It's A Knockout! ATLart [06]

Steve Penley's work will be on exhibition at Matre Gallery.

Members of Atlanta’s sprawling arts community think the city should be known for gallery hops as well as hip-hop, even if corporations have been reluctant to sponsor art at the grassroots level. The sprawling ATLart [06] event should make the naysayers think twice.

The 19-day event, from Jan. 25 to Feb. 12, will feature 36 galleries, six museums, and a whopping 56 exhibitions.

The Art House, an anchor event that drew about 1,500 people last year, will double in size to 11,000 square feet in a house on Glen Devon Drive. Renaissance Builders agreed to temporarily take the Buckhead mansion off the market for participating galleries to install their work. Members of the American Society of Interior Designers will “lightly” decorate the house and lead seminars on art collecting, insuring art and art placement. This year, the house will host seminars for the public on topics such as how to insure art, how to rewire frames so that they won’t buckle, and the merits of Plexiglas versus regular glass.

One visit to the house and you might consider replacing those two tired prints from the Bombay company with one signature piece for a starter home, said Susan Nicole Gibbs, president of the Atlanta Gallery Association and organizer of this year’s event.

“It’s kind of the Cliffs Notes of the galleries,” she said. “The closets are so big in this house you could hang art in them.”

At the same time, ATLart has doubled the number of events for children, despite objections about messy hands being close to fragile, pricey merchandise. An addition to the museum roster is the Robert C. Williams American Museum of Papermaking at Georgia Tech.

“The trial runs of the first and second year are kind of over,” Gibbs said. “Now, it’s a very solid event.”

The Atlanta Gallery Association is a non-profit membership organization of galleries whose exhibits range from mid-18th century through 20th century American and European paintings and prints to early modernist and contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, crafts, glass and conceptual installations by regional, national and international artists.

Former association president Timothy Tew founded ATLart in 2004 to help establish Atlanta as the South’s cultural capital. Tew said a lack of cohesion in the arts community makes it difficult to attract big sponsors.

“The people who are selling the city are missing the opportunities,” said Tew, who owns TEW Galleries in the Galleries of Peachtree Hills, next to the Atlanta Decorative Arts Center. He said Atlanta should aspire to an event rivaling Art Basel, Miami Beach’s international art show held in December.

The association approached Delta and Coca-Cola to donate this year, but both companies declined because they didn’t have enough advance notice, said Gibbs, who plans to resume discussions next year. The event is funded mainly from ticket sales, but the majority of exhibitions are free. Galleries will remain open from Feb. 3 to 5 this year. In previous years, all of the openings were held on the same night, which meant visitors had to cram and scramble if they wanted to see everything. This year’s lineup of cross-cultural exhibitions and lectures ranges from contemporary mail art to stacked landscapes on acrylic sheets to a symposium on reading the Roman portrait bust. Gibbs said the number of visitors to ATLart has snowballed since its inaugural year, but the association doesn’t keep statistics. The event doesn’t only attract avid art collectors, she said.

“Unlike a museum where you can be flying solo, you have the benefit of more intimacy in a gallery, and with that comes more conversation and enlightenment and creative thinking,” Gibbs said. “Galleries are merchants of art of these beautiful things, but it’s also our responsibility to develop the relationship and enlightenment to help that sale.”