Metro Arts May 24

This program is brought to you by Georgia Radio Reading Service. It discusses photographer Christine Potter's project "Dark Waters," which includes large-scale prints, a video, and a book. The project features portraits of murdered women from historic murder ballads and locations associated with these acts of violence. The work is currently on display at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and in Bentonville, Arkansas. Potter discusses her artistic influences and the use of color in her work. She also talks about the concept behind her studio portraits and the significance of the medium in her book. The interview concludes with a discussion about Potter's collaboration with musicians for an upcoming exhibition. 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, May 24, 2024. 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 Burnaway Publication Online for In Conversation with Christine Potter by Jennifer Dudley. Georgia-raised, Nashville-based photographer Christine Potter's project Dark Waters has borne large-scale photographic prints, a video piece, and a book by the same name published by Aperture in 2023. For eight years in the making, the project reanimates the murdered women from historic murder ballads vis-a-vis studio portraits. These figures are presented alongside images taken in and around the southern locations named for these violent acts, Bloody Fork, Troublesome Creek, Blackwater Swamp. Potter's work is currently on view in Atlanta at High Museum of Arts Exhibition Truth Told Slant and in Bentonville, Arkansas, in a solo exhibition at the momentary Christine Potter Dark Waters. This interview was edited for length and clarity. Jennifer Dudley, I have been lucky enough to see your show at the Institute of Contemporary and Art in Chattanooga back in Christine Potter. 2000 and COVID? JD. Exactly. And the exhibition was black and white, no color. But as soon as I see your new book, Dark Waters, there is this shock of a green cover. And it's amazing. Since then, I've heard you talk about the color of the color in terms of the forest canopy, that green curtain that happens in the landscape. I love that connection. But my initial connection to this gorgeous green curtain was to this Bronzino painting that hangs in the Frick, the portrait of Lodovico Caponi and to Holbein's Ambassadors. There's something very painterly about that cover. But then you open the book and the images are speaking a different language, a photographic language. You have a background in art history. You got a BA in art history at the University of Georgia, along with your BFA in photography. What is your relationship to that painterly language? KP. It's a good question. I actually worked at the Frick for a year. JD. Oh, I had no idea. KP. Yeah, and I had this desk job, digital asset management. I basically was putting metadata on files all day, and it was just mind numbing. So I would leave my desk every day, at least twice, to go roam the Frick and visit my Vermeer, I would say. I love painting, and I love the history of Dutch painting, and I love the portraiture, the lighting that comes from the Dutch masters. I thought a lot about that when I was making the portraits for this work, these stark studio portraits. But in terms of the green, I think of influence as that just all part of the soup. It's like part of my visual language. It's part of what I've studied, or what I have spent my time looking at. When I look at the world photographically, I'm thinking about light and form, not thinking about color. In fact, I find color very distracting, photographically. But the book was an opportunity to make an object, an experience for the viewer. For me, that's where color can become really operative and instructive. The choice of green was to mirror the canopy in a grown-over forest. The kind of dark, dark green that you can encounter, how even if you look at your skin, it's reflecting that green. It covers everything. The color was meant to reference the forest, but the curtain was meant to reference the stage, the performance, so that as you open the book, you understood you are coming into something of a performance. The studio portraits in this work that point directly to a history of performance. J.D., the book has three different kinds of photographs. I found landscape, documentary, photography, and studio portraits. I was especially interested in, well, I don't want to say pulling back the curtain, but KP, you have a good pun, J.D. But I was curious about that process, curious about your distance from the South and leaving Brooklyn where you had been for 10 years at that point, KP, 13 years, J.D. You were living in Brooklyn for 13 years, but leaving to photograph the southern landscape, then coming back and doing the studio portraits in Brooklyn. How did that distance from the South affect the way that you then kind of crafted the earliest versions of the studio portraits, KP? The concept for the studio portraits was always meant to be what I call a psychic space, so not real space, not real place. They were meant to represent the ideas in the mind, so they're not situated in the South. I am so interested in place and place geographically as much as place culturally, but for the studio portraits, well, I thought I was crazy for making them because I'm not that kind of photographer, right? But I really wanted to see them, J.D., and what is that kind of photographer, KP? I work in the world. I always thought my job is to be in the world and to make sense of it with the camera. I've always been taught that the world is more interesting than anything you could come up with in your own mind, and I believe that to a large extent, I really do. But I was struggling with the question of how do I represent what's in my mind? How do I represent my mental or psychic preoccupations if I'm not seeing it in the world? Or if what I'm negotiating when I'm making work in the world are these thoughts in my mind? For this work, the thoughts were about vulnerability, about being alone in the world, being alone and encountering someone in the forest or whatever. Those preoccupations color the way I move through space. They affect what I feel like I can accomplish in the world sometimes. How do I make pictures about that? So yeah, they needed to be built. I don't think of them as southern, and I don't think of them as connected to the south or place. That's expressly why they have a black, endless space to them. J.D., when you open the Dark Waters book, the first images, The Medium, 2017, it hints that it's through her that we see the images. We enter the book through the medium. What is your interest in the medium as it relates to the oracle of Greek mythology? KP, I don't know if I've thought about it mythologically. I do think a lot about a sixth sense and intuition. I think it's a very close to true statement that every time I have ignored my sixth sense, I've gotten in trouble. One of the things we learn as we age is to trust that instinct, to not fight it. Call it spidey sense. Call it whatever you want. The medium is being able to hear yourself clearly. J.D., I was thinking about representations of women who've held power, like the medium. I'm reminded of how women who have held power or owned property would be accused of witchcraft. I'm wondering about the medium's relationship to the witch as having some extra intuitive powers. KP, yeah, women's power has always been vilified by men in whatever way, and sometimes also by women who can't escape a patriarchal mindset. It's not surprising that we are groomed to move away from those powers. It makes perfect sense that in this society, this wouldn't be encouraged or broadly accepted. That's not frou-frou ideas. That's something real. I mean, that's cyclical, and I don't mean to be cynical. I just think we live in a society that disempowers women in all kinds of ways. J.D., yeah, that could be perceived as cynical, but when I hear this, I just feel that you're speaking the truth. Thinking about women artists, the success of women artists, and how that can be played as troublesome to the patriarchy, there is a connection between the troublesome women in the murder ballads referenced in this body of work and you as an artist. You are generative, creating voice. You're getting ready for a large exhibition at the Momentary at Crystal Bridges, and you're collaborating with musicians. How is that going? KP, it's so fun. I'm collaborating with Heather McIntosh, someone we both know from Athens, Georgia, who now is living in L.A., doing all kinds of amazing things. I'm trying to think of when I started this conversation with her. I knew the Momentary would be the place just because it is an institution that's so interested in multimedia experiences. I thought, well, I already have a video component. It's these men singing murder ballads, and that's meant to stick in your mind when you move through the photograph. But I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to give women voice and to build some soundtrack built entirely of women's voices and bodies, as it turns out? What I've always known about Heather, since we worked in Dixie Blood Mustache a million years ago, was that she's interested in thinking outside of the box with experimental music ideas. She's hired in some amazing singers and has just done some interesting things rhythmically with clapping and humming and breathing. I think we are trying to create something that might blow by like the wind. It will move directionally through the space. It will be gone just as soon as it was there. It's a new way of thinking about making. It's a new way of accompanying the photographs that I'm excited and nervous about. I want to get it right. JD, I'm thinking of other photographers from the past that have had so-called soundtracks. Someone like Nan Golden. Are there other photographers that you're thinking about as you approach the sonic component? KP, no, I'm not. I feel rudderless in this idea. Nan, whose work I really admire, was using Bjork and before that, New Wave, songs that were of a generation, songs that had narrative components to them that you knew that you could sing. I'm creating something much more abstract. I wouldn't even call it musical, although it has a musicality, I suppose. It's more of an abstract sound environment, like this ephemeral wave just washed over you and left. JD, you spoke previously about photographing these dark, lush landscapes so that every detail is in focus and discernible. It's not just a technical prowess. It's from a drive to see into the distance, to know what's behind the forest canopy, behind the curtain, to be safe, to have a map. KP, yeah, at the end of the day, I would like to think I'm kind of a photographer's photographer. I'm interested in describing the world. I'm interested in how tools affect the way I can see the world. When I came to photograph the South, I wanted to work in this lower tonal range, to talk about darkness, talk about the effect of darkness. And I didn't want it to be obscured, so I had to change my tools, to use tools that allowed me to work faster, to be more agile, and to describe darkness. I'm not interested in describing the South as this hazy, obscured place. I think the most mysterious thing is a well-described place. That's where I enter the landscape, not trying to be mysterious through omission, but to be mysterious, if that's the right word, through description. JD, it also makes me think, again, of different outcomes. The history of the South has been told so frequently that way, by obscuring or by omission. KP, especially photography. And I can appreciate that history, but if I'm going to pull a chair up to the table of art history, what's my contribution? It can't be just what she said, right? This certainly feels like a space where I could contribute something that feels different, that feels specific. Truth Told Slant is on view at the High Museum of Art Atlanta through August 11th. Christine Potter, Dark Waters is on view at the Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas, through October 13th. That was In Conversation with Christine Potter, by Jennifer Dudley, from the Burnaway Publication. Next, we move to the Atlanta Magazine online for One City, Three Ways, Charleston, South Carolina. Explore architectural highlights, Black history, and top dining spots along the palmetto-lined streets of the Holy City, by Emma Hunt. Charleston's palmetto-lined cobblestone roads and distinctive southern charm have long captivated visitors. Outstanding restaurants and cozy galleries tempt on every block, and picturesque architecture abounds, from the original brick structures lining the business district to the pastel homes with their breezy piazzas and hidden gardens. It's easy to walk these enchanting coastal streets, looking, but not really seeing. There's more here than meets the eye, and you'd do yourself a disservice to not dig deep into the Black history that touches every aspect of Charleston, the largest point of entry for the slave trade from 1670 to 1808. African-American influence extends to the historic buildings, many of which were constructed by enslaved laborers, and the cuisine, which draws inspiration from Gullah Geechee tradition. Charleston is lovely, made even lovelier with an effort to see the bigger picture. Here are three ways to approach your next visit. Antiques and architecture. Stay. Occupying a set of 1780s auction houses, the Vendue comprises two distinct accommodations that both feel like museums. It was Charleston's first art hotel, after all. The namesake Vendue offers eccentric fun with an eclectically decorated lobby and popular rooftop bar, while the Enclave across the street has a cozy, intimate feel with exposed brick and original beams. Collect. Charleston has some of the best antiquing in the country, but where to begin? Start a few steps off King Street, the main shopping thoroughfare at David Skinner Antiques, which specializes in intricate period lighting, including rare chandeliers that go for upwards of $250,000. Down the road, Tucker Payne Antiques is a treasure trove of vintage furniture, figurines, and decor. Get educated. In a city replete with home tours, a visit to the Aiken Rethouse Museum is a trust. Everything from the paint and flooring to the furniture is original and preserved as found rather than restored. The enslaved people who once lived here take center stage as understanding their stories is key to the home's history. Stroll. You're always mere steps away from stunning architecture in Charleston. Join a guided walking tour, Bulldog Tours offers many, to hit the highlights, including Rainbow Row, St. Michael's Church, and some of the historic antebellum mansions. Seek out. Much of Charleston's wrought iron gates, balconies, and railings can be attributed to one master blacksmith, the late Philip Simmons. His legacy lives on in more than 600 pieces around the city, including the Double Heart Gate at St. John Reformed Episcopal. Tour his house and the studio where he worked from the 1930s until 2005 at the Philip Simmons Museum Home and Workshop. Black History. Take home. Pick up a handwoven sweetgrass basket, a quintessential Holy City souvenir, at Charleston City Market, which features more than 50 resident Gullah artists in addition to dozens of other vendors. The baskets represent generations of tradition tied to West African culture. Engage. Located on Gadsden's Wharf, once the largest slave point in the country, the new International African-American Museum offers perspectives on the African-American experience from the 1600s to today, interspersed with modern art. The museum invites visitors to tell their story in sound booths and offers genealogical resources for black Americans to trace their roots. Feed the Soul. A hearty meal of fried chicken, red rice, cornbread, and several other rotating daily sides is worth the slight detour north to Bertha's Kitchen. The family-owned Hole in the Wall is a locally loved soul food institution with national acclaim. It won a James Beard Classic Award in 2017. Don't skip the signature okra soup. Honor. McLeod Plantation Site. On nearby James Island, McLeod Plantation Historic Site is one of two plantation sites in the country focused entirely on the enslaved laborers who lived there. Take a guided tour for the most instructive and impactful experience. Stops include original preserved cabins, a cotton gin house, and a rare burial site where indigenous people were laid to rest with both Gullah and white people. Pay Respect. Founded in 1816 and often called Mother Emanuel, the Emanuel AME Church is the South's oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church. Guided tours share its complicated but important history, from serving as a gathering place for civil rights activists, including MLK and Booker T. Washington, to being the site of a devastating racially motivated massacre in 2015. Culinary Gems. Slurp. Oysters are a must when you're on the coast, and Leon's Oyster Shop is an ideal spot to indulge in the briny delicacy. Start with a dozen raw, feast on fried chicken as your main, and finish with a cup of sprinkle-topped soft serve. The recommended sip, a frozen gin and tonic, the house specialty. Book Ahead. Reserve a table well in advance at FIG, aka Food is Good, a three-times James Beard Award winner that helped establish the city as a dining destination. The menu rotates seasonally, but a few stables remain, including the Boya Base and Ricotta Gnocchi with Lamb Bolognese. Chow Down. Make your way to Lewis Barbecue before it opens at 11 a.m., or plan to wait in line. This Texas-style barbecue joint always draws a crowd. All the meat is cooked in custom smokers, welded by pit master John Lewis himself. And if you're all about the sides, don't miss the Green Chili Corn Pudding. Mix it up. Sure, Charleston is known for seafood and southern cuisine, but surprise your palate at Pink Bellies, a bright, chic Vietnamese-American spot serving dumplings, noodles, and burgers with an Asian twist that pairs perfectly with experimental cocktails, such as the Pho Cocktail, made with pho syrup, fish sauce, gin, lime, and sriracha. Try It All. You never know what you're going to get at Chez Nou, an inventive French fine dining spot tucked away into a cozy 1835 home. Chef Jill Mathias changes the lunch and dinner menus every single day and offers just two appetizers, entrees, and desserts. Follow your server's suggestion and order one of each to share with your dining companion. That was One City, Three Ways, Charleston, South Carolina, by Emma Hunt. Next, we move to Using Rap Songs as Evidence in Criminal Cases Can Miss the Punchline. Should an artist's words be used against them, Soul Food Cipher's Executive Director examines the issue of using rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials, by Alex Acosta. My favorite part of a rap record is a good punchline. The best punches catches you off guard, leaving you laughing or crying so much that you literally feel like you've been punched in the gut. I love that even after 12 years of serving as the founding Executive Director of Soul Food Cipher, a nonprofit that connects and builds communities through freestyle rap, I still get this feeling. Rappers are more than entertainers. They are artists who can paint a picture with just words. I've met rappers who paint with light, like Ansel Adams, showcasing the beauty of their landscapes in photographic detail. I've met others who paint with shadow, depicting their struggles and traumas with dark hues, like the tar in a Theaster Gates painting. Rappers give voice to the Black experience and intimately express the dualities, or as W.E.B. Du Bois puts it, the double consciousness of being a Black American. Rap music is a uniquely Black art form, and its proliferation is intricately linked with the freedom of speech that the First Amendment protects. For a people who have had everything stolen, language, culture, freedom, this ability to express ourselves has been crucial to our identity, survival, and liberation. That is why I am deeply troubled by the implications of the use of this art form as evidence in criminal trials. Equally troubling is how these guaranteed freedoms can exploit for financial gain the very same communities and craft I care so deeply about. The two sides of this proverbial coin are symbolic of the double consciousness rappers face. The justice system, like the entertainment industry, can be a dirty game. Winners and losers can be decided as if by the flip of a coin. So your call, heads or tails. Painted as the better head of a criminal enterprise by prosecutors, Jeffrey Lamar Williams, better known as Atlanta rapper Young Thug, and 28 other individuals associated with the YSL label, or gang, depending on whom you ask, are on trial after a RICO indictment that includes charges of murder. Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville ruled that Young Thug's rap lyrics could be used as evidence. In the hip-hop community, this decision was deeply alarming. The use of rap lyrics in court cases has historically leaned on stereotypes, biases, and racism. Rarely does the jury selected represent true peers. If the jury cannot contextualize the art form and culture, they miss the punchline, and the emcee is left down for the count. For rap artist Mac Phipps, it was 30 years. Back in the 1990s, Phipps was an up-and-coming rapper. On February 21, 2000, he was scheduled to perform at a concert in Louisiana. Prior to the start, a fight broke out, and a man was killed. A security guard confessed to mistakenly shooting the victim in self-defense, yet Phipps was still tried for murder. Although the prosecutors weren't able to provide physical evidence, the judge allowed Phipps' song, Murder, Murder, Kill, Kill, to be used in the trial. The all-white jury convicted Phipps of manslaughter. In 2021, Phipps was granted clemency by then Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, but only after he'd served more than 20 years for a crime he did not commit. One of the great ironies of this case was that Phipps did not originally record hyperviolent material. He had only recently changed his subject matter and image to increase his marketing appeal. This fact brings up the troubling flip side of the coin and exposes some uncomfortable truths. Russ, another rapper who launched out of Atlanta and who identifies as white, said in an interview on the Flagrant podcast, What I think people should really be looking into is white people's fascination with black trauma. Rappers are the new action heroes to white people. But to black America, rappers are speaking to their trauma, and it lands for them. The main consumer, the main ticket buyer of rap, is a white boy. They are there not because the content lands. They're there because they get to watch John Wick up close. Meanwhile, John Wick is on stage saying, this is real trauma. The whole attractiveness of rap is that it is real. On social media platforms, rap conflict and rappers' deaths have become gamified. In fact, there is an entire cottage industry devoted to covering the deadly conflicts of drill rap. Drill rappers have made music broadcasting their gang affiliations and literal exploits and even mocked the deaths of their rivals on record, which ultimately leads to more violence. In the same interview, Russ states, white people are fascinated with black trauma because it's exciting to them, because it's over there. They can get close enough to experience it, but when it gets a little bit too real, they go home. They can participate from a distance. This hits on the fact that much of this content is exploited for profit by bloggers who can commentate from the safety of their digital devices. In this dynamic, rappers have become like avatars or video game characters, but these are real black lives lost. Most of them are from the most vulnerable parts of society and victims of systemic oppression that keeps these vicious cycles in places. While I don't believe lyrics should be the sole evidence in a case such as the FIPS prosecution, there are some rappers who will rap about literal violence, and that is egregious. In those cases, prosecutors should still rely not just on their lyrics, but on other evidence, especially physical. U.S. Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia's 4th Congressional District is one of the main sponsors of a proposed law that would bar the use of lyrics in federal criminal and civil cases unless it can be shown that the artistic expression was intended to be taken as truth. I am a believer in the power of words and speech. I believe rappers should take accountability for their lyrics. Two of Soul Food Cipher's core values are respect and responsibility. MCs do bear responsibility for their words and actions. This does not mean, however, that their words should be used to paint a picture of them out of context. Every rapper's lyrics should be cross-examined with empathy to explore this country's inequities and examine the real disparities that exist. We live in a country, however, where rap lyrics are used to prosecute individuals, rather than examine the systems of oppression. We live in a society where it's more profitable to feed the prison-industrial complex than to create more equitable communities. We live in a society that proliferates violent rap music to justify the policing of black bodies and the inhumane treatment of black people for centuries, rather than addressing its cognitive dissonance that the Declaration of Independence, which says that all men are created equal, was written by enslavers. But rappers are all too familiar with the double consciousness and the immortal words of a bankhead prophet, Shawty Lo, well, god damn, it must be two sides. That was Using Rap Songs as Evidence in Criminal Cases Can Miss the Punchline by Alex Acosta. Next we move to the Arts ATL publication online for Jin Jin Li Captures Fleeting Friendships in a Temporary Place by Andrew Alexander. We sought refuge in our apartments, artist Jin Jin Li tells us of herself and her friends, a group of young Chinese women who temporarily lived in Atlanta as international students during the period of about 2022 to 2024. Such self-imposed isolation, mentioned briefly in the wall text of her show In Her Company at Mint Gallery through June 1, hardly seems like the optimal starting point for creating great work. It runs slightly counter to our convictions that artists should be bold and art should be exploratory. Nonetheless, in this scad MFA thesis show, it becomes a peculiarly compelling vantage for a strong and moving series of photographs. Li's reasons for seeking refuge aren't mentioned in the text, and they're not centered in the images, but the context looms large nonetheless. The context is large for one thing, and for another, it belongs to the viewer as much as it does to her. Atlanta is a violent city, and our country is so beset by political and cultural risks at this point that there is increasingly plausible speculation of potential turns to fascism and civil war. Weighing particularly heavy here is an event that occurred shortly before Li's arrival, and to which no doubt factors into her view of the city. In 2021, a conservative religious maniac targeted Asian women in the Atlanta area during a shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of eight people. All times are difficult, the context is always terrible, but it's fair to say the current time is particularly fraught. In a series of somber portraits, she presents her subject with a raw, crystalline immediacy, capturing their physical bodies in environments where their presence seems somehow transitory, ghost-like, and ephemeral, a notion made more literal with the occasional use of double exposure. Situating landmarks and other such characteristic details are all but excluded, as are dramatic action and even facial expression. In the show's central series of portraits, Li captures her friends in isolated contemplative moments, whether singly, in pairs, or in small groups. Portraits are most often shot against the poignantly nondescript background of temporary apartment homes in Atlanta, but also in places around the city that are most haunting in their unexceptionality and alienating anonymity, teen-like fences, brick walls, barren winter branches. There is one tender scene of escape. A large photograph shows an improvised, desultory picnic on the disappointingly humdrum shore of a lake outside the city. The work's title, Stop and Look at Me, carries both an invitation, the point of a photograph after all is stopping and looking at its subjects, and a note of exasperation. The displaced subjects, possibly exhausted by their status as perceived outsiders, have sought refuge in a place where remoteness guarantees few people can either stop or look. The same lake, tellingly, becomes the abstract, epic background for a touchingly intimate moment in another larger work, Blue Embrace. In a series of accompanying still lifes and manscapes, Li's eye seeks out and finds things remarkable, almost mysterious and mythic, in their bleak mundanity and inconsequentiality. The back of a plastic chair, the utility worker's spray-painted arrow pointing to a seemingly ordinary stretch of gutter and sidewalk, some crumbling plaster next to a metal and concrete barrier pole. The backgrounds suggest an inscrutable, uninviting, creepily vacant place where the talismans, and stuffed animals, and enormous, so-cute keychains seem especially pathetic and ineffective. Friendship is the lifeblood here. It's a subject rarely depicted in contemporary art, and it's all the more moving for that. With an impressive balance of tenderness and sharp-sightedness, she renders friendships fragility, its transience, its solace, even its insufficiencies, but primarily its ultimate necessity. That was Jin Jin Li Captures a Fleeting Friendship in a Temporary Place, by Andrew Alexander. Next review, Albie's Wolf Reveals Cruelty Under Polite Illusions, by Denise K. James. In 2005, American playwright Edward Albie told interviewer Jeffrey Brown that the purpose of serious theater has always been to hold a mirror up to people. Now audiences might see themselves inside a production of Albie's Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf on stage through June 9th at Theatrical Outfit. The classic play made its Broadway debut at Billy Rose Theater in 1962, depicting two married couples struggling with, as protagonist George puts it, truth and illusion. But how many layers of illusion must we remove to reveal the truth? As the play begins, we observe George, Steve Coulter, and Martha, Tess Malice Minkade, who return from a cocktail party at 2 a.m., oddly late for a middle-aged couple leaving a work party, alerting us of the strangeness to come. Sure enough, Martha has invited a young couple, at the suggestion of her father, the college president, to drop by for a nightcap, despite the hour. George and Martha seem unhappy, nitpicking at each other to the point of cruelty. By the time Nick, Justin Walker, and his wife, Honey, Devon Hales, ring the doorbell, tension is mounted. It seems unlikely the couple will stay, given the odd environment, yet they do. At first, Nick and Honey seem to be the opposite of George and Martha. Unlike George, who is mowed over by Martha's nasty attitude and emasculating comments, Nick is a prototypical manly man, attractive, self-assured, and in charge of his lady. He's a new professor in the college's biology department, working on research projects which make George, a professor of history, uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Martha, who is overbearing and tasteless, contrasts with politely meek Honey. But as the night unravels, similarities emerge. Both couples deal with expectations. Nick and Honey's families have known each other and predicted marriage since their childbirth. Martha and her father pressure George to become more academically ambitious. As the drinks continue to pour, discontentment with life spills from the older couple to the younger. Coulter embodies George, who pivots between being the foolish butt of his wife's jokes and a knowing host with a secret upper hand. Along with Kincade's Martha, the couple evokes amusement, disgust, and finally pity. Meanwhile, Walker and Hales are a well-cast match. And once Nick and Honey devolve into a chaotic mess, the actors are up to the challenge. Of particular note is Hales, whose emotive expressions and movements are a highlight as things get crazier. Much happens offstage in this production. Honey's repetitive illness in the powder room, Martha's and Nick's kitchen shenanigans. But with the direction of artistic director Matt Turney, it's tough to feel left out or clueless as to what is happening. For the duration of all three acts, we are part of this party. Patrons even joked in the lobby that they craved their own cocktail while watching George tend par on stage. Certain aha moments in which the audience thinks they have discovered the play's point arise throughout act two and act three. To Albie's credit and to the credit of the cast, any of our hypotheses seem to work until they don't. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf offers the audience a thousand-piece puzzle and doesn't stop taking pieces away. Soon, there's nothing left. The play's title refers to Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf from Disney's 1933 cartoon Three Little Pigs and serves as animal symbolism, though it is unclear why George and Martha have rewritten it to refer to the author Virginia Woolf. In addition to a wolf, a small rodent pervades the narrative. George describes his father-in-law as a mouse with red eyes. Nick calls his wife a church mouse. However, the shocking ending shows Martha formerly a wolf, now a mouse at the mercy of George, who has reminded her that even illusions must have rules. As we watch George comfort his wife, he sings, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And she tearfully answers, I am. Without her illusions, Martha feels eaten alive, reduced to nothingness. Albie's play was awarded a Tony in 1963, the year following its Broadway debut, and stagings of Wolf continue. At its core, this is a story about the delicate nature of appearances, a timeless theme inside a beautiful mid-century rapper created in this case by scene designers Isabelle and Mariah Curley Clay, set director Caroline Cook, and lighting designer Ben Rawson. A production done this well requires the best of all elements, genius writing, a talented cast, and a hardworking creative team. As with any art form, both the idea and execution must be flawless. Theatrical outfits production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an artful staging, inviting us to look closely at ourselves. That was Review. Albie's Wolf Reveals Cruelty Under Polite Illusions by Denise K. James. Next, What to See, Do, and Hear, Puppetry Arts, Hell Hotel, Jazz Fest, and More by Arts ATL staff. Theater. The Puppet and its Double Theater of Taiwan creates innovative puppet arts events based on the idea that everything can be a puppet. In their latest outing with the Center for Puppetry Arts this Friday through Sunday, the group will present The Selfish Giant, Oscar Wilde's tale of a giant who learns about the true meaning of friendship and generosity through the innocence of children. An opening reception on Friday features Taiwanese treats and a first look at a new Taiwanese pop-up exhibition at the Center. Tickets are $27 for members, $30 for non-members, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Edward Albie's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a masterwork in the depiction of the terrifying cruelties we can visit upon those closest to us. Theatrical Outfit lays these bare and its production running through June 9th. Check out senior editor Denise K. James' review of the play where she says of the production that it offers the audience a thousand-piece puzzle and doesn't stop taking pieces away. Tickets start at $15, ongoing. You can watch theater, or you can become a part of it, with One Night at the Hell Hotel, a nerdy burlesque and sing-along for has-beens. The speakeasy and burlesque show will transform the Pig Gale at the underground Atlanta into a gorgeous seedy lounge environment, reminiscent of Belle Epoque-era Paris or Vienna. Patrons are encouraged to dress the part for this show, described as fan-driven IRL fan fiction fever dream. As part of syndicated New York radio show The Breakfast Club, Charlemagne the God has dubbed himself Prime Minister of Pissing People Off, the architect of aggravation and the ruler of rubbing people the wrong way. The impresario of nerve-touching will be at Eagle Eye Bookshop next Thursday to discuss his new book, Get Honest or Die Lying, Why Small Talk Sucks. In conversation with Ms. Basketball, Christina Granville, Charlemagne expounds on why a lack of meaningful conversation leads to division, unhappiness, and dissatisfaction. Tickets are $33.99. That's Thursday, May 30th only. Music The Atlanta Jazz Festival is one of the signature jazz events not only in the region, but indeed the world. Across three days, Saturday through Monday, 15 artists from the traditional to the cutting edge will perform at Piedmont Park. Cecile McLaurin-Salvant, Paquito de Rivera, Butcher Brown, and many others will grace the Midtown stage, including a hum-cumming of sorts for Andre Benamon, whose 2023 instrumental song, I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a Rap Album, but this is literally the way the wind blew me this time, holds the record as the longest song to hit the Billboard Hot 100. Free. Saturday, Sunday, Monday. If you've ever wondered what sorts of altered mental states are possible if you cross the Grateful Dead with Pink Floyd, find out at Dark Side of the Dead at Terminal West at King Plow Art Center in West Midtown this Sunday. This show is the brainchild of Cosmic Charlie, an Athens-originated band known for putting its own high-energy spin on Grateful Dead tunes. Dark Side of the Dead will feature a complete performance of Dark Side of the Moon, bookended by Dead favorites. Tickets start at $29, Sunday only. Dance Continuing its foray into the intersection of dance and film, Core Dance presents the Encore Dance on Film 2024 Showcase. Streamed on the windows of the Core Dance studios in Decatur Square, these films will explore screen dance, dance made exclusively as performance, for a camera as an art form. This year's showcase includes artists representing Canada, the UK, Austria, Iran, and several other countries. Free. Ongoing. Film in TV The 2004-2005 rom-com Saving Face was way ahead of its time in its depiction of a Chinese-American lesbian, destined for a happy ending. Witness the groundbreaking film, directed by Alice Wu, which finds not only the central character of Will, played by Michelle Krusek, keeping secrets from her traditional mother, Joan Chen, but the mother also harboring a secret of her own. The film, brought to audiences by Wussie Mag, will screen at the Terra Theatre night, May 23rd only. Tickets are $16 with discounts available. Thursday only. L.D.O.D. was formally organized in 2000 with a mission to perform screen-accurate productions of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the Atlanta area for young adults aged 17 to 29. The cast strives to embody values such as inclusiveness, artistry, self-love, and fun as they invite anyone to join in the fun at the Plaza Theatre Fridays starting this week and continuing throughout the summer. Tickets are $16 with discounts available. Friday and ongoing. Art and Design Closing weekend, Atlanta art scene fixture Tom's Orilly brings cats to Decatur. Depicting whimsical and hallucinatory felines, Return to Catlandia features more than 20 paintings, ceramics, and collages that channel the purported inner lives of the Orilly's cats, Joey and Petey. The Orilly has a storied career in Atlanta, including managing a gallery and art venue and becoming a foremost documenter of roadside memorials. The show runs through Sunday at the Decatur Arts Alliance Gallery, free through Sunday. Smashing up alien-esque space forms and otherworldly deep-sea organisms, Emily LaMazele's Merc Materia at Mint Gallery boldly goes where no terrestrial sculpture has gone before. The artist has been the recipient of the Emerging Artist Award from the Atlanta Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs, as well as an Idea Capital grant. Her current gallery exhibition running through June 1st takes its name from an epic poem by Swedish writer Asse Berg, which is described as a post-cataclysmic parable in which the narrator witnesses the slow drip of mutation and evolution toward a new order of biology post-radiation and climate disaster, free through June 1st. That was What to See, Do, and Hear, Puppetry Arts, Hell Hotel, Jazz Fest, and More by Arts ATL staff. Next, Michael David Reflects on Friends at Johnson Low by Deanna Serlin. When an artist pays homage to his influences in Friends and his own work, the result can be meaningful. In several of Michael David's works made with a substrate of wood panels supporting shattered black mirrors, his content seems to be referencing his artistic heroes, perhaps including Captain Beefheart, the cover of whose 1971 album Mirror Man, designed by Michael Mandel, depicts a shattered mirror in a frame. The glorious darkness of David's works make them all venitus of one sort or another. The aging artist asks the viewer to reflect on the ephemeral nature of life and to consider that we are only on this earth for a fleeting moment. David has contemplated the great masters of painting in his own work for decades. His early work was figurative. In his exhibition Requiem for a Gangster at the Ursweil Lowe Gallery in 2007, David presented a suite of paintings that contemplated death and machismo through post-modern re-workings of the figure of the matador in Edward Manet's The Dead Man, also known as Death of a Bullfighter in 1864, and David's Au Voir as well as the artist's fixation on death. David's ongoing dialogue with other artists through layered references and his preoccupation with death as a theme both reappear in his current show, Nighttime with Dreams and Mirrors at Johnson Lowe Gallery through June 28th. No Regrets for Johns and Mapplethorpe, 2024 is elegant, a shattered mirror lies just at the center top of the panel in an image that resembles a skull. The skull might be a simple image, but David's art, historical, and personal references add a layer of meaning. Robert Mapplethorpe is known for his black and white photographic portraits, particularly his self-portrait, 1988, which he made a year before his death from complications of HIV AIDS at the age of 42. In this self-portrait, we see only the artist's face and a hand. Mapplethorpe, holding a walking stick with a small skull on top, dissolves into the darkness of the richest black. David also uses a walking stick as he is mobility impaired, an injury related to his work was encaustic. David's title also refers to the exhibition Jasper Johns, Regrets at MoMA in 2014, which was itself an instant of an artist thinking about another artist. Johns found in an auction catalog a photograph of the painter Lucian Freud by John Deacon that was commissioned by Francis Bacon to use as the basis for painting. The photo of Freud was folded and scarred by Bacon as he used it, and this version of it bearing the marks of Bacon's process inspired the Johns exhibition. By titling the work for these other artists, David adds another link to this referential chain and reimagines Mapplethorpe's memento mori. In the adjoining rooms of the Johnson Lowe Gallery is an exhibition by David's close friend, artist Judy Pfaff, which includes a grid of drawings in black and white oil stick and encaustic on vintage paper. There are close up views of sunflowers simply titled Michael and another lovely moment of connection and understanding between artists. David's process of making these works is revealing. He attaches black mirrors to wood panels, then shatters the mirrors in particular parts of the panel, sometimes at just one point. One can imagine the artist purposefully choosing where his hammer will make impact, attempting to achieve control over the uncontrollable. The fractures and shards are then reinforced with resin and adorned with small bits of color made with acrylic paint. In considering David's process and choice of medium, one might also reflect on Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, even The Large Glass, made from 1915 and worked on until 1923. In 1927, Duchamp's work was shattered in transit. In 1936, the artist restored The Large Glass by reconnecting the shards. Duchamp declared in 1954 that the cracks improved the composition. David's work, however, is an expressionistic and lacks the intellectual detachment of Duchamp. Consider, for example, that David may see himself in the mirrored glass as he shatters it in a highly personal encounter with the boundary between past and present. Nevertheless, it is clear that David's historical references are not accidental. Through them, David aligns his work with the modernist canon. Saint Sebastian, 2024, is a vertical work composed of two equal square panels on top of one another, a double square. Van Gogh used this proportion in almost all of his last paintings, albeit in a horizontal format. In Saint Sebastian, David emphasizes the division of the double square as the top panel is black with shattered glass placed with the delicacy of a mosaic. And the bottom panel contains a silver splintered mirror with small amounts of rose acrylic paint and a burnt umber colored stain. The title of the work refers to the saint who was tied to a tree and shot with arrows. Three other works titled The Heavens Above and the Earth Below, 1, 2, 3, 2024, all seem to be lamentations, perhaps reflecting the way the last few years have been such a time of sadness and grief for so many. These three panels are caked with paint and tar paper, their patina on more concrete than mirror surface, which is somewhere buried underneath the artist's reflection. In Night Time with Dreams and Mirrors, David uses black mirrors as he would have used in caustic paint a decade ago. The surfaces are complex. They call up Aztec cosmology, where black mirrors are used symbolically both to communicate with the dead and to change the present for the living. Black mirrors are also credited with revealing secret knowledge. David's dark mirrors seamlessly embody beauty, grief, and the temporal. As an artist, David is a kind of sorcerer. His materials are the symbolic making of his brew. That was Michael David Reflects on Friends at Johnson Low by Deanna Serlin. Next up, Marika Foster's children's book, Pokes at Gender Norms by Januta Petrus. Marika Foster's Leo and the Pink Marker, Peachtree Publishing 2024, takes young readers on a journey of the life-changing magic of color in a drab world. In its pages, we feel the dimensions of color psychology activate in the hands of a small black boy in the junkyard owned and operated by his white mom and East Asian mama. Like many kids, he finds himself at his parents' job, left to entertain himself with little else besides a few sorted materials and his own imagination. The circumstances of solitude and boredom lead Leo to an innovation of play that entertains and helps him transform the world around him. Leo sighed. Mom and mama had told him to play quietly while they worked all afternoon. He grabbed his favorite pink marker and started coloring. He begins with his coloring book and, enamored at the transformative of his pink marker on the pages, he feels inspired to reimagine the gray and drab world of the junkyard around him and does so, pinking one item at a time. The boy begins to paint the town pink, as it were, and feels a deep satisfaction with the way his pink marker can soften the landscape of this marooned afternoon in the junkyard. Leo's love of the color pink and his enthusiasm of his marker's ability to change all that's around him to a blush of sweetness speaks to the power of color and the sacredness of finding your favorite one. He gets so carried away with the power of pink in his palm, it's only after he makes a blush majesty of his world does he consider whether he should have asked permission. The story offers a glorious plot twist to what the reader might expect when a child decides to make art in his mundane surroundings. And yet Leo's favorite color isn't just any color, but a color with fraught cultural definitions in our recent history. Pink is a color that, as pale as it can be, is not neutral in society and is meant to stay in its place, specifically at an arm's length from masculinity. It is a color that is associated with the soft and feminine. Even before a child enters the planet, if they are to be assigned female at birth, pink is the color that is used to say, it's a girl. The color pink is typically read as highly gendered, and the roots of its association with femininity begin where a lot of phenomena begin, capitalism. Post World War II, this bright color became more gender coded than ever, writes trend consultant Sam Trotman, largely due to the fact that corporations began marketing the color as a symbol of hyper femininity, which would cement the pink for girls, blue for boys stereotype. Reading Leo in the pink marker makes me think of another black man who loved the color pink, Cam'ron. The Harlem rapper shook the hip hop world by wearing a bubblegum pink preferred jacket with a matching fur hat to Fashion Week in 2002. In a rap game that had been largely associated with a variety of hyper masculinity that was also architectured by the flattening greed of the record industry, Cam'ron adored himself in a furry pink softness, unapologetically. Some tastemakers were aghast that a rapper would wear the color pink, and not just once, and not just one piece, but from head to toe as a brand. Soon, all over Harlem and worldwide, we saw cisgendered, heterosexual black men rocking pink polos, button ups, hoodies, and fitted caps with no concern for being judged. Cam'ron's pink boldness gave him the permission. Cam'ron, like Leo, drew outside of the lines of what was expected of him as a young black man and asserted that he contained creative multitudes that could not be repressed, but instead needed space to blossom in a vibrant, rosy blush hue. That's all the time we have for this article, entitled, Marika Foster's Children's Book Pokes at Gender Norms, by Januta Petras. That concludes today's Metro Arts 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.