Atlanta Biennal
August 27, 2016 – December 18, 2016
Atlanta Contemporary presents ATLBNL
On view: August 27 – December 18, 2016
Public Opening: Saturday, August 27, 2016 from 7 – Midnight (in conjunction with ART PARTY*)
ATLANTA — June 21 – Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta Contemporary) is pleased to announce the return of the Atlanta Biennial – an exhibition that will showcase emerging, established, and forgotten artistic practices from around the region of which Atlanta, the “capital of the New South,” professes to be a cultural node.
In 1984, the Whitney Museum’s biennial survey of influential American contemporary art contained work from zero Southern artists. This lead Alan Sondheim, then curator at Atlanta’s Nexus Contemporary, to take matters into his own hands, by creating the first ever Atlanta Biennial as platform for contemporary art emerging from and impacting culture in the southeastern United States. From that first exhibition until its last iteration in 2007, the Biennial exhibited hundreds of artists from throughout the region. Over the course of this 23-year run the exhibition sometimes focused solely on Atlanta-based artists, sometimes on artists from the state of Georgia, and, in several iterations, on an area of artistic production that included the whole of the American South. In 2016, we are waking the Atlanta Biennial from its nine-year slumber.
To continue to add to the dialogues created in Atlanta Biennials past, the 2016 edition will focus on bringing entirely new voices to table: the extraordinary artists exhibiting represent 10 states from across the Southeast – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee – and have never shown in an Atlanta Biennial before.
“After a nine-year slumber,” says Daniel Fuller, curator at Atlanta Contemporary, “it is a pleasure to bring the Atlanta Biennial back to light. On moving to Atlanta, this exhibition allows us to go back to our institution’s roots, while thinking about art from the South in a fresh way. This Biennial is an invitation to engage voices of the south; it is a platform to gather upon.”
The 2016 Atlanta Biennial is organized by the curatorial team of: Victoria Camblin, Editor + Artistic Director, ART PAPERS (Atlanta); Daniel Fuller, Curator, Atlanta Contemporary; Aaron Levi Garvey, Independent Curator and Co-Founder of Long Road Projects (Jacksonville); and Gia Hamilton, Director, Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans).
ART FORUM: Atlanta Biennial Announces List of Participating Artists
TOPICAL CREAM: Meanwhile in Atlanta, A Biennial is Reimagined
