After two and a half years of the pandemic and a reckoning with racial injustice, a new art campaign explores the question, ‘Where do we go next?’
Next-Atlanta and MARTA have partnered to launch Next-Movement. The multi-platform arts and social action campaign highlights five Atlanta artists and their works, which speak directly to this moment in time. Next-Atlanta co-founder and director Faith Carmichael joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom along with Katherine Dirga, director of art in transit at MARTA, and the poet and author Jon Goode, to talk about the scope and content of Next-Atlanta’s wide-ranging showcase.
Interview highlights:
On the Next-Atlanta project of uplifting under-recognized artists of color:
“Next is really the brainchild of several Atlanta artists who had been going out into the community and just happening to engage with amazing, talented artists across genres – musicians, literary artists, visual artists – who were doing incredible work,” said Carmichael. “They were from our own community, so Black and brown artists, artists of color, and… their reach was limited. We realized that we don’t always have the same level of access to venues and exposure and arts journalism as, maybe, our other counterparts, and we complained about it, as artists are well-to-do. And then, at a certain point, we just thought, ‘Well, what can we do about it?'”
“These were all powerful artists who were sort of at the cusp of getting to that next place, and what we saw was ourselves as a space and a vehicle to help them get there. So we started calling it ‘Next,’ meaning they were really the next big thing. You had the opportunity to sit in living rooms or in small gallery spaces and see these incredible artists up close before they became stratospheric.”
Filming “Next Movement” performances on empty MARTA train cars:
“We were looking for ways to be able to pivot with the onset of the pandemic, to be able to showcase these artists in their amazing talent in a virtual space, and so this virtual concert series sort of bottled up, sort of built on, this idea that we first saw on ‘Tiny Desk,’ and then we just thought, ‘What if our sound set was a train?'” recalled Carmichael. “‘What if it was just a part of the exact space and energy of the transit system that we were hoping to showcase?’ And so we merged those two concepts, and this idea came up, and it sounded a little insane to me, but… [Katherine Dirga], always willing for a great adventure, said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.'”
“The cast and the crew, they actually served as an audience. So I was very fortunate that when I was done, they were nice enough to give me a standing ovation,” said Goode. “It felt good, but it also felt good because I’ve ridden the Marta forever. I’ve probably ridden every line of the Marta, and I’ve written so many poems sitting there on the Marta, and I’ve sat there and kind of, you know, mumbled them to myself, where people are looking at me like, ‘I don’t think that young man is well.’ And so it was good. It was good to do the poem on the train and have it so well received, when I’m like, ‘Wow, I’ve created so much art on these trains.'”
On the contributing artists and events:
“We’re working with the incredible Jon Goode… who is an author and poet, host of ‘The Moth’ storytelling event. Okorie ‘OK Cello’ Johnson, who’s a longtime friend of this program, CC Sunchild, who’s an amazing vocalist and pianist and songwriter, Carlos Andrés Gómez, who is also a poet and an author, spoken word artist and an actor, and Melissa Mitchell, who is a visual artist who has worked closely with Marta in the past. And together, each one of these artists, thanks to Marta, will be commissioned to do a single piece within their genre that speaks to these issues of where we are right now and where we need to go,” explained Carmichael.
“There’s three key elements to the campaign that we are curating with MARTA. One is a poster series and photo exhibit that features each of our five artists. It also really excitingly features five incredible what we call ‘art champions’ in the community… The second key element is the virtual concert series… and we have already recorded those and filmed those,” said Carmichael. “We’re really excited to be working with the High Museum to host an event, as the young people say, IRL – real life, physically – at the High Museum, and each of these incredible artists… will be performing their commission piece live.”
More on Next-Atlanta’s collaboration with MARTA in the “Next Movement” can be found at https://www.next-atlanta.com/.
