Today in street art: Lotus Eaters trio turns walls from drab to dazzling at The Bakery

Not long ago, The Bakery Atlanta invited artists from the Lotus Eaters Club to transform its drab border walls. The Bakery, a grassroots arts complex in southwest Atlanta, houses community engagement projects, environmental education programs, private artist studios and live performances.

The Lotus Eaters Club is a 10-member creative collective of designers, illustrators and motion-graphic animators. Members’ work can be seen along the Atlanta BeltLine Eastside Trail, on billboards around town and online through an app. The app, which is downloaded on a mobile phone, uses augmented reality to create interactive pieces from Lotus Eaters’ art throughout the city. This column has already featured pieces on the club itself and the husband-and-wife team of Chris Alvarez and Courtney Hicks. Today we meet three more Lotus Eaters, whose murals sit side by side by side at The Bakery.

KACIE RUSHTON

Kacie Rushton has experience in fashion and graphic design, both of which inform her artwork, which focuses on hand-cut original silhouettes. Rushton, 37, studied at the SCAD and graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City with a degree in fashion and apparel.

Her designs and works on paper feature images of female strength and confidence. The Bakery piece came about after a dry spell and grew out of similar work. “I was inspired by all the strong, genuine women I am so fortunate to know, who helped me through,” Rushton says. “I decided to revisit and reinvent this design for The Bakery mural for all the same reasons.”

HELEN CHOI

Illustrator Helen Choi, an Atlanta native, studied nursing before she realized she was an artist. She enrolled in SCAD and recently earned her degree in illustration. Choi, 32, was befriended by several Lotus Eaters while working in a coffee shop and was invited to join them. “I’ve never met a group of people that I have clicked so well with,” she says, “and that feel like family.”

Choi saw The Bakery invitation as an opportunity to break free from academic limitations and express her own style. “I decided to make a visual return to the traditional foundations of painting but add in technical layers of graphic design,” she says. By using digital tools, Choi designed a floral painting with petals that appear to have edges resembling ripped paper.

PAM PEACOCK

Five years ago, longtime Lotus Eater KILLAMARI encouraged Pam Peacock to leave Southern California and join Atlanta’s inclusive arts community. “It was a wonderful experience to move to Atlanta and instantly connect with like-minded people,” Peacock says, “and have an immediate foundation.”

Peacock, 35, is a full-time graphic designer for the iHeart Podcast Network and digs science fiction, outer space and comics. Her Bakery mural, Fuel the Future With Love, shows a rocket jetting across a night sky in a message of hope.

AND ONE MORE

LET US HEAR FROM YOU:

ArtsATL’s street art column appears every other Thursday and is done largely in collaboration with Art Rudick and his Atlanta Street Art Map. We’d love to hear your ideas, too. See something you like? Something we should know about? Have an opinion or suggestion? Please email kathy@artsatl.org.

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MOST RECENTLY: Marge Radford’s rad geometric murals.

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