Advice to artists and galleries: Don't give out your email address unless you intend to answer your email.
The Rail Arts District is in Avondale Estates, Georgia just east of Decatur. It's a group of galleries and workshops in a light industrial area. On Valentines day your host and my two architecture tourist daughters cruised the RAD.
We saw glass blowing at Duckbill Studios.
We saw pot throwing at Mudfire Pottery Studio. Their gallery featured witty, folksy work by Mudfire founder, Erik Haagensen.
Erik Haagensen on the right.
AtStudio 2850 we ran into Jim Wakeman whom we'd met last year. If you have to be told who "Hoss" and Little Joe are, you might have trouble. Jim is on the left with your briefly bearded host.
Planetarium time travel with music in lay-back chairs rattles my archetypes. Above: Ling Zhang opening at Whitespace Gallery.
Last Friday night, February 26, Mrs. AT invited her girl buds over. You know I love them but they gave me the urge to ramble.
So off I went alone with one destination in mind. Then I just followed my nose. I had a delightful evening - Music, Astronomy, Architecture, Galleries, Art, Nice Folks. This is exactly what the architecture tourist enjoys most: Enjoying what is right in front of me for the moment. Even the obvious can deliver the unexpected and un-looked-for pleasures.
Klemchak is cool but doesn't actually glow in the dark.
Lisa Alembik, director of the Dalton Gallery at Agnes Scott College invited the audience to the Gallery. That's an architecture tourist 2-for. Dalton Gallery is in the Dana Fine Arts Building by John Portman (1965), completed 2 years before iconic Hyatt Regency.
The Dana is a great building with Portman's trademark atria and courtyards. It's alive inside and out: gallery, theater, classrooms, studios - wonderful. Outside it's post-modern Gothic in brick. Inside it's sleek, warm and inviting. It begs visitors to explore right and left, up and down. Enfilades, balconies, and stairs beg me to look around the next corner.
The thing with the blue balloons is a musical instrument Klemchak invented, composed for and played at the Center for Puppetry Arts.
I was perfectly happy but it was only 9 o'clock. Why not head to Whitespace Gallery in Inman Park? Whitespace featured the 3 Zhang sisters from China. Is't a busy gellery but I'd never been.
Dreams of a Butterfly...
Treasures...
Culture and Nature...
Three Graces...
I went to Whitespace for art and architecture broke out.
The gallery is in an outbuilding behind a grand Inman Park Victorian: "the three-room brick carriage house dates from 1893."
You walk in from the street crunching on a gravel drive. The Victorian is on the right, a colosssus. I had no idea how grand the Victorian was though I've driven by hundreds of time. The outdoor space is beyond my ability to photograph or describe. It's breathtaking. The carriage house renovation won an award for Atlanta architects Brian Bell and David Yocum.
We want to party at Whitespace!
It was time to head home, north on Highland. What do you know? Just past the Highland Inn Vacation Gallery was having a show too. I'm sure I'm the only person who didn't know that there was such a thing as Vacation Gallery.
The show featured Clarence. That's all the name I got. Witty, charming, a bit crude in places, Clarence has the talent. He's actually normally colored. My photos were blurry so I art'ed them up.
At first I couldn't read the writing on the glass.
There was a good crowd, a bit younger, more tattooed and flanneled than the other galleries'. The zig-zag floor would be a migraine trigger on a bad night.
I enjoyed it had an improvised message on corrugated cardboard.
I'd been lucky on my unplanned music/art/architecture crawl. It was late. I joined the Mrs's and company chez Kearns.
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