The best chapter in “The New Mind of the South” (the title of which is taken from W.J. Cash’s seminal 1941 survey, “The Mind of the South”), concerns the city of Atlanta, a booming metropolis straining at its seams, where whites are a minority and the poor still get short shrift. Thompson doesn’t live there anymore, and when she tells you about the traffic, the sprawl, the free rein given to business interests and the racial mistrust that scuttles every attempt to create vibrant public spaces, you can hardly blame her. Yet she’s still invested in Atlanta, still finds memories on many street corners and still believes that it constitutes the most genuinely “biracial” city in the nation. She understands it deeply enough that when she resolves this chapter in an indictment of the Atlanta’s “pretense,” the result is a magnificent and stinging piece of writing.
The sprawling, outdoor paintings were made for Living Walls, an annual gathering of street artists from around the world who paint on walls and buildings. The project has been praised as brightening up a city struggling with one of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates.
But it has also prompted an outcry. Some residents have raised concerns that too much of Atlanta has become a canvas, and some find the works disturbing or offensive.
One mural depicting a nude woman was taken down in September after residents called it pornographic. On Tuesday, Georgia Department of Transportation workers painted over another mural — of an alligator-headed man with a serpentine tail — that neighbors said confused them and was possibly demonic.
“The best thing you could say about the alligator painting was that people didn’t understand it,” said Douglas Dean, a former state representative from the largely black neighborhood in southwest Atlanta. “It absolutely did not represent what people want to see on a busy street every day.”
Architecture about dancing:
Beckham and her small dance organization, The Lucky Penny, recently approached the world-renowned Atlanta-based architectural firm Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects to discuss her vision of a structurally-sound cardboard house built for dance performance.
She was primarily seeking a bit of advice about how to construct such a space, but the two principal architects were so excited and intrigued by the idea that they immediately signed on to design it for her.
From August 16-19, Atlanta audiences will be able to check out the results of the unusual collaboration as Beckham and a team of dancers perform the new work Threshold in a cardboard house designed by the architectural super-duo. The set will be built during a month-long residency by the Lucky Penny at Georgia Tech’s DramaTech Theater beginning July 16.
Via Curbed.
[Earlier: A post on “dancing about architecture” attracted a number of examples in the comments.]
Comprising an elite group of bankers, industrialists, politicians, merchants, and newspapermen, characters such as Charles Collier and Rufus Bullock embodied the spirit of a place they insisted on calling the New South.
A rhetorical invention, the idea of the “New South” itself represented aspiration more accurately than reality: in 1895, thirty years after the close of the Civil War, the former Confederacy’s transition to an industrial economy from an agricultural one was not only not over; it had hardly begun.
Atlanta, as an industrial center and railroad hub, was one of the few economic bright spots in an otherwise bleak landscape. And in the 1890s, amidst nationwide depression, even the relative promise of Atlanta fell short of expectations.
The difference lay in the expectations themselves: in Atlanta, stakeholders and enthusiastic boosters labored tirelessly to keep them high. The city’s energy was so pervasive and persistent that visitors could not help but find it worthy of exclamation.
“Atlanta,” wrote W. J. Lampton for the New York Sun in anticipation of the exposition, “is the best town in the south, present and future…She doesn’t wait for other people to come along and reap the advantages, but she buckles right to herself, and the result is—well, it is Atlanta, the Imperial City of the Empire State of the South, the City of Unceasing Endeavor, the City of Get There, the City of Atlanta.”
Lampton’s words acted simultaneously as evaluation and challenge: though it might be the Imperial City of the Empire State of the South, Atlanta and her stakeholders had a way to go before becoming an imperial metropolis not “of the South,” but on the world stage.
It was a genuine revelation to me that the term “New South” dated back to the late 19th century.
Maybe they weren’t hustlin’ round Atlanta in their alligator shoes quite yet, but the archetype is evidently far older than I would have guessed. Fascinating.
the Great Recession has exposed some troubling cracks in the foundations of Atlanta’s success. Perhaps it’s too early to declare “game over” for Atlanta, but converging trends point to a possible plateauing of Atlanta’s remarkable rise, and the end of its great growth phase.
Slide show: We unravel enigmas of the city, from the pink faces of Paris to a Virgin Mary under a Chicago underpass
Perhaps the most ambitious effort in the U.S. to develop lifelong communities is taking place in and around Atlanta.
