Atlanta Contemporary has just announced the return of its Atlanta Biennial, scheduled for January 10-March 31, 2019. The Contemporary’s curator Daniel Fuller and Phillip March Jones, director of Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York, will collaborate on the exhibition.
Originally launched in 1985, the Atlanta Biennial went on a long hiatus until its revival in 2016. It has variously been focused on Atlanta proper or the greater region. As it did in 2016, the biennial will embrace the entire South. The curators will make studio visits in 10 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
March Jones is familiar to Atlantans and Kentuckians. He founded the nonprofit art space Institute 193 in Lexington in 2009, and was the inaugural director of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta. Also an artist, he has shown his photographs at {Poem 88} in Atlanta. Since 2015, he has been director of Andrew Edlin in New York, which specializes in works by Outsider artists.
Fuller said: “I am thrilled to be working on the Atlanta Biennial again. This exhibition offers a barometer of the South at its might, to exchange ideas and gain new perspectives based on what artists in our region are creating. A key part of this exhibition will be ongoing conversations with the artists, but also with each other. Phillip has a long history of having his finger on the pulse of what is exciting and groundbreaking.”
Fuller, who has curated a number of self-taught artists into exhibitions at the Contemporary, has a fondness for placing art in unlikely places. He has curated shows in ice fishing shacks, a swap meet at a drive-in theater, the JumboTron of a minor league hockey stadium, on public access television, on a train, and in several closets, and he has carved out quirky underutlitized spaces at the Contemporary for artist projects, such as the Sliver Space and Chute Space. A writer and sports enthusiast, Fuller will publish a book of essays this year titled This Is Not Here (Publication Studio).
