (and current Atlanta magazine senior editor) Steve Fennessy. IMAGE’s executive director Gabe Wardell was also in the house. He sat next to me and was clearly beside himself with excitement, being a huge “Wire” fan.

Literary Center Director of the Margaret Mitchell House Julie Bookman told me she had been trying to book Pearson as far back as April. She said she was happy to see that the crowd of 140 or so was composed of some new visitors to the space, attracted by “The Wire’s” cachet. Let’s just say the center named for a Southern white chick was looking very urban and cool with Pearson on the stage and a diverse crowd raptly following her every deadpan word.

The androgynous, cold-blooded gangsta “Snoop” on “The Wire,” Pearson was in town to promote her memoir, Grace After Midnight.

The book chronicles Pearson’s crack-addicted birth, her arrest at age 14 for self-defense murder, her prison time and her eventual 21st-century Schwab’s Drug Store discovery in a Baltimore bar.

As Pearson tells it, “The Wire’s” Michael K. Williams (aka Omar Little) had been watching her at the bar all night and finally came up to ask her, “Are you a boy or a girl?” The rest is history.

Pearson was interviewed by Written’s publisher Michelle R. Gipson, who was funny and real, and made the evening fly along.

Pearson killed ’em. She had to temper some of her discussions of the homemade dildos she fashioned in prison, and the open abscesses and HIV that make finding love in prison a bit of an ordeal. There were, after all, children in the crowd. Those kids sure love “The Wire.”

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The Atlanta Film Festival has announced its lineup for the April 10-19 event, available on its website.

I am especially excited to see that the opening film, The Lena Baker Story, about the first and only woman sentenced to die in the electric chair in Georgia and which was shot in Colquitt, Ga., features Jasper, Ala., native Michael Rooker, who made such a creepy film debut in John McNaughton’s 1986 film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

The closing-night film is from the wonderful The Station Agent director (and actor in Michael Clayton and Year of the Dog) Tom McCarthy. McCarthy’s The Visitor is about a college professor (Richard Jenkins) who returns to NYC to find his apartment has been rented to two illegal immigrants. Variety called it “this year’s humanistic indie hit.”

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My query at the end of a recent blog post about the threatened demolition of Mack Scogin’s and Merrill Elam’s award-winning Buckhead library was:

“Will the library be saved? Do Atlantans even care?”

Well, apparently Atlanta does care, very much in fact, about preserving the character of its city.

From American Institute of Architects Atlanta president Bruce McEvoy’s statement:

The Buckhead Library is a rare -and good- local example of a movement that marks a definite point in our community’s cultural evolution. If we destroy all those markers and milestones, then what will our successors use to understand that evolution?

We urge our government officials to transcend personal taste and protect this public asset that will be appreciated in the generations to come.

A forum hosted by the Atlanta chapter of the AIA is planned tonight from 6-8 p.m. at Georgia Tech to discuss preserving the library.

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(Courtesy Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design)

Houston’s Project Row Houses have helped make the Texas city a center of contemporary art. The concept was simple: Take 22 abandoned shotgun houses in the city’s neglected, predominately black Third Ward section and transform them into an experiment in positive development. The houses became artist residencies, low-income housing for young mothers, gallery spaces and even a bike co-op. New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman called it “the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country.” Project Row Houses founder Rick Lowe (pictured) speaks about “SCULPTING THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT” at Georgia State University Wed., FEB. 20. Perhaps he can give Atlantans a sense of possibility and purpose in sculpting our own in-flux urban spaces. Free. 6:30 p.m. GSU Speaker’s Auditorium, Student University Center, 44 Courtland St. 404-413-5230. www.gsu.edu/artgallery.

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(Photo Jeremy Chance)

Agnes Scott College’s Dalton Gallery often highlights the old-school art of painting with a modern twist. It’s the focal point again in THE POSSIBILITY OF FRAMING INFINITY, continuing Mon., FEB. 18, where works such as Marcia Cohen’s color-drenched spheres or Caomin Xie’s hallucinatory canvases upend the medium’s traditional square-frame parameters. Atlanta artist Sarah Emerson has taken over the gallery with her dark reveries, painting several large walls with her sweetly tragic mix of a natural world marred with splashes of blood red. Former Atlantan Jeremy Chance also creates violent, troubling associations in his portraits (pictured), erasing his subjects’ identities with fierce slashes of paint. Through March 16. Free. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., noon-4 p.m. Dana Fine Arts Building, 141 E. College Ave., Decatur. 404-471-5361. daltongallery.agnesscott.edu.

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(Photo courtesy Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects)

Architecture fans had better up their dosage of Prozac before reading the following article, in yesterday’s AJC, about the possible demolition of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects’ Buckhead library. I had originally hoped Buckhead developer Ben Carter was helping bring culture to the area by making high-profile sculpture by the likes of Frank Stella part of the “Art on the Streets” streetscape in his $1.5 billion Streets of Buckhead project set to open in 2009 and covered in a New York Times travel piece here.

But now, Carter is offering the city of Atlanta $24 million for the site where the award-winning library currently sits, to level the nationally renowned library, designed by what might be the city’s best architects, Elam and Scogin. It’s hard to applaud the arrival of art works to the area if architecture has to be erased to make room. The article is a keyhole into not only how we view architecture in the city (make it pretty, or don’t bother making it), but also book learnin’. Carter proposes to build a new library, but the implication is that the old one is simply an impediment in a developer’s plan. It’s as if Atlanta has to always take two steps backward for every step forward.

What I found most shocking about the article, though, was the unabashed yokelism of some of the businessmen quoted in the article.

Fulton County Commissioner Tom Lowe, quoted in the AJC, likened Elam’s and Scogin’s library to “an abortion.”

This is embarrassing, but actually what Lowe says in the article:

“I am a lover of art. I can even stand abstract art. But God darn, who in the world would build something like that? There ain’t no damn artistic value to that library.”

There is a reason people in other parts of the country sometimes look at Georgia as a backwater. Between the Barbie bandits, runaway brides, crane sitters and the good ol’ boys who can’t bother speaking proper English, even when interviewed, it can often be a real trial living in a state where people like this are your symbolic representatives.

Local architect Greg Walker, whose firm Houser Walker Architecture was the recent winner of Atlanta’s Emerging Voices architecture competition (which I judged in 2003), alerted me to an online petition already in the works. And a local architecture forum has been running a thread with the expected outrage and resignation from some who have witnessed just this sort of cavalier approach to culture in the city’s past.

Will the library be saved? Do Atlantans even care?

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