Cullum’s Notebook: Atlanta’s art spaces are awash with color this spring

Many Atlanta art spaces this April are drenched in the saturated colors of spring. Cooper & Corfer’s photo-based collages at Jackson Fine Art’s expansive new gallery got me thinking about this, along with the Fernbank Museum of Natural History’s educational show The Nature of Color. On display through May 7, the latter is all about the functions of colors in culture and nature, including the symbolic meanings of red and its relative, pink.

A surprising number of galleries are exhibiting works in which color is deployed for its own sake. Tew Galleries, for instance, has a group show called The Mechanics of Color (through April 22) in which the many uses of color is the only unifying theme.

So too Spalding Nix Fine Art with Perspectives + Perceptions (through May 5) and Thomas Deans Fine Art, with a colorful, untitled group show alongside Jeni Stallings’ Life Is But a Dream (through April 15.) Stallings brings a visionary sensibility to swimming-pool symbolism.

The same could be said of the paintings and sculptures by Ashlynn Browning, Austin Ballard, Casey McGuire and Alice Serres at Whitespace/Shedspace/Whitespec through April 22, but with the significant addition of unusual geometries. This makes the works far more multilayered than the simple compositions in which color dominates and which are wrongly categorized as decorative.

In Cooper & Corfer’s collages in the decidedly idea-oriented When We Are Giant (through May 26), monumental images of women spill out of the frame in a reclamation of feminine space. Saturated colors move the images out of the realm of color photography and into realms reminiscent of such painters as the Blue Rider group — but these are related to the garments of the refugee women the pair have photographed.

At the often overlooked downtown Gallery 72, Sandy Teepen’s Quilt Collages (through April 28) form an attractive bridge between traditional and contemporary uses of color in a craft medium that Teepen has transformed into fine art.

As a playful homage to Pantone’s color of the year, Viva Magenta, Spruill Gallery’s new director Shannon Morris has curated Pink Pop-Up, open through April 23. Suitably pink-toned paintings and sculptures by Sabre Esler, Carol John, Shanequa Gay and Didi Dunphy are joined by Cynthia Farnell’s house-shaped enclosure in which vases containing branches of pussy willows and various living plants are bathed in magenta light that shines through the house’s semi-transparent walls.

And there’s more. Lucy Luckovich’s inaugural solo show Pop My Cherry!, at Cat Eye Creative through April 16, makes maximal use of the metaphoric possibilities of bright red cherries. Lukovich also reaches into art history for chromatically subdued paintings of outline figures in which the witty erotic details might bother more reserved audiences. Most viewers, though, will find the work less provocative than the title suggests.

At Kai Lin Art through April 21, the vivid strangeness of the varied greenery in Steven L. Anderson’s How to Know the Ferns seeks to rescue the many types of ferns from the blandness of botanical illustration, presenting them freshly as “forest weirdies.” This may well be Anderson’s best show to date, stretching his aesthetic in lushly diverse directions with materials that include gold leaf on bookcloth.

Eleanor Neal’s Landscape of Memory, at September Gray Fine Art Gallery through April 27, uses the shapes of Spanish moss to create subtly colored images, a “web of entanglement of lines,” as she puts it, that alludes to memories of the lives of women in the Georgia Sea Islands.

Three shows at Agnes Scott’s Dalton Gallery through April 14 combine and almost sum up this column’s themes of colors, nature and culture.

Shana Robbins’ installation Weelaunee honors an endangered woodland park. The Floating World, selected from the Agnes Scott collection of Japanese prints and textiles, includes Hokusai, Hiroshige and a range of other notables’ artworks from pre-Meiji years to 1971. The bell chime calls the night is an eso_tilin project featuring ceramics and 2-D work by Hannah Adair, Parisa Ott and Laura Bejarano that form poetic evocations of elements of the human body and other abstractions evoking and eluding narrative.

Worth mentioning, though not related to color, is Megan Mosholder and photographer David Clifton-Strawn’s Visionary Mode opening at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery on April 8. Mosholder describes it as “a meditation on powerlessness, struggle, acceptance and change.” Mosholder, a disabled artist, plans to use traditional Japanese techniques of rope work to provide powerful metaphors of disability.

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Dr. Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Journal of African-American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020 he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.