Took an interesting road trip this past Saturday with my sister, Gina, to Serenbe, a planned community about an hour south of Atlanta near Palmetto. It looked like an easy drive, until we missed the very first exit on the directions. Ending up in Newnan, it was a bit of a backtrack from overshooting the route – but we finally found the compound, thanks to phone directions from the Hill’s desk person.

Steve Nygren, a local entrepreneur who made his fame and fortune with the Pleasant Peasant restaurant chain, is the visionary behind Serenbe. He and his wife bought the first 60 acres in 1991 and have developed with a focus on environmentally sound practices and the preservation of 70% green space while they added 40,000 more acres over the years. A good history of their work and the resulting Chattahoochee Hill Country Community Plan can be found here and the master plan concepts here.

I wanted to see the community and Gina needed corn from the organic farmers market – produce from Serenbe Farms. We made it just before it closed at noon.

Steve Nygren was walking towards us while we hit the Farmers Market.

Next on our list was lunch at The Hill restaurant. One pizza, one flatbread w/smoked salmon & fresh greens. Fresh blueberry pie for dessert.

Gina with her crispy pizza.

We ended up having a nice chat with Nygren at lunch. He was kind enough to draw directions back to Atlanta on our paper tablecloth.

The entire village is friendly and has an upscale eclectic feel in its design and layout - reminiscent of some small towns in southeastern PA, where I last lived near Philly. A recycled door to townhouses or condominiums could just as easily be found in the Westside arts district of Atlanta.

Atlanta’s own supreme garden designer and philosopher, expert on old flowers and passionate visionary for all things green, Ryan Gainey, worked on the landscaping for the community and has been retained as the horticultural advisor.

Cottage-y looking certified Earthcraft houses with no front lawns allowed! No noisy lawnmowers or leafblowers = fewer emissions. Water comes from the city of Atlanta and while there is plenty of landscaping, much of it is geared towards low maintenance.

I hadn’t expected the  zero-energy Bosch house to be so designer focused, but it was lovely to tour. I readily admit to a lack of interest in decorative accents, so you can review Southern Hospitality’s wonderful blog post for the look.

Equipped with a geothermal heat pump, solar panels on the roof, an electric heat pump water heater and Toto toilets and sinks, Bosch’s first zero-energy house in the US  is just that: highly energy efficient and designed to sell back excess energy to GA Power.  An AJC journalist recently produced a good article about geothermal energy and the house. Hardwood floors look like reclaimed wood, but come from managed forest resources and certified by the Forest Stewardship  Council.

I was taken with the Bosch smaller footprint washer/dryer and their accompanying enclosure. And that drying rack, set in the wall next to the appliances, is a marvel of old fashioned design. I want one.

We missed touring the HGTV Green Home, but you can read about it here.

This video shows Nygren talking about Serenbe and some shots of the community. A Flickr set shows more downtown architecture and some of the surrounding land.

And Terry Kearns has another fantastic architectural overview and video of Steve Nygren’s ‘Artist Talk’ at his blog, Architecture Tourist, here.

Finally, the New York Times has a great write-up from 2009 here. Well worth the drive, don’t miss the exit for South Fulton Parkway just past the Atlanta airport!

There can be a purity of purpose in dance and choreography can cross over into conceptual art. The mystery of unanswered or open-ended questions about meaning, doesn’t detract from the force of the performance. I saw this on Saturday, June 23rd, when I attended “Folding”, Nicole Livieratos‘ three person, three hour draft performance in MocaGA’s lobby. Notes pinned up to the far wall of the atrium spelled out subtext of the show’s title: “Anticipatory, Routine, Closure”. The three performers included Celeste Miller, Erin Weller Dalton, and Kim Kleiber. Miller is well known locally and has directed the Choreographer’s Lab at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival since 1995.

My notes are cryptic:

This was a leisurely performance. The dancers went about their task of folding slowly, deliberately. At different intervals, one dancer might turn and look at another and motion stopped for a minute. At other times, a performer raised her arm as if to stretch or to mark her space. Suitcases waited in the wings – as they were filled, the performers rolled them off ‘stage’ or near the back wall.

The audience sat on the floor and in chairs along one side of the space. Being eye level with the mass of donated clothes stacked or folded enabled a more intimate interaction with the performers. The loud snap of the sheet being folded by two dancers was startling, when so close.

I was reminded of the painters who have used women in their work not merely as icons of beauty, but to comment about their era. Degas was famous for his ballet dancers, yet his depictions of French laundresses always got to me.

The Laundress. Oil on canvas 25.1 x 19.4cm. Edgar Degas, 1873. Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, CA.

Women Ironing. Oil on canvas 76 x 81.5cm. Edgar Degas, circa 1884-1886. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

These are paintings of women who are yawning from fatigue, bent over hot irons with masses of white linen spread out on tables or hanging nearby. They slave away, washing and pressing the dirty clothes of a class far above their own. They are the paintings of a master who in the late 1800′s presented women’s labor and the singular class structure of Paris. His friend, Emile Zola, had published L’Assommoir in 1877, describing an urban laundry and the misery of the Parisian poor. Whether Degas’ intent was reflective of the naturalist and social concerns of his day or simply to depict the poetry he saw, we’ll never know.

The commonality of the act, forgetting gender, is what Livieratos seems to be after. She said that she wants the piece to be read on several levels; clothing as a covering for the body in transition, disorder and order, a rhythm in brief and fleeting moments and the harmony formed when we connect with each other, or what happens when we don’t.

Reactions from the audience became a part of the performance. Some of us were moved to laughter when the piles of folded clothes fell off a card table and a dancer shrugged. Others were moved to tears.

New work from spring and early summer. All of these are small paintings, acrylic or oil on masonite or canvas panels. Available in my eshop here.

Orange Square. Oil on masonite 8″x8″, 2012.

Red Landscape. Acylic on canvas panel 10″x8″, 2012.

Breathe. Acrylic on masonite 9″x12″, 2012.

Fields of Memory. Acrylic on masonite 9″x12″, 2012.

Strybing Cypress. Oil on masonite 12″x12.5″, 2012.

and a studio shot.

On May 19th, Atlanta’s Emily Amy Gallery hosted an artist’s talk by German-born Bernd Hausmann, a Boston based painter having his first solo exhibition at the westside arts district gallery, through July 7th.

The gallery’s blurb states: “The show title, Darwin’s Coral, is a reference both to the broader concept of evolution and the natural world that is so critical to Haussmann’s work and process as well as to the more blatant patterns that often appear in this new series. In addition to the new collection of paintings that will be on view, there will also be several short films broadcast during the show that will allude to the elusive yet familiar natural world.”

The unique placement of the untitled work is a collaboration between gallerist and artist. Although each is to be perceived on its own, Bernd said that he was interested in what would happen when connecting the large and small works, and how the colors would inform one another. The small paintings work as more intensely chromatic reflections of the larger pieces. Even so, Hausmann says he never paints for the space, or for an exhibit.

Hausmann divides his time between Boston and rural Maine and many of these works have to do with water and, of course, coral. He says that a particular place makes the artist change or alter his personal environment and engage with the outside world.

Like so many contemporary artists who deal with landscape, there is a veiled political message in these environmentally focused paintings. Sixty percent of the world’s coral reefs are in trouble; global warming is raising water temperatures and increased CO2 is adding more acidity to the waters.

Hausmann notes that a biological or spiritual attraction to place may be the genesis of the artist’s curiosity, but the difficulty of being grounded results in attaching one’s self to the land, whether we till the soil or paint it.

This series on coral emerged from a series he was doing on mountains and oceans. By layering information in the paintings, through his use of scraping and reworking thickly textured areas, he is alluding to the evolution of ideas and a new theory about how coral replicates itself. Darwin originally formulated a sound theory about the structure and formation of coral, before ever setting foot on a reef.

Close-up.

The single celled algae that live inside the new coral provide it with food, and as the coral grows, the polyp divides repeatedly and produces more skeleton. Continually adding onto the next layer, each subsequent generation of coral builds up the reef on the bones of its ancestors. Because so many variables contribute to the formation of the coral’s shape, identification of exact types is difficult. The newer science claims that glacial effects cause sea level changes and that plate tectonics have a role in ocean floor changes.

Hausmann’s silvery paintings are unique – and reminiscent of lichen on rocks if you happened upon them during a full moonlit night. Depending on time of day or the lighting, these highly reflective works will change in hue. The mutations toward either blues or pinks are startling even in their subtlety.

Hausmann mentioned that very little in two dimensional painting has the ability to change, although we might consider Monet’s series of about thirty haystacks that he painted throughout a six month period. The same thematic repetition to show differences in light was in play, with resulting success.

In these shimmering works, Hausmann references the surface of water as a mirror. When one focuses on the bottom of the ocean, the top level information is lost. If we suspend our perception and then refocus on the surface, the converse is true. The shifting of information seems to be both his literal and philosophical point, about how memory informs and repetition influences memory.

The boundaries of his art, as he says, are influenced by his environment. Hausmann suggests that being authentic is a difficult endeavor for any artist, it will be intriguing to see the progression of this work.

More about Bernd Hausmann here.

This past Saturday was jam packed with artists’ talks, a panel discussion on painting in the morning (more on that in the next post), and another Seek ATL studio visit and dialogue with artist Nancy VanDevender, who has a space over at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (ACAC). She teaches at Clark University.

VanDevender uses video, photography, pattern and typography and in this new work, she’s drawing. She is also interested in space and installation, what she calls sets and salons. Large scale color photographs include women with intricate tatoos; the body as subject. She has created Victoriana and heraldic patterned wallpaper with African American women’s faces cut and pasted into it, with historical references that include the Civil Rights movement. Her take on feminism and ritual has juxtaposed young African American women posed in bathing suits before a backdrop wallpaper of ruffles and maps.

In her current work in progress, she is appropriating and layering frames from three films; the always fascinating Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, Lars Van Triers’ Dogville and Hong Kong based Wong Kar-Wai’s retro and beautifully dysfunctional In the Mood for Love. This series is still being worked on, but VanDevender suggests that she wants to lead the viewer into the idea of game playing and show the alienation that can occur through the formation of cliques.

To take one film example, Marienbad  deals with memory and the loss of continuity over time. The film’s baroque hotel set and formal gardens are obvious in the patterns that VanDevender works into her layered assemblages. Self-trickery in this film is not so much a game but a question. What is reality, what is memory but a series of constructs?

The Seek group, including ACAC’s Stuart Horodner at this visit, discussed how the artist’s intent might be further elaborated. The complexity of the layering and perspective created by patterned repetition is what makes these tableaus so interesting. The artist’s main focus seems to be people; how they relate to each other, their roles in society, and race and gender issues.

That mystery is a feature of all three of the films seems to carry over as an element into VanDevender’s work. Like Resnais, she does not want to so much portray a linear narrative, as to look at an entire scene at once and highlight the reference points of the filmic ‘armature’. She says her interest is in how people meet, and the circumstances in which some random meetings take place.

Nancy’s statement on her site notes that “she is an installation artist who uses space as a platform for mixing politics, theatre, and design. Through a sculptural practice, physical ornamentation and digital illusion are handled as both flattened historical venue and projected politicized stage.  The collection, alteration, and arrangement of tattoos provide interior displays of presumed relationships and shared cultures.”

VanDevender’s new work prompts a rumination on figurative art and mark-making. What is the signatory pattern to these pieces? The combination of  iconography that she mines results in dense overlapped perspectives. Are the patterns a decorative ruse meant to confound, which then become an analogy for the way that the participants in the films struggle to meet and interact?

David Cope, a UC Santa Cruz Professor Emeritus of Music embarked on a project when he suffered from composer’s block. He used a computer scientist’s help to develop a program that could reveal musical patterns; the DNA of the composer’s ‘mark-making’. In his words:

“Recombinancy can be defined simply as a method for producing new music by recombining extant music into new logical successions…recombinancy appears everywhere as a natural evolutionary and creative process. All the great books in the English language, for example, are constructed from recombinations of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

Similarly, most of the great works of Western art music exist as recombinations of the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered scale and their octave equivalents. The secret lies not in the invention of new letters or notes but in the subtlety and elegance of their recombination.”

In these appropriated frames, the artist recombines icons and symbolism to explore gender roles, isolation and relationships. We look forward to seeing the elegance of her results.

Thanks again to Shara and Ben from Seek ATL for organizing these studio visits for local artists, in which to engage, connect and discuss.

I volunteered a few hours of my time at the Decatur Garden Tour last weekend, specifically at a garden with pool and beautifully cared for antique roses. Pat Maddux, owner and gracious hostess, spent the entire shift with us volunteers. While we sat on her patio and drank iced tea, she pointed visitors to the goldfish pond and the sparkling salt-water pool. Not a bad trade for tickets to the tour.

Private enough for skinny-dipping on hot summer nights…what bliss!

Pat told us about AW Pottery as a source for garden urns and pots, and Elizabeth Dean’s Wilkerson Mill for hydrangeas. I may have to drive down for a visit later this month.

David Austin roses scent the front yard and other varieties border the pool.

She has Ligustrum, Tea Olives (osmanthus fragrans) and Arborvitae Green Giant in her foundation plantings.

Original wood models for papier-maché bunnies.

The next day I visited three gardens. This first one on Adams Street owned by Patty and Ed Buckley, had a tiny formal herb garden, great seating arrangements and  lovely perennial borders scattered with sculptural elements.

The Daiga Dunis and Kim Wallen garden was also on Adams Street and featured a pond and old stone garage converted to artist’s studio.

An idyllic backyard for reading, listening to birds and sketching. Cool and serene.

Ryan Gainey’s magical enclave was next. If you’ve never visited his garden, please go on Decatur’s fall garden tour. And try to meet him. He is a marvel of knowledge about plants and flowers. I went to his late afternoon talk on antique roses and how to use them in the garden. To answer a question about whether his roses liked being intertwined with moonvine, clematis and jasmine, he whispered, ‘they are lovers’. Atlanta’s poet of nature.

The irony  is not lost on Gainey that the Cherokee Rose is Georgia’s state flower, while the state drove the entire Cherokee tribe out of the territory from the early to late 1800s. He pointedly asks us if we know the rose’s history. His own great great grandmother was a full blooded Cherokee. Watch him talk about the mythology of the rose in this video.

Some of his other suggestions include using the 1930 climber, New Dawn with clematis and confederate jasmine.

A charming guest cottage in the back of the property.

A spiral staircase up to the tree-house.

Greenhouse with goddess sculpture.

A special Eden.

Manicured boxwoods.

Gainey reading from Peter Coates’ hard to find 1970 book, Flowers in History. Another recommended book is A Rose by Any Other Name by Douglas Brenner and Stephen Scanniello. Gainey says he never sprays his roses, not even for black spot or powdery mildew. He chooses hardy varieties and plants only those that bloom once a season. He gets 1 gallon plants from two favored growers; Pat Henry of Roses Unlimited (“she has a passion for roses”), who grows them on their own rootstock, and the Antique Rose Emporium in Texas.

Finally, a wonderful video on the Southern Spaces site about figs with Gainey’s narration, produced by Steve Bransford.

Excerpt from Bransford’s essay:

This video short is one of several satellite pieces connected to their comprehensive film about Gainey, which fuses biography and botanical discourse. Born in the 1940s, Gainey grew up poor and gay in rural South Carolina and attended Clemson University, where he studied ornamental horticulture. Using vernacular plants in classical garden design, he became a successful landscaper in the 1980s. He is renowned for pairing English garden aesthetics with native plants of the southeastern United States.

As is evident in the introduction of this short video, Gainey’s gardens become fields of memory. He participates in seed saving movements that value heirloom plants, both botanically and culturally. He sees plants as part of larger historical narratives, whether they are species grown by Benjamin Franklin or Gainey’s own grandmother. Gainey’s musings on figs (using scientific Latinate terms and discussing Western mythology) demonstrate his devotion to gardening as botany and cultural study.

“Fields of memory”, I may steal that phrase for a painting…

I am honored to be awarded inclusion in the Georgia Museum of Art’s Kress Project this year. A panel chose 24 artists out of those who gave responses to one of the Renaissance paintings in the museum’s collection, and whose work will be published in the book.

It’s wonderful that this award includes an honoraria and I keep the painting.

Fifty years ago, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation gave a small collection of Italian Renaissance paintings to the Georgia Museum of Art as part of the foundation’s efforts to make great works of art available to the general public in museums throughout the United States. Now, in celebration of that anniversary and to further the foundation’s mission to promote interaction with great works of art, the Georgia Museum of Art announces the Kress Project.

Below is the painting, my statement with Antonio Cicognara’s painting and here is the link to their site.

“Christ, Man of Sorrows” depicts a rocky and harsh landscape, relatively empty with one lone walled town in the distance. At the time, not only were Renaissance painters imbuing landscape with a new naturalism, but symbolism became more important. As Barbara Lynn-Davis suggests in her book “Landscapes of Imagination” (1988, Princeton University Press), the landscape of the Italian Renaissance became a rarefied object. Contrasts between urban and rural environments were commonly depicted, as we see in this particular work. Christ sits in a naturalistic setting, while the city lies behind him.

The sentiment in the painting echoes my own sorrow towards the land’s demise. In the painting, Christ is depicted as a man for whom the world is a grim reminder of man’s sinfulness. The landscape is not his main concern, but in our own culture the same attitude of “forbearance” to the possible extinction of species and the rape of land by industrialists or in the name of progress, can be aligned with Christ’s towards the sinners who beat him for preaching peace, justice and equality.

I try to portray the moment between the landscape as it lives in nature and at the point of man’s destruction – or transformation – of it. The light is the one constant that we painters can at least for now, depend on.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The spell of nature and our dependence on environment is at the root of my work. The act of painting is often ecstatic, taking me beyond ordinary observation. I see colors while listening to music; heightened chroma combines with the primal force of place that informs my work. Sourcing the history of expressionism, I voice the song of dualities: emotion and formalism.

 Antonio Cicognara (Ferrarese, active ca. 1480–1500)
Christ, Man of Sorrows, ca. 1500
Tempera on wood
11 3/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; The Samuel H. Kress Study Collection
GMOA 1961.1889

I know, no one wants to hear about death, dying, illness or misery.  My maternal grandfather once said, à la Yogi Berra, ‘if you live long enough, you will get old’. 

What do we talk about when we talk about death? Not much, it turns out. We skitter around what has become a toxic subject in the west, like scaredy-cats. We lose parents and friends and still, most of us avoid the issue  in conversation. Sadly, it’s true that once a certain age is reached, we begin losing more and more friends and relatives to either old age or illness.

The late psychologist and suicide researcher Edwin Shneidman echoed my grandfather by stating that “Dying is the one thing – perhaps the only thing – in life that you don’t have to do. Stick around long enough and it will be done for you.”

A pioneer in the holistic health movement, UCSF’s Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen puts it a little differently, “death is a mystery worth contemplating.”  Talk therapy can help sort out our feelings and sadness. So can any transformative effort like painting, music or literature. I’ve been working on a couple of paintings for the last few months that directly reference a potential personal loss; a friend has been valiantly battling advanced cancer for over a year.

My newest work doesn’t portray her visage in any realistic way, it’s an homage to her in absentia. The memory of her friendship, possibly what might be called her aura, is what I hope to evince and more than that, use as a kind of healing acceptance. I have no illusions about death being an adventure into a new and fabulous world. It may end up being nothing more than a ‘big black hole’ - as my mother used to maintain after she’d had it with all forms of religion.

Baby Blues. Oil on canvas 24″ x 24″, 2012.

But that’s not really the point. In Schneidman’s book, Death: Current Perspectives, he says that “a person’s death is not only an ending, it is also a beginning – for the survivors.”

How we accept and deal with loss in our everyday lives is often based on our culture. I took a trip to Bali in the late 1990′s, specifically  to witness a cultural phenomenon like none other in the world; almost everyone there is an artist or artisan. Their culture supports and rewards the act of creating and the end result. And their unique belief system, a blend of Hindu, Buddhist and animism, does not so much mourn death as celebrate it.

Ok, it helps if you think that you might be reincarnated into an industrious ant or a magnificent bird. The soul is released from the body and freed from all material aspects of worldly life. Could the journey be just one step closer to that white light that some of us witnessed in certain drug induced states?

Elegy/Thunderbolt of You. Oil on canvas 46″ x 27″, 2012. (work in progress)

What I’ve returned to for comfort in years of experiencing loss, whether it was the end of a relationship or more profound loss, is poetry. The poet Tess Gallagher, once married to author Raymond Carver and who has been writing and teaching poetry since the mid 1970′s, wrote a volume called Moon Crossing Bridge, a few years after Carver’s death in 1988. That collection of luminous writings, centered on loss and grieving, has been my mainstay for the past couple of decades. It has shown me that transcendence and healing can come through experiencing a work of art.

Moon Crossing Bridge

If I stand a long time by the river

when the moon is high

don’t mistake my attention

for the merely aesthetic, though

that saves in daylight.

Only what we once called worship

has feet light enough to carry

the living on that span of brightness.

And who’s to say I didn’t cross

just because I used the bridge in its witnessing,

to let the water stay the water

and the incongruities of the moon to chart

that joining I was certain of.

The second monthly studio visit I attended with Seek ATL as host, was to Shara Hughes’ third floor Telephone Factory space. She showed several paintings that will be in an upcoming exhibit this fall. This visit, coordinated again by artists Ben Steele and Hughes, included more local artists in attendance, some of whom I’d met at Marc Brotherton’s studio in early February.

Hughes moved back to Atlanta from New York about three years ago and has settled into her light filled studio with Chicken Nugget, her Boston Terrier.

The group launched into its usual routine of asking questions about the work and offering comments, always constructive, sometimes challenging. Hughes’ current work consists of medium to large sized paintings of interiors, packed with patterns and skewed perspectives; sofas, windows, chairs, altered or disjointed figures and spray painted slashes.

Some of Hughes’ influences are obvious in her paintings; Hockney and Matisse. The latter she calls her hero, and her sense of color and high chroma contrasts what may be darker subject matter in some of the work. Joan Mitchell was an early influence when Hughes experimented with more gestural abstractions.

I wondered about one painting. Like Francis Bacon’s central figures that appear to be trapped in a psychological battle that only the painter can elucidate, in one of Hughes’ more centrally focused figurative works, a defined head is missing, but the body’s pose in the chair was remarkable, not least for the uncomfortable sensation it produced in this viewer.

She talked about initially coming up with titles, and then proceeds from that starting point. Her intent is not to be necessarily narrative in a literal sense, at the same time surrealism and cubism seem obvious infiltrators in her perspective and recent subject matter. Hughes said she didn’t want the viewer to be faced with the responsibility of interpreting subject matter. In her painting process, she consciously attempts to alternate between “speeding up and slowing down”, in an effort at spontaneity.

As a mostly intuitive painter, Hughes says that she doesn’t work from sketches although there were several small paintings on paper tacked to the studio wall. The work may be autobiographical but her intent is to subsume that in the final composition. Her paint can be traditional oil, with the addition of house enamel alongside areas of spray paint and glitter.

An interesting comment was made that in Hughes’ paintings there is the feeling that the viewer is being pushed out of or trapped within the painting via her constructs. Beyond the window in one work lies a dull and dreary winter tree vista. Hughes explained that her concept for that title – “I don’t see like you anymore” had more to do with how others view one’s persona rather than the image one may have of one’s self.

In another painting the hint of a man is shown outside what could be a window frame; his fingers wrapped around a door, or his eyes peering between the leaves of a plant – and lends an ominous feel to the work. The title of the piece is “Shady”. 

The books on Hughes’ shelf show her interest in the gamut of art history; just a few noted are Egon Schiele, Francesco Clemente, Edward Munch, Clyfford Still. And as the controversial critic Robert Hughes said in an essay about Giorgio de Chirico, Shara’s personal iconography and symbolism may “condense voluminous feeling through metaphor and association. One can connect these magical nodes of experience, yet not find what makes them cohere.”

One painting I especially like is from her website, but wasn’t being shown. It’s a loosely painted gestural work that speaks to me of summer.

Thanks Shara and Ben – looking forward to the next Seek ATL salon.

Good Growth Dekalb is a group of concerned citizens and neighbors who live in communities near Suburban Plaza, a 1960s shopping mall that’s been allowed to languish for over twenty years. There are some stores that have thrived despite the recent economic stress. Big Lots is the company’s most successful Atlanta location and Last Chance Thrift Store is beloved by many. Decatur Estate and Way Back Antiques does a good business and historic Onstage Atlanta has long attracted an audience in its theater space in the center.

AJC file. Suburban Plaza circa 1960.

The owner, Selig Enterprises, has found a willing tenant to anchor its proposed redevelopment; Walmart and a 149,000 square foot super-store. Neighborhood groups met earlier this fall to draw up non-binding concessions from the developer that other communities’ experiences suggest Walmart will never honor.

This is a plan from Selig with some concessions highlighted in red, courtesy of the Decatur Metro blog. Higher resolution here.

Good Growth Dekalb evolved out of many neighbors’ frustrations at questions that weren’t asked at any of the neighborhood association meetings, and a parking variance approval that went through without Dekalb county demanding any study, whether for the increased traffic or an environmental impact report. Since according to GADOT, over 70,000 vehicles travel Scott Blvd on a daily basis, an independent traffic impact study is one of the issues that GGD would like to address and the group hired a land use lawyer to investigate whether the county was remiss.

Last Saturday about 100 people marched in protest from Suburban Plaza to the Decatur Square. Musicians from the Atlanta Sedition Orchestra provided accompaniment. Press coverage included broadcasts from Channel 5 News and Channel 2, articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Avondale-Decatur Patch blog.

The Atlanta Sedition Orchestra plays for activism projects in Atlanta’s progressive community.

GGD’s mascot, the hard working Melanie Parker – who also writes our press releases.

WSB Channel 2′s Angelique Proctor interviews Brian Westlake, a resident in the area.

Fox News Channel 5 interviews Stacie Dixon, GGD’s fearless coordinator and the channel broadcast two clips of video on the event.

Decatur Mayor Bill Floyd spoke to the crowd and gave his support, although the city has no current jurisdiction over the Plaza.

State Representative and my neighbor Karla Drenner spoke to the crowd on Decatur Square, in support of GGD’s anti-Walmart stance and urged us to protest Senate Bill 469. The bill would make civil disobedience a felony in Georgia and is designed to weaken unions. Punishable by up to one year in jail, it would levy a fine of $1,000 on individuals and $10,000 on organizations. The bill passed the Senate on March 3.

A community forum was held on February 23 and the North Decatur Presbyterian Church auditorium was packed to standing room only with 300 people, some of whom spoke to the audience.

Volunteers from the Dekalb County Green Party and Atlanta IndyMedia helped shoot video for the forum and the March 10th walk.

One resident reminded us that corporate greed is only secondary to our willingness to buy cheap goods. That habit has to break before we can have equitable and sustainable forms of commerce.

Thomas Wheatley’s Walmart Cometh presents both the pros and cons of big-box stores in his cover story that came out today in Creative Loafing.

Good Growth Dekalb will be screening “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”, 7:30PM on Sunday March 18th at PushPush Theater, 121 New Street, Decatur, 30030. Free, donations accepted.