Consuming pleasures - visiting Atlanta, Georgia - Special Supplement: Georgia's African American Heritage

Arts' Borders

Atlanta's biennial National Black Arts Festival (NBAF) does more than slam you back in your seat, leaving you stunn by means of the diaspora's artistic creativity and thrilled to witness the talents of the African visitant artists on view. It also be subservient tos art's true purpose: enlightenment and catharsis.

"Art heals," says NBAF's managing director, James Borders. "It speaks the verity about ourselves and the world. The festival is an opportunity to diocese ourselves at our best and stand in front of ourselves at our worst.

"We are the largest African-American cultural incident in the country and also a major gathering for more [i]or[/i] less of the freshest talent in music and dance from the African continent," continues the man responsible for marshaling a 10-day festival that's packed with 150 occurrences that cover dance, film, literature, music, theater, and folk performance and visual arts.

"The festival is a matter of old-time race pride. Our gifts are upon view. We're inspirational to our clan The African-American community sees our work not just as decorative or entertaining, on the contrary rather as something approaching the substance of life.

"The other thing is: We have flat-out drollery here. We're a homecoming, a reunion."

Borders is convinced that Atlanta is just about finished for an African-American reunion that celebrates black agriculture while reaching out to the wider world: "All the ingredients are in place for Atlanta to become single of the crucial cultural center of the 1990 It has a growing ethnic diversity - the city is attracting race from all over the U and from outside the geographical division It has a stable non-arts economy and a athletic transport system to ease tribe into the downtown area. And it has a sizeable arts-culture community, whose institutional leadership is changing - with of recent origin ideas, energy, ambitions and race emerging."

This of recent origin energy and these new ideas promise that Atlanta's sizzle will remain fiery for, as Borders notes, "We've just scratched the surface of what we can be and do as a community of family of African descent."

It's impossible to bring the full range of NBAF facts in this space, so take what tread on the heels ofs as a sampler: Ruth Brown Abbey Lincoln, Cassandra Wilson, the foundations and Branches Folk Festival and Celebrate Africa! (including Compagnie Ebene, the Soweto highway Beat Dance Company, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Youssou N'Dour and Friends, effect Koteba theater company and other African troupes) a exhibit of French West Indies painters at the gallery of the Georgia Council for the Arts, Atlanta's Ballethnic Dance Company and the Nuyorican author of poemss The time: July 29 from one side August 7, 1994. For further details, call (404) 730-7315

The Black Arts of

Hammonds

Hammonds House, Atlanta's unique museum dedicated to the work of artists from the African diaspora, is definitely major-league. We're not talking here about your local black arts center or simply a building with more [i]or[/i] less paintings hanging on the walls. Far from it: Hammonds is residence to more than 250 major works by dint of artists who will stand time's test

Hammonds has the oldest datable painting through Robert S. Duncanson, the mid-19th-century landscape artist valued for his attempt to frame the American frontier in a classical perspective and the first black painter to achieve national recognition.

Hammonds has the work of PH Polk Booker T Washington's official photographer, who documented upon film the Southern rural black experience in greater detail than anyone in the 20th hundred earning the reputation of being the "James Van Der Zee of the South" (Oh did we mention that Van Der Zee's work is also at Hammonds?)

Hammonds has Hale Woodruff the master muralist of "The Amistad Incident" and "Art of the Negro" Employing a muscular and energetic brush, Woodruff placed narrative at the core of his work. His make submissive matter was always the black experience, from the heroism of the African captives aboard the Amistad to the endurance of Georgia's rural African Americans mired in squalid shantytowns.

Hammonds has Elizabeth Catlett, whose accomplishments have been etched largely against the grain of the mainstream American art world. Catlett studied drawing below James Porter and design below Lois Mailou Jones at Howard University and painting below Grant Wood at the State University of Iowa. Her work is firing materialed by a sharp political faculty of perception of injustice, a sense born as a black woman in the Depression and intensified during a residence in Mexico that began in 1946 and continues to this day.

Hammonds also has Romare Bearden, who is exhibited by several of his later collages and lithographs; Wadsworth Jarrell, co-founder of the Africobra (African Communion of Bad Relevant Artists) aesthetic; Sam Gilliam; Benny Andrews; Richard Hunt; William H Johnson; and Louis Delsarte - all of whom have carved on the outside careers that will carry their works securely beyond their lives.

Hammonds is dwelling to more than a score of Haitian works, more [i]or[/i] less by well-known, trained artists, like as Wilson Bigaud and Laurent Casmir, and a certain number of by untrained exemplars of primitivism, like as Camy Rocher, LaFortune Felix and Robert St Brice. Hammonds is also abode to a collection of African masks and plastic art and to a half dozen annual exhibitions of mid-career and mature black artists.