Support "After SELMA" & McFadden's Production Costs

 

After SELMA artist Joshua Rashaad McFadden is raising funds for the framing and further production of his photography. 


Please visit his page to donate & support this historic exhibit.

Upcoming Exhibit: "After Selma"

After Selma, Work by Joshua Rashaad McFadden
September 17 – October 24, 2015

The year 2015 marks the fifty-year fight for human and civil rights in America. Yet, what was supposed to be a time of celebration turned into one of uprising across the nation. Half a century later, America is left with the question, “After Selma, where are we now?” 

Photographer Joshua McFadden is a visual storyteller, whose interest in social justice advances human and civil rights in America through the narrative of his series, After Selma. His work illuminates similarities between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the demonstrations of the new millennium. McFadden’s work depicts the passion, anger and sadness of recent events in America, while at the same time showing the hope, strength and unity of a nation.

Regarding After Selma, McFadden says, "I think my work speaks to a world wide audience. Yes, it’s about the Black person’s experience in America, but it’s a worldwide topic. Everyone is involved, whether they see it or not."

The exhibition will display framed photographs of intimate moments from the 50th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. There will also be a night of projections and an open forum with the artist that will give a look into McFadden’s multimedia work.

McFadden was recently awarded a “Top 50 Emerging Talent 2015” award by LensCulture, for the After Selma series, by critic Mary Virginia Swanson. LensCulture is a global authoritative resources and publications for contemporary photography. McFadden is one of eight grant award recipients from thousands of photographers from over 120 countries.  

Join us for the Opening Reception, Thursday, September 17, 6pm – 9pm
 
Joshua will host an evening of Projections and Conversations on Thursday, October 8, 2015, 6pm – 8pm.

We hope to see you at both of these events!

Did you see that?! Exhibit Review

Many thanks to Jeff Stafford of ArtsATL who has written a review of the current exhibit, Did You See That?! Stories of Urban Oddities.  

Within this review Stafford states, "Sometimes [Steve Steinmans's] effect is taken to extremes, resulting in a sort of hyper-reality that looks more like a fantasy painting than a photograph — as in PUNKTURED, which exploits the exterior of a body piercing shop in Brighton, England, as a lurid marriage of DayGlo pink, neon aquamarine and hellish red hues."

Astutely Stafford observes that, "[The exhibit] also includes a handful of black-and-white compositions, but they tend to get lost displayed amid the color prints...There are some tantalizing standouts, however. Did You Know Flash Gordon Lived in San Francisco shows a gigantic metallic rocket, poised for blastoff, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. In what is otherwise an unphotogenic urban strip, the conspicuous sculpture represents an irrepressible but quintessential aspect of the area’s eclectic appeal."  

Check out Stafford's entire article including his thoughts on Steve Steinman and the current exhibit by clicking here.

Spruill Gallery in the news!

The Reporter Newspapers wrote a fantastic feature piece on Did you see that?! Stories of Urban Oddities featuring the photography of Steve Steinman.

View Jenna Goff's article: here!

We are never ever ever going to charge you entry, ever!

There have been a lot of calls today asking if there is an entry fee to see the current Steve Steinman exhibit... It is ALWAYS a free exhibit at the Spruill Gallery! So come one, come all and see our newest exhibit! Be sure to browse our selection of handmade treasures that can be found in the adjoined Gift shop! To see what our current exhibit is check out our previous blog post. :)  

Reminder: Spruill is a nonprofit organization built to help support local budding artists. Help us help you!

Best,
Spruillians
4681 Ashford Dunwoody Rd
Atlanta, GA 30338
770-394-4019

NEW EXHIBIT: Did you see that?! Stories of Urban Oddities

The Spruill Gallery will open Did you see that?! Stories of Urban Oddities featuring photographs from Atlanta-based artist, Steve Steinman, on August 21st. The opening reception will be held Thursday, August 21 from 6-9pm and will run until October 25^th at the Spruill Gallery.

The exhibit, held in conjunction with Atlanta Celebrates Photography, dictates a subtle commentary on the anomalies often missed in everyday life. From the odd attraction on the side of a highway to street performers; from public art to the delicate beauty found in architecture, Steinman captures evolving lifestyles present in the unnoticed and overlooked people, places and things that have become a part of our lives.

Spruill Gallery will host an Artist Talk with Steve Steinman on Saturday, September 27 at 1pm. Steve Steinman will share what inspires him in the creation of his pictorial urban tales, including his use of contemporary technologies to create photographs that serve as both historical evidence and conveyers of art and passion.

Atlanta Celebrates Photography aims to make Atlanta a leading center for the world's fastest growing art form. By producing the largest annual community-oriented photo festival in the United States, ACP provides experiences that engage and educate diverse audiences through lens-based media.

Upcoming Photography Exhibition

Spruill Gallery Presents

Inspiring Connections 

 September 5 - October 26, 2013

Opening Reception

Thursday, September 5

6 - 9 PM

Spruill Gallery joins with Le Meridien Atlanta Perimeter, Children Inspiring Hope and Colorado photographer Steve Chin in the upcoming photography exhibition, Inspiring Connections.

Le Meridien Atlanta Perimeter Hotel and Spruill Arts announce their partnership in Le Meridien's Unlock Art program by featuring A Photographer's Journey, a special photography show produced by Le Meridien Hotels and Air France.

Fellow nonprofit organization, Children Inspiring Hope celebrates their 5th anniversary with a special showing of photographs taken in the course of their travels and outreach in Ghana. All photographs make up Faces of Hope and are from the numerous volunteers involved in the program.

One such volunteer is Steve Chin; a Colorado photographer.  Spruill is proud to present him and his work to Atlanta audiences in this joint showing.

Felicia Feaster reviews show for AJC

Atlanta gallery showcases Southern women’s photos
By Felicia Feaster 

Judy Lampert, Barn in Bainbridge 2, Bainbridge, GA, 2012,
Pigment Inkjet print on archival paper

The three photographers in “Southern Women — Southern Photographers” at Spruill Gallery are fixtures on the Atlanta art scene. Corinne Adams, Lucinda Bunnen and Judy Lampert have been around long enough to have played their part in shaping the city’s photographic image bank. But in many ways these three women have gone further than that, and even helped make Atlanta the photo-centric place it is.

Bunnen is a cheerleader, both financially and philosophically, for photography in Atlanta. Adams was one of the three co-founders of the annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography event each October, which has done much to raise the profile of photography locally. Lampert has made her own mark serving on the boards of many area arts organizations, including “Art Papers” magazine and Atlanta Celebrates Photography.

The emphasis on “Southern” in the show’s title makes you crane your neck for shared regional features in these photographers’ work. Southerners have long been defined by their love of history and the past, and Lampert certainly delivers on that front. Her appealingly plainspoken color portraits of the well-worn buildings — farms, apartment blocks, small-town businesses and ramshackle barns — that dot the Southern landscape are like pictures of familiar friends. Take a drive out into the rural communities that ring Atlanta and you will inevitably encounter one of the decaying barns Lampert photographs, whose weather-stripped wood has turned the color of Spanish moss, and whose rusted roof is the hue of dried blood.

Lampert captures not only those rural icons, but also the similar obsolescence of Southern downtowns and even Atlanta’s architectural turnover — as in her portrait of a “Gray House on Irwin Street” whose windows have been boarded up and whose sad appearance suggests a dog tied up in the backyard, neglected and forgotten. Shot from the middle distance with just a snippet of their surroundings, the houses and businesses Lampert documents take on something close to a personality not unlike portraits of animate subjects.

Lampert measures time’s passage — the march of decades — in a building’s decay. That concept of chronology is echoed in Bunnen’s photographs, which capture nature’s continuous molting. As in Lampert’s work, there is a touch of melancholy in Bunnen’s chronicle of the withered blossoms that mark a season’s end on a Southern pond.

Bunnen has been documenting the gradations of life and death on the surface of Hatcher’s Pond in Tiger, Ga., since 2008, says the show’s curator, Tania Becker. In “Southern Women,” Bunnen focuses on the sad, bending stalks of lotus flowers whose beauty has dissipated, leaving only deflated brown husks behind with the look of crumpled party dresses.

Adams makes her own effort to trap the beauty of the natural world under glass in her series of moody and, like Bunnen’s work, exceedingly romantic photographs of seed pods, flowers and eggs. Adams takes various presentational tacks in photographing nature. Her smaller “Flower Dreams” images in the 9-by-12-inch range, present a variety of blossoms against a black backdrop to highlight their flamboyant prettiness.

Large-scale photographs of “Lilies” and fragile white petals in “Floating Tulip” tend to pale next to the scientific, antiquated look of Adams’ more arresting images mounted on wood — a lovely series of seed pod studies. The images are coated in a thick shellac of varnish, which gives the photographs the look of pages in an aged and yellowed botanical book. In these works, rather than highlighting the beauty pageant winners of the natural world, Adams focuses on a litany of almost extraterrestrial shapes. These striking photographs highlight the fascinatingly odd forms that exist in nature. These pods show that form is clearly Adams’ obsession — a trait she shares with her companions in “Southern Women.”

City Cafe Hilights Exhibit

NPR's City Cafe with John Lemley featured 
Spruill Gallery's current exhibit 

Southern Women - Southern Photographers 

in This Week's Best Bets.  

Check out the audio here  
and then come on by and see the show!

Opening Reception for Photography Exhibit

Spruill Gallery Presents

 

Southern Women - Southern Photography
Corinne Adams - Lucinda Bunnen - Judy Lampert
September 7 - October 27

Opening Reception September 6, 6-9 PM

This event is in conjunction with Atlanta Celebrates Photography 

With their various approaches, the work by these 3 Southern women photographers leaves us with impressions of strength, courage and endurance...

These photographs draw you inward, into a complex world of symbolism, meditation, intimacy and emotion. Each has been inspired by a greater voice for their images which speaks of their individual creative spirit. 

They focus their lenses on complex stories with imagination and skill that push the boundaries of their processes while depicting compelling stories. Adams, Bunnen and Lampert share images that allow the viewer to see them as individuals using the photographic medium as a tool to tell their stories of beauty and strength.

Corinne Adams is an Atlanta-based artist who works in fine art photography and mixed media. She is the Co Founder of Atlanta Celebrates Photography. Her work has been exhibited nationally. 

Lucinda Bunnen is a practicing artist in Atlanta. She has traveled worldwide to find subject matter for her work and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the Southeastern United States.

Judy Lampert has participated in numerous exhibitions and her photographs have been collected throughout the South. Her subtle and personal approach to photography conveys a deep respect and honor for the individuals and places that she portrays. 

Laura Noel: Subject Matters
through October 29

Laura Noel, Daniel Clowes' Art School Confidential, Atlanta Central Library, 2011 Chromogenic Print, 20 x 16 inches

"I created a series of photographs of books that have been withdrawn from libraries. Some of these books were rejected as no longer relevant to current culture, others were battered, and some were the victim of popularity - too many copies and not enough room.

These books and papers represent time and yet, are inevitably destroyed by its passing. The librarian's "Withdrawn" stamp is like a silent slap across the face. A once loved volume is ostracized from the family home."

Laura Noel

Mark Your Calendars!

"Last chance for Margaret Fletcher and Michael David Murphy" on BURNAWAY

October 28, 2010

By Jeremy Abernathy

The tiny man who lies on his back in the photograph's center marks an intersection between blind luck and human intent. Above: Michael David Murphy,Untitled, San Francisco, 2006, chromogenic print, 16 x 24 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Spruill Gallery.

Something about Michael David Murphy’s exhibition at Spruill Gallery (closing this Saturday, October 30, with a reception from 3-5PM) strikes the viewer with the photographer’s disarming warmth, spontaneous intelligence, and his refusal to ever stop working. While Murphy’s video installation and photos fill most of the gallery, one room showcases a rather sweet, though understated, series of smart paintings by abstrationist Margaret Fletcher.

Instead of dwarfing the significance of either artist, however, the asymmetry compliments both: Fletcher’s work feels like an intimate solo show seamlessly tucked inside Murphy’s more comprehensive retrospective. The yin-yang schema suggests subtle harmonies of photo-based and traditional media, representation and abstraction, male and female artists, and an established career shown alongside a relative newcomer.

Although the current show counts as Fletcher’s fine-art debut, the two artists have more in common than one might think. Murphy earned his MFA in poetry, but he switched careers and now serves as Program Manager for Atlanta Celebrates Photography. (Click here to read Susannah Darrow’s 2009 interview with Murphy.) Similarly, more than a decade has passed since Fletcher earned her master’s degree in architecture from Harvard, but now she paints. Her design concepts, inspired by her architectural background, are unfortunately easy to miss—she makes “paintings” by applying tiny press-on letters in Helvetica script.

Read Jeremy Abernathy's entire review on BURNAWAY

Closing Reception Saturday from 3 - 5 PM

Join us at the Spruill Gallery on Saturday,
October 30, for a Closing Reception for
Michael David Murphy's Certainty Principle and Margaret Fletcher's Ocus.

Murphy and Fletcher will join the festivities
from 3 - 5 PM for refreshments and closing remarks. Help us to celebrate this great show by sending the artists out in style!

Great Feature on 20x200 for "Certainty Principle"

Michael David Murphy at Atlanta’s Spruill Gallery

October 19, 2010 posted by: Emma

Body Watching, Atlanta, 2008 by Michael David Murphy

Attention, Southern art-goers! Michael David Murphy has an exhibition, titled Certainty Principle on right now at the Spruill Gallery in Atlanta. The show features photographs, as well as an installation from Michael's ongoing series, Unphotographable—his catalog of never-taken photographs: regretfully missed opportunities, memorialized in words.

For the entire review, go to 20x200

Review by Cathy Fox in today's AJC

Here is an excerpt from an AJC review of "Certainty Principle" and "Ocus" written by Cathy Fox.

"Margaret Fletcher makes a stunning debut in her concurrent exhibition of drawing and paintings. She composes these ethereal abstractions using press-on letters that are no bigger than the head of a pin. She has the crisp Helvetica letters specially made and places them with the precision of an architect, which she is, who knows that God is in the details.

The letters are fixed, like insects in amber, by layers of milky, translucent encaustic (wax), sometimes infused with an aqueous blue-green. Her application is so extremely thin and smooth that it makes other encaustic paintings look vulgar.

These small works may evoke the stars in the night sky, swarms of microscopic beings, or other naturally occurring patterns. In one series, the letters hover at the edges, a suggestion of dispersal. Mostly, they are elegant, meditative and really, 
really beautiful."

See the full article on accessAtlanta.

Praise for "Certainty Principle" on ArtsCriticATL.com

Review: Michael David Murphy explores instability of photographic truth in smart solo at Spruill

by Jason Francisco

Sometimes it seems that it could not have been an accident of history that photography and writing fused to form photography’s very name, which conceives of camera-made images as inscriptive illusions made using light, “light writings.”

It isn’t just that so many important photographers have been writers, but that photography as a medium is deeply solicitous of language. What is more natural in response to a picture than to broker it with words — to talk about it, to it, around it, to position and reposition it in terms of “stories” that it exclaims and hints at, prompts and doesn’t quite finish? Is it wrong to say that a photograph is a disquieted form of language, language displaced from grammar and usage, expelled from words so that the surfaces of the world might be made to beckon names and identities, and be reconstituted as sound and the logic of speech?

“Certainty Principle,” Michael David Murphy’s smart new exhibition at Spruill Gallery, offers a droll and philosophically rich meditation on the complications of photographic thinking as the mutual searching of words and pictures.

The show consists of four rooms, three containing photographic works and one with video — each room conceived as an autonomous statement in a larger, dialectical project. The first in Murphy’s suite of inquiries, Spruill’s front gallery contains gridded clusters of untitled, undated pictures all made in public places.

Taking on the guise of an everyman with a camera who appears anywhere and everywhere without explanation, Murphy approaches the commonplace as a field of random connections, or more strictly, random connections that seem ineluctable once made. He is a conceptualist alternately chasing and being chased by his own observational acuity, an artist for whom clear-sightedness is enigmatic. He is deeply concerned with photography as a power to heed.

Many of the photographs in this room deal in Americana and Americanism, intervening by turns gently and archly into culturally unself-conscious events and locations, both high and low. With what seems like remarkably consistent good luck, Murphy throws out vision upon vision of American normality coughing up its contradictions...

click here to read the full article

Certainty Principle and Ocus Debut

The Spruill Gallery would like to congratulate Michael David Murphy and Margaret Fletcher on the opening of their art exhibitions. We had a wonderful reception which included insightful artist talks from both Michael David Murphy and Margaret Fletcher.

Look for photos from the reception and talks on our blog this coming week.

The Spruill Gallery Presents:

Michael David Murphy

Certainty Principle

and

Margaret Fletcher

Ocus

September 24 - October 30, 2010

Opening Reception

and

Artist Talk

Thursday, September 23

6:00-9:00 p.m.

The Spruill Gallery is proud to present a retrospective of Atlanta artist Michael David Murphy. The show contains several works that span a range of projects including Unphotographable.

Margaret Fletcher's paintings take inspiration from pattern. In her new body of work, Ocus, Fletcher focuses specifically on issues related to thought, emotion, and expression through swarming and flocking of letterforms.

Thursday is a busy art day in Atlanta, but you won't want to miss this show! Artist Talk at 8. Remember: Spruill Gallery is open until 9pm!!

Coming Soon!

Michael David Murphy
Certainty Principle
and
Margaret Fletcher
Ocus: Recent Work

Join us for an Opening Reception and Artist Talk
Thursday, September 23 6-9 pm

Stay tuned for more updates.