The Spelman Museum of Fine Art, MOCA GA, Johnson Lowe Gallery, Atlanta Center for Photography. These organizations have one similarity: They all regularly present fantastic exhibitions. Their one glaring dissimilarity? Geography.
Attempting to see the current exhibitions at all these venues in one day would require five car trips, navigating the always frustrating battle of Atlanta traffic and parking - and likely most of a day. The car-centered urban design of the city, among other factors, has meant Atlanta has next to no concentrated pockets of arts organizations, a frequent topic of complaint in the art community.
There is one large exception to this: Miami Circle. That one small Buckhead side street contains Johnson Lowe Gallery, Pryor Fine Art, Mason Fine Art, Marcia Wood Gallery, Maune Contemporary, Thomas Deans Fine Art, Alan Avery Art Company, Anne Irwin Fine Art and Madison Gallery. That's nine galleries on a quarter-mile stretch of road, a concentration that rivals places like New York.
Yet young Atlantans rarely use this gallery district as the walkable art hub that it is, appearing only at the openings and sporadically in between. Perhaps this has to do with the demographic toward which the Miami Circle cluster caters. These galleries are situated among high-end vintage shops, Persian rug stores and lighting, countertops and windows retailers - hardly the kind of store a 28-year-old with minimal funds and maximal zest for adventure would frequent. Regardless of the exact conditions of its omission, one thing is clear: People want another walkable art hub.
Now, with the opening of two new galleries, Atlanta has a walkable gallery neighborhood of the kind that Gen-Zers commonly seek out.
Debuting on the same day, One Contemporary and The Sun ATL are two new contemporary art galleries on Edgewood Avenue in Old Fourth Ward. These galleries, which are only a few buildings apart on the same block, both opened with group exhibitions and four days of programming to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
In many ways, the opening of these two galleries feels like a windfall. Located on Edgewood Avenue, they join a small, pre-existing cluster of galleries in Old Fourth Ward: whitespace gallery, Atlanta Center for Photography and September Gray. The addition of these galleries creates a substantial cluster in a neighborhood home to many places where young people congregate, such as Krog Street Market, the Eastside Beltline Trail and the prebuilt bar crawl on Edgewood Avenue.
This means this demographic has finally gotten their wish. It is now possible to park your car in one place and get coffee, walk to five galleries and get dinner and drinks, all without having to move your car again. Thank goodness.
Let's embrace this development in earnest. Let's turn Old Fourth Ward into the haunting ground for artistic types of all walks. Let's coordinate openings at all five spaces so, every few months, we flood the neighborhood with new art and the full breadth of Atlanta's artistic community, drifting between venues and having conversations at the galleries and the roads between that connect them.
I'm certainly romanticizing this image, but the emergence of this art hub feels like what we have been wanting. Why not run with the idea now that it's arrived?
