Metro Arts April 19

This program is intended for a print-impaired audience and is brought to you by the Georgia Radio Reading Service, GARS. Welcome to Metro Arts for Friday, April 19th. I am Kristen Moody for the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Metro Arts is brought to you by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. For our first article, we go to the Creative Loafing Publication Online for Listening Post. Pasquan as Ground Zero. The art compound in southwest Georgia inspires experimental music captured on zero by Doug DeLoach. Once again, Pasquan, the seven-acre art compound in southwest Georgia near Buena Vista, originally created by Eddie Owens Martin, aka Saint Oum, has inspired an album of imaginative musical delights. Subtitled, An Interdisciplinary Project Under the Direction of Craig Dongoski, Stuart Gerber, Deal Pruitt, and Travis Dodd, Zero is a double LP CD release featuring separate but related public performances by two different groups of students from Georgia State University and Columbus State University, the latter of which serves as the institutional caretaker of Pasquan. Zero follows the 2016 release of A Circle of Atoms, which featured performances by artists and bands originally scheduled to play at Pacifest, an annual outdoor music and art celebration, which was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Zero's music belongs in the experimental, improvisational, found sound category. Mostly quiet and contemplative, the recording consists of analog and digital sounds and vocals performed live in accordance with prescribed themes or frameworks and in specified sites at Pasquan and a recital space in Atlanta. The ambient, meditative, and exploratory nature of the music places Zero in similar territory with works by contemporary composers such as Pauline Oliveros, Carl Heitz Stockhausen, and John Cage. As educators, we use many pedagogical constructs to teach and mentor students, technique, craft, critical thinking, and so on, says Travis Dodd, lecturer at College of the Arts at CSU. However, this project focused on breaking students out of their comfort zones and dropping their usual modes of inspiration to reach toward the avant-garde. Side 1A of Zero follows an untitled score for the 1927 silent film The Love of Zero by Robert Florey. Recorded live at the Florence Kopleff Recital Hall on the GSU campus, the music was performed by members of the Integrated Studies Lab, a multidisciplinary art class dedicated to creating performance-based work. Side 1B features 13 students from CSU's expanded media course in a performance of All We Have for which each student composed a one-minute sound design inspired by Florey's silent film. Recorded live at Pasaquan in April 2023, according to the Zero liner notes, the artists interpreted their audio compositions live using action, choreography, additional sounds, and improvisational movements. Filling Side 2A of Zero is a performance by ISL students of Keep Kindness in Your Heart and Go On Along and Keep in the Rhythm and Keep in the Song. Described as a sound walk through Pasaquan with its creaking doors and open skies blending with the sounds of seven site-specific works of music, video, and performance art, Keep Kindness is perhaps the album's most effectively immersive track, graced by delicate gongs, calm winds, and otherworldly incantations. Side 2B showcases two works, Levitation Ceremony and EOM, both performed by ISL in the Pasaquan Sandpit, a special space where St. Oum frequently conducted fantastical ceremonies and sacred rituals. Regardless of whether you've been to Pasaquan, Zero conjures up a captivating soundscape representative of the phantasmagorical experience you can expect when visiting. The creaking of which, thanks to a complete restoration completed in 2016, the main house and outbuildings, ornamental walls, statuary, and thousands of brightly colored architectural features and ornamental details that make Pasaquan one of the world's most spectacular outdoor art environments are exquisitely preserved. Prior to the Zero project, most of the GSU and CSU students did not have direct experience with the techniques and methodologies required to complete the mission. That's a feature, not a bug, according to Dodd. This was all about creating new paths of exploration, he explains. This journey into the avant-garde links the project with Pasaquan and St. Oum. Eddie's life as a weird outlier in rural Georgia put him on the front lines of creative expression. Our students resonate with that legacy, which comes through in the record. To celebrate, an open-to-the-public party for Zero is scheduled for March 30th, 5-7pm. It featured a live DJ playing the album and projecting video of the performances. Also this month, Friday, April 19th, Saving the Chattahoochee, Waller's Coffee Shop. Hal Jacobs' moving documentary about Sully Bethe, one of the first women river keepers in the U.S., will be screened at Waller's Coffee Shop in Decatur, Friday, April 19th, at 7pm. An activist and advocate whose efforts led to a massive cleanup of the Chattahoochee River and a $4 billion investment by the City of Atlanta under the leadership of Shirley the Sewer Mayor Franklin. The film renders a vivid portrait of Bethe, a single parent of two sons who became the face of the Chattahoochee at a pivotal period in the development of Atlanta. Following the film, Bethe and producer-director Roberts will conduct a Q&A session. That's $15, 7pm, Waller Coffee Shop, 240 DeKalb Industrial Way, Decatur, 30030. Call 404-975-3060 or visit wallerscoffeeshop.com. Thursday, April 25th, Dreams Don't Cost a Thing, a tribute to Dexter Romweber, the Earl. The passing of Dexter Romweber, who reportedly died of natural causes at home on Friday, February 16th, shook the indie rock world to the core. On Thursday, April 25th, a concert at the Earl organized by Jeffrey Butzer pays tribute to the life and legacy of the Chapel Hill, North Carolina native and guitarist extraordinaire. Romweber was best known as co-founder of Flat Duo Jets and Dex-Romweber Duo. The latter was sister and drummer of the late Sarah Romweber. Usually slinging a vintage silver tone electric guitar, Romweber performed numerous times in Atlanta, including in a specially memorable solo set under a tarp in the rain during drive invasion at Starlight Theater. He was always so present while performing, sometimes it felt scary watching him, especially if you cared about him personally, says Butzer. I miss him so much. The band lineup for Dreams Don't Cost a Thing features Gentleman Jesse, George Harris with the Compartmentalizationists, Tom Maxwell, Rod Hamdallah, Waiting for UFOs, Don Chambers, Flap, and Senor Artie Mandello. Earlier in the week on Saturday, April 20th, Record Store Day, Criminal Records is hosting an All Dex Day with some of the same musicians. That's $15. Doors are at 7.30 p.m. Music is at 8 p.m. at the Earl, 488 Flat Shoals Avenue, Northeast, Atlanta, 30316. Call 404-522-3950 or visit badearl.com. That was Listening Post, Pasquan as Ground Zero by Doug DeLoach. Next, we move to the Burnaway publication for A Landscape Longed For, The Garden as Disturbance at the Crisp Ellert Art Museum, St. Augustine by Christopher Steven. A Landscape Longed For, The Garden as Disturbance is currently on view at the Crisp Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine, Florida. This marks the second iteration of the exhibition, which now features an expanded collection of artists who address identity, belonging, and historical reverence to the intricate visual metaphors associated with the garden. Two rooms house the exhibition, and visitors are welcomed by pollen-hued windows. The first space holds 14 works that span traditional media of painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and sculpture. The variety of visuals, textures, forms, and colors is in itself stimulating. The work of Kathy Liu, a newly included Chinese-American artist, presents her ceramic sculpture, Fruit Stand, 15, 2002. Like a vine of plenty dropping down from an invisible canopy, the sculpture slowly and freely rotates, imbued with life, adorned with ginger root, papaya, lettuce, gourds, and other edible flora, the glazed surface boasts an earthy variety of blues, greens, browns, purples, and golds that hum with the reverence of tradition. By eating the same fruits and vegetables in China and America, this work synthesizes food and identity, creating a symbolic link between the artist's cultural past and present. Another new inclusion in the exhibition is Candace Williams' work, Genes, Not Genius. The overlying purpose is to address how the social production of biologically determinist racial scripts, which extend from a biocentric conception of the human, can be dislodged by bringing studies of blackness in and science into conversation with autopiosis, black Atlanta livingness, weights and measures, and poetry. A biocentric conception of the human, it should be noted up front, refers to the law-like order of knowledge that posits the Darwinian narrative of the human, that we are purely biological and bioevolutionary beings as universal. Elegance is elimination, 2021. We are confronted with a massive potted plant standing at seven and a half feet, whose stems are wrapped in vines and end in a crown of leaves at the top. At a distance, the sculpture's texture is obviously plastic. However, moving closer to the work reveals a surprising collage. Quietly adhered to the leaves, images of a body grow as one with the plant. The sculpture's use of synthetic material fashioned to look organic speaks metaphorically to the manufactured nature of racism that persists in society. Here, despite the odds, the body flourishes, standing tall and taking its place. The second room houses eight works, two sculptures and six wall pieces. One of the original artists from the first iteration of a landscape longed for, David Hart presents Fragments, 2014. True to life and scale, this bronze sculpture of an acanthus plant emerges from between terracotta tiles. From a distance, the organic topography of the bronze seems to glow in the light like a smoldering verger. This plant was removed from the host, taken out of context and placed somewhere unexpected. The scale and material of the work are enchanting. Bronze is a living metal, changed through touch and patinaed with age. At this size, the sculpture takes on a sacred quality, heightening the already impressive list of associations with the acanthus and mortality, victory and beauty. This is the plant depicted in the relief at the top of Corinthian capitals, so there is a historical reverence at play. Fragment asks the viewer to observe closely and quietly to take in the warmly hued light resonating from the leaves and reflect upon symbolic associations with nature. A landscape longed for, the garden as disturbance expressly reminds one that shared human histories of time and place are embedded in the dirt. The timeless adage, when in doubt turn to nature, serves as a poignant reminder of the deep-rooted connections between the garden and the human experience. Plants, like people, hold histories often obscured by time or memory, yet their significance is felt empathetically. The exhibition offers an enriching garden that nourishes both the physical and spiritual needs of those who take the time to walk, look and contemplate among the plants. A landscape longed for, the garden as disturbance is on view at the Crisp Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine through April 20, 2024. That was a landscape longed for, the garden as disturbance at the Crisp Ellert Art Museum, St. Augustine by Christopher Stephen. Next, as for me, I'm just passing through this planet at Badwater, Knoxville by Harrison Wayne. In this season's opening exhibition at Badwater, as for me, I'm just passing through this planet, curator Kelsey Conley delicately balanced works from Jacob Giacomo, Caitlin McCann and Benjamin Stallings, three artists who together create a temporary shared universe of yawning sentimentality. The white barnwood walls of the gallery, romantically uneven and interspersed with bracing and reinforcement added over time, provide shelter to five sculptural works alongside a poetry publication. Giacomo and McCann's sculptures suggest a shared history, a hypnotic fiction which is stabilized in part by the atmospheric similarities between the myriad found objects in the barn. To the imaginative viewer, the oxidized patina on the briefcase hardware of McCann's folk song machine for 2024, might suggest a shared origin to the aged fiberglass form of Giacomo's seeing the elephant 2024. Floating underneath these superficial similarities, the substantive bridge which connects these distinct approaches to sculpture is found in the silence within the works and the emphasis placed on cultural and community identity. To experience folk song machine four as a static object without activating the single pole switch which brings it to life, the bundled electronics within the well-worn briefcase evoke an emotional response which oscillates between terror and sadness. The machine's silence is made uneasy and sick by the exposed power switch connected by trailing wires back to the briefcase. While the work might ostensibly resemble an improvised explosive device as it lies dormant on the barn stage, by flicking the switch and calling the machine to its purpose, something of an implosion happens. The percussive and electronic components of the sculpture begin to perform a traditional gospel song so old that a specific author cannot be confidently identified, rendering the composition a shared cultural heirloom. The sound modules predict melodic distilled beeps which bring to mind the sounds of a life support machine. The snapping metal servos click in a distinctly mechanical register. While the tune of the machine is lively in its cadence, the impact of the sound is emotionally tinted. The composition of the found material is not merely presented here but affected drastically by the hand of the artist in the construction of the instrument itself. The purpose-built simple electronics allow McCann to add her own confident voice to the longstanding dialogue of American folk tradition. The choice to allow viewers agency in deciding when each machine on display is turned on or off creates an unexpected emotional entanglement. Turning off the machines as they eagerly share their songs is a decision that carries weight. Giacomo's hanging fiberglass molds confront the viewer from every interior face of the barn. Their silence is made palpable not only in contrast to McCann's machines, which provide a disquieting soundtrack, but also through the accumulated history that radiates outward from each surface. Industrial molds now covered in lichen and moss colonies push viewers to reckon not only with the age and hidden history of the found objects, but also with their obsolescence as tools for commercial fabrication. The cartoonishly exaggerated features of seeing the elephant might even have once been used in the production of a vibrant, playful statue, perhaps even a playground feature. Suddenly, but to great effect, Giacomo has hung the elephant's life-size profile high enough to confront the viewer eye-to-eye. Locked rigidly to the wall, towering over viewers with an imposing, silent presence, the discarded mold has become a taxidermy specimen of somehow American culture. Deep inside the barn, Giacomo's Dividend 2024 confronts the viewer with a final silent stare. The unyielding hollow face exerts a gravity similar to that of McCann's exposed power switches, drawing viewers into the mask, tantalizingly close to the dormant wasp nest within. Similarly to his elephant, Dividend 2024 confronts viewers eye-to-eye. To experience a close-up encounter with Dividend, as McCann's neighboring folk song Machine 3, 2024, plays its raspy, compressed tune, is an emotional crescendo. Benjamin Stalling's Museum Garden, 2024, utilizes forms of experimental prose and poetry to flesh out the competing feelings of decay and preservation that pervade the barn. Across three chapters, Stallings explores memories, impressions, and landscapes of the American South. In Old Car City, describing the poet T.S. Eliot, Stallings plots a beautiful intersection point for all three artists on display at Badwater. The poet is walking through the mess he's made, the history he's made, and understood that he is guilty too. He is walking through the wreckage, looking for what can be saved, what's salvageable in the after. As for me, I'm just passing through this planet is on view at Badwater by appointment until April 14th, 2024. That was, As for me, I'm just passing through this planet at Badwater, Knoxville, by Harrison Wayne. Next, we move to the Atlanta magazine online for, Remembering Rico Wade, how the legendary producer influenced Atlanta, Southern hip hop and pop music. The Organized Noise and Dungeon Family member died April 12th at age 52 by Rhonda Racha Penrith. Even with the knowledge that none of us will live forever, Rico Wade's untimely passing at age 52 is still hitting hard days after the April 12th announcement. As a cornerstone of the game changing production trio Organized Noise, formed in his teens with Ray Yoda Murray and Patrick Sleepy Brown, and the de facto general of the Dungeon Family, the music collective that includes OutKast and Goody Monk among its members. Wade's impact in the music industry is huge. That has been evident in how widely his death has been covered outside Atlanta with the New York Times, Billboard, Rolling Stone, and the Hollywood Reporter penning tributes to the late producer. With hundreds of credits, including OutKast and Goody Mob's debut album, Southern Playlistic Cadillac Music and Soul Food, TLC's Waterfalls and En Vogue's Don't Let Go, Wade helped to expand Atlanta's imprint in music, reaching global heights. With OutKast and Goody Mob, Wade was part of mainstreaming Southern hip hop, expanding its boundaries and perimeters. The Atlanta City Council praised Wade in an Instagram tribute as a music pioneer and cultural architect whose impact resonates far beyond his time. His contributions to hip hop and production shaped the sound of generations and made our city the beacon of the modern hip hop era. Rico left an indelible mark on music and culture around the world. And for that, the South will always have something to say, shared Mayor Andre Dickens in a statement. Both the Hawks and Falcons also acknowledged his role in promoting Atlanta pride and their brands in particular through social media posts featuring him rocking their jerseys. Among his musical family and peers, the love and respect as well as pain has been overflowing. Killer Mike, the first to post publicly about Wade's death, said on Instagram, I don't have the words to express my deep and profound sense of loss. I am praying for your wife and children. I'm praying for the Wade family. I'm praying for us all. This is a different type of hurt, shared OutKast's big boy via Instagram. We lost part of the soul of the city, said super producer Lil Jon. Simply put, thank you, Rico Wade, Ludacris posted. Back in 2015, the city of Atlanta showed its appreciation for Wade and organized noise through Elevate, the annual visual arts program and festival sponsored by the Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs, then in its fifth year. Themed Forever I Love Atlanta or FILA, programming put a spotlight on the Dungeon family's game-changing contributions to the city, culturally, artistically, and mutually. For its curator, renowned artist Dr. Fihamu Piku, working closely with Wade was both a professional and personal highlight. For the Brooklyn-born, South Carolina-raised Piku who moved to Atlanta in 1994, the same year OutKast's debut album was released, organized noise in the Dungeon family served as his introduction to the city and its soundtrack. The music also helped to alter Piku's personal perceptions of hip-hop and clarified his own artistic vision. I was still very much a New York hip-hop purist, he said, but I remember vividly hearing Crumbling Herb from that debut album for the first time and that's what really turned me on to organized noise. That initial introduction transformed into deep appreciation with the arrival of Goody Mob's Soul Food. That really pushed me to try to create something through visual art that had the same sort of feeling and emotion that I felt listening to Goody Mob, and particularly that song Guess Who. That song changed everything for me. Piku said he was surprised to learn just how organic the organized noise in Dungeon Family Sound was. He also was happy to give Wade and his crew their flowers, but also to cultivate a real friendship with him. Every time I think about Rico, I envision that photograph. I think it was in Vibe Magazine where they were all at the White House and were all dressed up like X-Men characters. Rico was Professor X, Piku said. I always see him like that. He was so visionary, and working with him on the exhibition, I got to see that on full display. The way he thought and how quick he was with an idea, like you could say, oh, I'm thinking of X, Y, Z, and then immediately he's like, okay, you could do it like this. It was just really fascinating to be in his presence and to also become friends with him. Alan S. Gordon, an Oakland native who served as editor-in-chief of the Larry Flint-owned Rap Pages in Los Angeles in the late 90s, felt so strongly about Wade, organized noise, and the Dungeon Family's contributions to hip hop that he oversaw a bold cover of the collective he dubbed as Nat Turner's Orchestra, in reference to the Slaver Rebellion Turner led in Virginia in 1831. On that April 1998 cover, the Dungeon Family posed in front of a tree with rope from a would-be lynching present, and the words Nat Turner's Orchestra were displayed in a refashioning of the Confederate flag. While a student at Grambling State University in HBCU in Louisiana, Gordon became impressed by organized noise first through Player's Ball, Outkast's debut Christmas single in 1993. For Gordon, organized noise's production had an impact he considers even greater than Dr. Dre's The Chronic, and Player's Ball was just a taste of what was to come. More so than The Chronic, there's more diverse and layered styles and sounds in that record. There's jazz, there was blues, there was R&B from different places or artists that nobody else was pulling from. It didn't sound anything like a New York record or a West Coast record, or what you would typically consider a Southern record from either Houston or Florida, being Orlando or Miami at the time. It was something totally different. It was its own animal, and to have those brothers rap how they rap, but it comes from such a soulful place, was impactful, Gordon says. When Southern playalistic Cadillac music dropped months later, that album changed everything, not just for the South, but for all of hip-hop, Gordon says. For Gordon, Outkast's sound on that debut album was a dramatic tonal and somatic shift from other rap albums, because it was street without the crime and reflected more of how do we live, how do we survive, how do we courage each other, how do we kick it, how do we have fun. None of it is degrading, he says. Wade, with Organized Noise and Outkast, offered an intimate window into the black Southern experience and the black experience overall that had been missing. By the time that Rap Page's Dungeon Family cover would come out, Goody Mob had joined Outkast in national conversations with other members of the collective also making waves in Atlanta and throughout the South, and Gordon wanted to reflect that. It was like a plantation rebellion, Gordon says, explaining both the cover and the Dungeon Family's culture-shifting impact. Like, we're killing old ideas, killing old masters, we're killing the idea of what people thought about Southern rap. I think Rico was greatly instrumental in helping Outkast, Goody Mob, Lil Will, and other artists all around Atlanta find that voice and find that space and tap into those things from their own perspective, how they want to do it, even for somebody like Ludacris, Gordon says, specifically of Wade's effect on Atlanta's emergence as a hip-hop force in Mecca. That impact certainly extends to his cousin, mega-rap star Future, and to Killer Mike, a later addition to the Dungeon Family who recently won three Grammys for his latest album, Michael. For Daniel Smith, who served as both music editor and editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine in the 1990s, Wade's legacy was solidified long ago. If the only thing Rico Wade ever did was co-create TLC's singular 1994 Waterfalls and Outkast's seminal 1994 Southern Playalistic Cadillac music debut, he would be a legend, said Smith, author of the groundbreaking Shine Bright, a very personal history of Black women in pop, and host and creator of the Spotify Black Girl Songbook podcast, Via Text. Because Wade influenced Southern hip-hop and American pop music for three decades, she said, he is immortal. That was Remembering Rico Wade, How the Legendary Producer Influenced Atlanta, Southern Hip-Hop and Pop Music, by Rhonda Racha Penrith. Next, we move to the Arts ATL publication for review, Stephen Thorpe's Pristine Dreams at Wolfgang Gallery, by Jerry Cullum. On exhibit at Wolfgang Gallery through May 18th, Stephen Thorpe's Who Looks Outside, Dreams, Who Looks Inside, Awakes, is a paradoxical new body of work, continuing Thorpe's prior vision in a regionally distinct register that reflects the years New York-based British artists spent teaching in Georgia. The work is paradoxical, because although Thorpe celebrates dreams and interior investigation as tools of discovery, and even alludes to Casper David Frederick, the premier German romantic advocate of symbolic landscape painting, the paintings at Wolfgang seem the opposite of much of the romantic sensibility, which valued such inwardness. Thorpe's most frequently used compositional device involves the two walls of a windowless room corner, with a carpet covering the floor. The figures in the carpet more often seem derived from European tapestries, but Thorpe cites classic Chinese textiles and the European chenisserie derived from them as perhaps the most important inspiration. The Chinese carpets, tapestries and ceramics that inspired European chenisseries are symbol-laden, but they deploy their symbols decorously and decoratively. If they are dreamlike, the dreams are pleasing rather than disturbing, which distinguishes them from the unsettling qualities of the schools of painting descended from romanticism. Ironically, what seemed like chaotic exoticism from a clearly advanced Asian civilization appeared to Europeans as a way of loosening up the tightness of dominant styles of decorative design. Thorpe has assuredly read his archetype mind sources, Carl Jung, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell. Paintings not in this show have titles quoted directly from Campbell, but his combination of the geometry of room corners and the designs of carpets draw their inspiration from the most domesticated renditions of mythic symbolism. Although they are not without romantic qualities of psychic depth, Thorpe's paintings share in the reasonable and restrained aesthetic of his visual sources. Whether his imagined textiles quote Chinese or European designs, they are always extraordinarily polite. Nevertheless, what he renders are the spaces of dreams, even if the dreams are orderly to a point best illustrated by two companion paintings in which a geometricized landscape is seen through the arch that forms one wall of a room featuring a carpet with an equally geometricized design of intertwined plants and animals. The landscape, more like a wall mural than anything in nature, depicts a sun focusing its rays on a wooded hill where the rays fuse with a waterfall that then continues into the foreground as a river. A great blue heron flies across the space where light rays and falling water meet. In Sacred Sentinel, the heron is flying to the left. In Soul Guardian, the heron is flying to the right. The two paintings are otherwise very nearly identical. A few other works all oil on twill weave fabric that the gallery identifies as denim, also feature dreamscapes of birds and waterfalls that are Thorpe's homage to his experiences in the landscapes of northern Georgia. Again, this is a very orderly inward vision, easier to imagine as a mural on the right-hand wall than an actual outdoor scene replacing the wall. Even the precisely rendered birds, conceived as an homage to John James Audubon, seem to celebrate Audubon's artistic skill more than his powers of acute observation. And yet, and yet, if I may quote the legendary poem by Kobayashi Issa, in ancient arboreal heaven, a bright red cardinal has hopped out onto the artificial paradise and onto the Chinese carpet of the room, rather as in the case of the imaginary gardens with real toads in them, as Marianne Moore's famous poem titled Poetry. Here, and in the dolly-like twisted rocks sharing space with birds, hills, a waterfall, and a strange tree unveiled ridges of transformation, Thorpe allows his unconscious forces to act up at least a little bit. Nevertheless, the overall impression of this show is enormously skillful control forming a body of work that Wolfgang Gallery has effectively turned into a single room installation by choosing a wall color that in some cases complements the painting's dominant palette so perfectly that they seem almost to merge with it. There are almost certainly symbolic depths hidden in the carpets and the paradisal landscapes that would be revealed by a search for art historical precursors. But even lacking that, it can be said that if these paintings represent a primordial realm or sacred woods of trial and initiation, as the titles of two of them indicate, then that realm and those woods are distinctly well-ordered places. That is not a bad thing, but given the misleading archetypes from which Thorpe started out, it still seems a paradoxical thing. It is also arguable that the deepest message of work like sacred woods or trial and initiation lies not in the pastel pastoral rendered in the carpet, but in the subtle effects of sunlight rendered in saturated colors on the walls. The most resonantly titled painting in the exhibition, no tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down into hell, is almost the most formally circumscribed. Each symbolic element is portrayed within the frame of a Romanesque arch, and while the centrally positioned birds seen frozen in flight in the central arch might be thought of as soaring in a semi-darkened sky beyond the facade, the matching flowering trees and the flanking arches are clearly not growing anywhere outside the exquisitely organized pattern in which they complement the botanical aspect of the carpet design. The central bird recalls Campbell's 1969, The Flight of the Wild Gander, in which he cites the wild gander as a symbol of spiritual liberation from oppressive restraints. So perhaps the point is that the tree's roots decidedly do not reach down into hell, and thus they will never reach heaven either. Perhaps the power of the whole show lies in the way it forces us to make our own intuitive sense out of its paradoxes, looking within for the artist's possible meanings instead of remaining outside analyzing the work's decorative aspects. Viewers may indeed awaken. That was Review, Stephen Thorpe's Pristine Dreams at Wolfgang Gallery, by Jerry Cullum. Next, Review, Fat Ham Reinvents Shakespeare's Classic with Modern Flavor and Spice, by Alexis Hawk. It's hard to overstate how many new takes on Hamlet there have been. But although Sir Lawrence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Ethan Hawke, and David Tennant all gave it the old college try, with a special nod to Tom Stoppard's breezy spinoff, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. No version has ever felt as transfixing and alive as James E. James, Pulitzer-winning deconstruction of the material, Fat Ham. Now proving the play's the thing at the Alliance Theater through May 19th and replete with a sizzling cast, E. James takes Shakespeare's tragedy and inverts it. He takes the story structure that has seeped into our cultural memory over the last several centuries, the usurping, revenge, meditations on morality, etc., and cracks through its ribs to find the soft flesh inside. And yes, I'm using some barbecue metaphors here, because the story itself has been transplanted to a backyard cookout celebration in North Carolina, following the rushed marriage of our protagonist's mom, Tedra, Ebony Marshall Oliver, bringing stellar comedic chops to the party, to his uncle, Rev, James Alfred, following the death of his father, Pap, Alfred again, pulling strong double duty in the dual role. The hamlet of our story is juicy, played by Atlanta native Marshall W. Mabry IV, they, them, who delivers a precise and lovely performance as a black queer young man grappling with a complex kind of grief over the parental figures in his life. Pap built a barbecue dynasty before going to prison for murdering one of his employees, only to get shanked under mysterious circumstances while serving his time. As we soon find out, that death was a coordinated hit planned by his covetous brother, just like in Hamlet. Juicy is not technically a prince, rather, he's a student at the University of Phoenix, pursuing a degree in human resources, but he is clearly inheriting an empire's worth of pressure and generational trauma from his family. As in Hamlet, Juicy's father, Pap, appears early in the play in ghostly form, demanding vengeance. Here, he delightfully emerges from various items in the backyard, including, at one point, the smoker, where the ethereal vapor makes it seem like he's what's being cooked on the burner. But Pap's visit doesn't send existential shockwaves through his son, so much as it stirs up profoundly conflicted feelings. After all, as a paternal thug, Pap was a tyrant, mocking his son for every element of his identity. When both of your father's figures are equally vile, where does that put you? Of course, maybe this is a good time to share that this play is also extremely funny. There's welcome self-awareness throughout, especially over how moody and emo Hamlet has always been as a character. I can't help who I am. I ponder, Juicy says at one point. In a series of soliloquies that blend the source material with the updated takes, Juicy is brought in and out of the contemporary storyline via smart lighting and sound design by Zhang Fu Chao and Aubrey Dube. This allows Mabry, as an actor, to showcase their impressive ability to seamlessly move from perfect iambic pentameter to present-day chit-chat. Later, when the family breaks out the karaoke machine, Juicy, of course, opts for Radiohead's creep. But what starts as an amusingly on-the-nose choice becomes a heart-stirring, slow-burn cry from the soul that soars beyond the Tom York original. The repeated lyrics of the chorus, I don't belong here, just hit differently. Throughout, we get clever little touches for the theater nerds in the house. Ah, there's the rub, Juicy says with a knowing wink, after his uncle goes on about the secret to good barbecue is in the rub. But these nods and fat ham aren't just injected as some kind of family-guy-style appeal to, hey, get it? It's a thing we know. Instead, E. James has unearthed, like poor Yorick, a truer depiction of what it's like to be contained within these 21st-century mortal coils than you might have imagined possible. Take Opal, Victoria O'Margery, this play's version of Ophelia, who's also queer. Here she's bursting with poise and confidence, sharing an easy repartee with Juicy that's fostered from a mutual overstanding about how difficult it is to hide who you are from those who are supposed to love you unconditionally. One more nimble twist is that full military uniform-clad Larry, this world's Laertes, played with tender yearning by David Castillo, has a romantic connection with Juicy here. It's a nice switch, and it allows us to build toward one of the most transcendent, cathartic endings of a play I've ever seen on stage, which, again, no spoilers, but just hold on to your hats, folks. In a full cast of absolute top-of-their-game performers, I'd be remiss not to shout out Larry Roach as Teo, the translated Horatio, whose boisterous, constantly high persona, seen in the delivery of one lengthy, raunchy monologue in particular, fills the show just about every time he opens his mouth. The one misstep here was in the Alliance's decision to stage the play at the much smaller, more squished Hurt stage, rather than on the theater's main stage, where you could have more easily guaranteed that the audience would be able to experience every little detail and movement. Because the Hurt stage is at the bottom of narrowly sloped stadium seating, and the stage isn't elevated, you won't catch all the action unless you're seated in the very front row. This is a play that deserves the room to breathe and take up space, especially with the dynamic direction from Dawn M. Simmons and Stevie Walker Webb, which propels each emotional beat to every corner of the venue. Ultimately, Fat Ham is all about radically choosing joy, deciding to thrive, and committing to be true to thine own self. It's also a meditation on the merits of softness in a world that too often favors mean and brittle. As one character asks in a crucial moment, what would your life be like if you chose pleasure over harm? That was Review, Fat Ham Reinvents Shakespeare's Classic with Modern Flavor and Spice by Alexis Hawk. Next, What to See, Do, and Hear, Hawkins HQ, ASO, Bremen Museum, and More by Arts ATL staff. At Hawkins HQ through April 21st, Hudgens Prize finalist Sergio Suarez has combined his evocative ceramics and paintings with a forest photo mural, black curtain, and a fog machine to create Shrine, a meditative homage to his late mother. Opened by appointment, the Hawkins HQ gallery, founded in 2023 by sculptor Alexander Hawkins, is housed in a remodeled second floor unit of a former motel adjacent to the interstate that has been partially converted to studios and storage spaces, free today through April 21st. Recently passed, Richard Hunt was one of the most significant American sculptors, combining an energetic use of materials with an equally energetic devotion to African American civil rights and activism. September Gray Fine Arts presents five artists working in his manner in The Artists of the Richard Hunt Studio on Friday. Artists include Isaac Duncan II, Eric W. Stevenson, Gwen Yen Chu, and others, free, Friday only. Music Portuguese virtuoso pianist Maria Joao Pires makes her debut with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in two performances of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, with its rollicking orchestral interludes, punctuating tender piano trills, and more. The concert, led by music director Natalie Stutzman, also includes works by Mendelssohn and Schumann, today and Saturday. Last year's Joe Alterman in Houston Person, together again at the Bremen Museum, was a crowd pleaser. Pianist Alterman returns this weekend, this time joined by clarinetist and saxophonist Ken Poplowski in Joyful Jazz. Poplowski grew up playing in a Polish polka band and transitioned to jazz when he joined the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. This Sunday's concert will be preceded by a catered reception, included in the price. Tickets are $60, with discounts for students and museum members. Theater Illusions, the drag queen show, features spectacular burlesque style and comedy performances by the industry's best celebrity impersonators and the funniest Atlanta drag queen hosts. Impersonators of classics like Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner, and Cher are joined by the newer divas such as Adele, Nicki Minaj, and Beyonce. Birthday parties, bachelorette parties, or parties of one, everyone's welcome for brunch and dinner shows. Tickets from $10, Saturday and ongoing. Something Wicked This Way Comes. Watch the Queen Mab players attempt to circumvent fate in Shakespeare's Macbeth in its closing weekend at Limelight Theater. Spoiler alert, fate has a way of winning in the end. The Scottish play, as it's known to the superstitious among us, has a huge cast of characters and epic locations, but the Queen Mab players mount the entire show with just a few actors and minimal staging. Imagination also wins in the end. Check out our Critics Preview and a prior article. Prices start at $20, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Anna Lee Traylor is Emory University's inaugural Emory Arts Fellow in Dance, during which time she has been working with the Emory Dance Company, teaching and creating new work. Her work extends to collaborations with other artists of the community, and this Friday will see the premiere of new choreographic work with professional performers from the community, as well as live sound design by Drew Sensu Weinstein and trumpeter Alexandria Smith, and text by E.E. Williams. Tickets $12, student $8, Friday only. Film and TV. Depending on whom you ask, AI will either save us from ourselves, or it will end the human race. Wherever you fall on that spectrum, you're likely to find food for thought in Emory Cinematics' Spring 2024 AI in Film Series, curated by Associate Professor Gregory Zinman. Unfortunately, the series ends its run next week, but the final entry, Mission Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part One, still offers plenty of thrills. Stick around for Q&A after the screening, free, Wednesday, April 24th only. The 2024 Atlanta Film Festival gets underway next Thursday through May 5th, with the usual plethora of film screens, along with a full agenda of panels, workshops, and conversations as part of the creative conference accompanying the festival. 27 world premieres, contest winters, and more fill out a robust program. The idea of you, in which a 40-year-old single mother sparks an unexpected May-December romance, and Sing Sing, a chronicle of false imprisonment and Sing Sing prison, bracket open and closing nights. Badge prices start at $100, with discounts for Atlanta Film Society members, April 25th through May 5th. Books. By all accounts, Lula Carson Smith, later Carson McCullers, led a tumultuous yet enigmatic writer's life. Mary V. Dearborn's new biography, Carson McCullers, A Life, explores this with new primary documents that have surfaced in the past decade. Dearborn will be on hand to discuss the book next week at the Decatur Library. Even from a region that has produced some of the world's greatest writers, Tennessee Williams, Alice Walker, Flannery O'Connor, McCullers stands out as an uncommonly fascinating decades later. The event is presented by the Georgia Center for the Book, free, Monday only. The Conyers Book Festival celebrates its second year this Saturday, making it officially an annual event. The family-oriented festival includes guest speakers, vendors, author signings, music, and entertainment. As a major filming location for lots of TV shows you have hardly heard of, historic Old Town Conyers is frequently the site of bustling crowds and lots of attention. The one-day event is supported by local businesses and bookstores, price set by individual merchants, Saturday only. The Arts. Rose Library on the campus of Emory University presents a multimedia theatrical interlude next week in celebration of the life and art of Benny Andrews. Benny Andrews, the man from plain view, explores the artist's life incorporating collages of music, images, sound effects, dialogue, and vocal blues riffs according to promotional material. Audiences will be immersed in Andrews' world and see the origins of his views and practices. A discussion follows free with RSVP, Thursday, April 25th only. That was What to See, Do, and Hear, Hawkins HQ, ASO, Bremen Museum, and more by Arts ATL staff. Next, Blind Willie's co-owner Jimmy Spike Maynard looks to retire from Atlanta's famed Blues Club by Jordan Owen. From blue collar grind to slinging shots from New Orleans to Atlanta, Maynard has seen a thing or two and once saved Blind Willie's from imminent closure. Now he's about to close down his own career. Blind Willie's has long been a fixture in the world of Atlanta nightlife. Since 1986, the celebrated blues venue has reigned as an elder statesman quietly holding court among the ever-shifting tastes of Virginia Highlands chic. But for veteran bartender and co-owner Jimmy Spike Maynard, the space is more than just a legendary bar. It's a portal into cherished memories of his home in New Orleans and a nightly altar where customers worship the city's roofy, blues-oriented sound. If blues were international music, everybody would be at peace with everybody, he says. Maynard has been a co-owner since 2011 when the club was facing closure. He and a business partner took ownership stakes in the bar to keep it open. Managing is a stress-free job, but when you manage, own, and book for 13 years, he says, it's time for a change. Now he is looking forward to retirement. Always the amiable everyman, Maynard reflects on a life rooted in one of the South's cultural meccas and his migration to Atlanta with his signature blend of warmth and good cheer. Born seven miles from New Orleans' French Quarter in the small town of Chalmette, Maynard knew early on that the Big Easy would come to define his life. I think my earliest memory is sitting on the trunk of a car watching the parade and having beads thrown at me, he recalls. I cannot imagine being raised somewhere else. Bartending was a welcome relief from the doldrums of the blue-collar grind. My hands were greasy one day from working in a warehouse hydraulic hose shop, he says, and a radio commercial came on about bartending. It's like a paid vacation. But it wasn't exactly. Maynard's new life mixing cocktails and slinging shots in one of the busiest nightlife cities in the country was soon underway, and the pace was relentless. But there were surreal moments. It wasn't uncommon, Maynard says, for police officers on horseback to bring their steeds into his establishment and ride them up to the bar for a handful of soft peppermints. An old photo from his collection shows a horse leaning its head in between bemused patrons at one end of the bar. The 1980s and 90s were halcyon days for the Louisiana native, but shortly after his mother passed away in late 2004, Maynard decided that he and his wife should relocate to the Atlanta area to help take care of her parents. Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, and the Maynards joined the mass exodus made by many of their fellow New Orleans natives. We left on a Sunday, and the water came in on a Monday. My house took on 14 feet of water. With their property submerged, the pair made tracks for Georgia. Like most displaced Louisiana residents, the once deeply entrenched couple struggled to make their new surroundings feel like home. My family history goes back to the late 1800s in the French Quarter on my mother's side, Maynard explains. For generations, he adds, people have resisted leaving because the place has such a spirit to it. Maynard soon found a little slice of New Orleans in his new city when a chance encounter introduced him to Blind Willie's. While working a banquet gig one night, Maynard was paid with a $50 bill, which he reflexively held to the light to check for forgery. The customer turned out to be one of Blind Willie's owners, and he offered Maynard a job. That's all the time we have for this article entitled, Blind Willie's Co-Owner Jimmy Spike Maynard Looks to Retire from Atlanta's Famed Blues Club. That concludes today's MetroArts program, which is brought to you by the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. This has been Kristen Moody for GARS, the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Thank you for listening to GARS.