Formerly the Bill Lowe Gallery, that contemporary art space is now in the hands of Lowe’s protege Donovan Johnson, a younger, ambitious Black gallerist with sartorial flair and a way with spin.
Rebranded the Johnson Lowe Gallery, hopefully this handsome Miami Circle gallery once home to Fay Gold Gallery will not become burdened by the tainted legacy of its predecessor’s founder (who in 2015 was indicted on criminal theft and racketeering charges and died in 2021 of Hodgkin lymphoma) but forge a new path.
On the evidence of its inaugural show under its new moniker, the future looks promising. Johnson and New York-based critic and co-curator Seph Rodney have assembled a group of internationally-known artists as well as a cadre of talented locals for the ambitious exhibition “The Alchemists.”
The show title conjures visions of something ordinary spun into gold and the propensity of Black visual artists and creatives of every stripe to use what’s at hand and turn painful history and experience into a storytelling device and creative medium. Ecstatic transformation is at the heart of “The Alchemists” which powerfully conveys an idea of the artist as magician and shapeshifter.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Masela Nkolo, a Congolese artist now living in Atlanta typifies that sense of invention and play at work in much of the work on display. Inspired by a childhood repairing oil lamps for his neighbors, Nkolo turns bicycle wheels, oil cans and scrap metal into colorful, whimsical forms that pull magic and humanity out of the discarded while conjuring the rich history of reuse and reinvention in African daily life and design.
All manner of humble materials become fodder for creation in “The Alchemists” from pennies to Ghanaian pesewa coins to pom-poms, glitter, duct tape, matchbooks, quilts and bicycle wheels. Assemblage is a large part of this far-ranging group show, though there are also video works, drawing, painting and sculpture represented, too.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Shapeshifting is another theme, seen in Atlanta artist Shanequa Gay’s “get that doe,” a haunting combination of stenciled wallpaper that provides the abstracted background for a large painting hung dead center on a large wall. Once again using her humanoid deer forms, Gay creates a mythic, folkloric quality in a scene where animals and Black men flee from a police car in the distance. As she’s done so skillfully in the past, Gay embeds meaning and subtext in her wall covering which then morphs into chilling commentary in her canvas.
Gay’s work hangs across from another celebrated Atlanta artist, William Downs, whose liminal beings hover between human and extraterrestrial, creatures that conjure up the magic and divinity of ancient gods and goddesses.
“The Alchemists” provides ample proof in other contributions from Michi Meko, Masud Olufani and former Atlantan Cosmo Whyte that the city can hold its own. It’s a welcome surprise to also see actress and artist Danielle Deadwyler included. Her video piece features a woman cleaning while a virulently misogynist song plays and recalls the biting fury behind the ‘70s feminist art of Martha Rosler and Hannah Wilke.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
The show features 29 artists including established stars like Mark Bradford, Sanford Biggers, Rico Gatson and Renee Stout. Particularly compelling in this transformative context is work by Todd Gray. The Los Angeles artist’s elegant, psychologically rich photo collages juxtapose classical architecture, the natural world and Black subjects into a haunting language of displacement and estrangement. An alchemist of material, Leonardo Drew’s explosive sculpture “Number 338″ plays with expectations about art itself, fashioning its assemblage not from found materials, but out of purposefully and artfully crafted and patinaed materials the artist transforms, manufacturing his own meaning, which is ultimately the essence of this compelling show.
ART REVIEW
“The Alchemists”
Through April 29. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; 11a.m.-5:30 p.m. Saturdays. Free. Johnson Lowe Gallery, 764 Miami Circle, Suite 210, Atlanta. 404-352-8114, www.johnsonlowe.com.
Bottom line: Almost overwhelming in the depth and breadth of work shown, this group exhibition skillfully blends Atlanta-based and internationally-known artists in thought-provoking conversation about reuse, value, appropriation and creation itself.
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