ARTS
2 Atlanta cultural leaders named

• Karen L. Paty is the new director of the Georgia Council for the Arts, the state arts agency that moved under the umbrella of the Georgia Department of Economic Development this month. Since 2004, she has worked with GCA as program manager, grants director and interim director.

The GCA recently awarded just under $1 million for fiscal year 2012 to more than 100 arts organizations across the state. “We expect great things from all of our grantees as they continue to provide activities and endeavors that make Georgia culturally sound and economically stable,” Paty said.

• Charisse M. Williams will start on Aug. 22 as president of Young Audiences, a division of the Woodruff Arts Center that provides in-school arts education programming. In 2007, Williams became founding director of Posse Atlanta, a youth leadership development and college access program.

Young Audiences board chairwoman Anne Game said of Williams: “Having someone with …

Continue reading Cultural notes: 2 Atlanta cultural leaders named; Botanical Garden plans winter wonderland »

Book Review
Fiction
“If Sons, Then Heirs”
By Lorene Cary
Atria Books, $24, 320 pages

Gina Webb / For the AJC

Ever wonder where the phrase “40 acres and a mule” came from?

It’s the allotment General Sherman promised to former slaves in January 1865 after he’d confiscated 30 miles of Southern coast land abandoned during the Civil War by plantation owners: roughly 400,000 acres, divided into 40-acre parcels, along with one mule each for approximately 18,000 African-American families.

When Andrew Johnson succeeded Lincoln and returned the parcels to their former owners a few months later, he set a discouraging precedent of broken promises and land grabs for those who had toiled on so many acres.

Black Americans acquired property nonetheless. Some owned land before the war; others received land deeded to them by slaveholders. Some, as children of those slaveholders, inherited property and many more bought land over a period of years, one small payment at a time.

By 1910, blacks …

Continue reading ‘If Sons, Then Heirs’ By Lorene Cary »

The National Black Arts Festival officially launches July 7, but most of the performances fall over the closing July 15-17 weekend at Centennial Olympic Park, other downtown sites and at Midtown’s Woodruff Arts Center.

The main offerings the fest’s first weekend, scattered across the metro area, are in the visual arts, with an abundance of potent expressions to capture your attention. Here are some highlights:

• Nationally noted artist Trenton Doyle Hancock is the subject of an ACA Gallery of SCAD exhibit “We Done All We Could and None of It’s Good.” The Houston multimedia artist is famed for works that pit good guys known as the “Mounds,” colorful half-animal-half plant creatures, against the evil black-and-white underground “Vegans.” Hancock and guest curator David Norr will speak in Rich Auditorium 5:30-6:30 p.m. July 7 with a reception following. Through Aug. 28. Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St., Atlanta.
• Atlanta artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier’s “Douglass’ …

Continue reading Visual arts to dominate National Black Arts Festival’s opening weekend »