04 Oct Art and Activism in 1970s Atlanta
It is a truism to say that 1970s Atlanta was the result of the decades that came immediately before it. But, the seventies here bore the fruit of
04 Oct Art and Activism in 1970s Atlanta
It is a truism to say that 1970s Atlanta was the result of the decades that came immediately before it. But, the seventies here bore the fruit of activist labor and economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s and also saw the deleterious effects of urban renewal, white flight, and the continuation of discriminatory housing policies. The city got its first truly biracial government and its first black mayor in 1973. In the same year, the Georgia General Assembly passed a new city charter that gave more voice to communities in city planning processes. Two years before that, voters approved the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit System (MARTA), which increased mobility in the city. 1Alton Hornsby, Jr., Black Power in Dixie: A Political History of African Americans in Atlanta (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), 141, 132–33. See also Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1989). For the first time in fifty years, African Americans from other parts of the country began to move to Atlanta (and other urban centers in the South) for economic opportunities. 2Gavin Wright, “Persisting Dixie: The South as an Economic Region,” in The American South in the Twentieth Century, Craig S. Pascoe, Karen Trahan Leaham, and Andy Ambrose, eds. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 88. At the same time, neighborhoods in the city remained segregated; communities reeled from the effects of displacement by interstates, stadiums, and housing developments; and a recession in the mid- and late-1970s threatened support for the coalitions built earlier in the decade.
Against this backdrop, a new, young art scene emerged—one that cannot be separated from the political, social, and economic structures of the city. 1970s Atlanta gave rise to a new energy for public support of the arts, and without this base the doughty organizations of our contemporary art scene might not have formed. The second half of the 1970s was an especially generative time for Atlanta arts due to a renewed activism among young artists, a plenitude of national arts funding, and the support of Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson’s administration. The result was an array of alternative art spaces, all created in the midst of a national recession, that supported experimental art practice and community-based work. Though severely hampered by the decimation of arts funding that came during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the next decade, many of the arts and cultural organizations founded in the 1970s remain vital to Atlanta today: the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Art Papers magazine, the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Seven Stages Theater, the Center for Puppetry Arts, WRFG, and the Atlanta Film Festival, for example. Moreover, the activism of the 1970s has parallels to recent history in the city’s art world, namely in the artist-initiated organizations that began in the late 2000s, in the midst of another recession.
In 2015, we began a project to document this scene, and particularly its women builders. The result is the ATLmaps site ATLas (Atlanta art scene), which explores 1970s Atlanta through the memories of eight women artists and/or art administrators. The site is a companion to the physical exhibition Forget Me Not, which was organized by the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University and on display from August 22–December 6, 2015. Forget Me Not featured ten women whose work explores 