UPDATE: Due to the rain forecast this weekend, the Reynoldstown Art and History Tour has been rescheduled for Saturday, May 1. We will still meet at WonderRoot Community Art Center at 12 noon.

Dear neighbors,

We hope you’re enjoying the amazing weather this month. After last weekend’s Dogwood Festival and Sweetwater 420 Festival, festival season in Atlanta is now in full swing. More people are getting out, walking their doggies, enjoying the grass and shade, forgetting the winter chill, and remembering why life in Atlanta is so great.

We also hope that you’ll join us this Saturday, April 24, at 12 noon, at WonderRoot Community Art Center for BURNAWAY’s Reynoldstown Art and History Tour. The service project, conducted in partnership with WonderRoot, will cover several artistic and architectural highlights in the neighborhood, as well as the history of the community. The tour will feature local aficionados Blacki Milhose and Karen Tauches. If you’re attending the Inman Park Festival that day, take a break from the crowds and come see us in Reynoldstown!

Join the event on Facebook here, and make sure to bring your water bottle!

Thanks,

BURNAWAY.org

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BURNAWAY!!

The publication you’re reading now is still very much a product of that summer. Each month presents new challenges we face with the same fiery enthusiasm, a spirit sustained by our hunger for experimentation and our commitment to professional reporting. For example, all of our original writers agreed to write under their full first and last names, instead of using the pseudonyms commonly used on other blogs. A year later, we’re more mature than when we started. As we begin to assemble our nonprofit board and look to new journalistic horizons, we hope you’ll be here with us another year from now!

A screenshot taken on October 6, 2008, depicting our original "brushfire" design, aka BurnAway Classic.

I can’t stop grinning today, thanks to you. BURNAWAY.ORG was voted Best Local Arts Blog 2009 in the Creative Loafing Best of Atlanta Readers’ Poll!! The newspaper’s Filthy Rich special issue debuted this morning. Check. It. Out!

We were also mentioned in the Critics’ section for Best New Trend in the Arts: Art Collectives for our involvement in Gather Atlanta, the conference we helped organize at Eyedrum in June, which readers ALSO voted Best Art Event. The heat was sweltering that day, punctuated by the buzzing of cicadas, microphones, and the murmuring of some 200 attendees talking about art. Even I was amazed at the time. Where does all this vitality come from?

As Chanté LaGon states in her explanation of the contest’s theme, Filthy Rich:

“The fact is, there’s no shortage of tools for living richly, whether you’re flush with cash or subsisting on the cheap—it just takes a little extra effort.”

Thanks again, Atlanta. Thanks for being awesome.

We are sad to report today that BURNAWAY.ORG will be taking an extended one-month break in programming in honor of Labor Day. But we promise it’s a necessary evil. We need time to concentrate on our nonprofit application, our site redesign, and preparing the foundation for something truly grand in the future.

Please stay tuned for To Do Lists every Friday! We plan to at least keep you informed about what’s happening around town.

BURNAWAY.ORG will return fully on Monday, September 21. See you then!

A special thank you goes to Cinque Hicks who moderated our panel, as well as the five speakers who participated: Louise Shaw, Rachael Spiewak, Matt Haffner, Michael David Murphy, and Stephanie Dowda. Another thank you goes to our own Jeremy Abernathy who organized the panel. We also thank our sponsors: Eyedrum for the use of their space, Max Lager’s for the beer, White Birch Vodka for the vodka, Parkgrounds for the coffee, and Turkheimer & Hadden for their financial assistance. And, of course, we thank our “partners in crime”—the folks at MINT Gallery, WonderRoot, and ThoughtMarker.

It is our hope to make Gather Atlanta an annual event. But there have been requests for another event sooner than next summer, so keep your eyes on BurnAway.org for all the latest details.

If you have any feedback, feel free to contact our editorial staff at burnawayga@gmail.com. We are proud of how Gather Atlanta turned out, but we realize there is always room for improvement.

Thanks again to everyone who came out!

Please: Steal this flyer!

Announcing the first of two Gather Atlanta fundraisers: Midnight Dance Party this Thursday, May 21, at Lenny’s Bar!

Even if you can’t make it Thursday, please remember that we still need support for the MAIN EVENT at Eyedrum, June 6. And keep checking the Gather Atlanta website for new updates each week leading up to the event, including panel speaker announcements every Monday!

Peachtree Street, ca. "a long time ago." Things have really changed, haven't they?

Atlanta is a town of adorable contradictions. At least, that’s how I like to word it. Depending on your artistic tastes and political inclinations, you might instead prefer the phrases “high versus low brow” or “the corporates versus the granola-heads.” Or you might even use the latest code word for all manner of social ugliness, “gentrification.” Then again, we’re a town that likes its sugar—and we say “sugar,” too, when addressing complete strangers on the bus.

BurnAway.org is preparing for a redefine/redesign project over the summer. Cosmetically, the changes may only be a few. In terms of content, however, we’d like to consider more types of articles on more types of subjects—and, perhaps, in more places than we’ve covered so far. What do you think?

Please leave a public comment here, or send an email to:

burnawayga@gmail.com

You’ve all been very generous with your comments in the past about what we should and shouldn’t do. While you may or may not like what we decide (and then again, we may not decide to change much, after all), we’d like to hear your suggestions now.

More than anything else, we’d like to know:

1. Are there artists and/or art spaces we’ve missed so far?

2. Should we expand to other cities? If so, how?

Additionally, we’ll also be considering:

3. Should we expand coverage to include books, graphic novels, animation, film, design, creative writing, and performance/theater?

4. Should BurnAway.org be more like a blog (shorter, fun posts) or more like a publication (deeper analysis)?

5. Are we “smart” enough? Would you like to see more theory in our analyses, or is that pretentious? Is there a balance?

6. Should our reviewers be more gentle, or should they be brutal? In what way?

Contradictions aren’t necessarily a bad thing, and they don’t necessarily need to be resolved right away, or at the expense of the parties involved. For example, there seems to be a perceived, local antagonism of “globalism versus yokel-ism.” Cyberspace, in my experience, actually tends to close distances in surprisingly meaningful and personal ways. It’s a process I think they’re referring to as glocalism (global + local).

And as our dear friend Georg W. F. Hegel used to say:

Art inspires men to directly opposite emotions, it only magnifies the contradiction of our feelings and passions, and either sets them staggering like Bacchantes, or passes into sophistry and skepticism, in the same way as argumentation ….

If culture of the world has fallen into such a contradiction, it becomes the task of philosophy to undo or cancel it, i.e. to show that neither the one alternative in its abstraction nor the other in similar one-sidedness possesses truth, but that they are essentially self-dissolving; that truth only lies in the conciliation and mediation of the two.

Can’t wait to hear your suggestions!!

Gather Atlanta is an annual networking event presented by MINT, BurnAway.org, WonderRoot, and ThoughtMarker that seeks to:

- Unite and promote Atlanta’s emerging galleries, alternative art spaces, and young creative collectives
- Improve collaboration between Atlanta’s disparate arts organizations
- Embrace a community traditionally separated by Atlanta’s geography or differences in artistic identity
- Provide a forum for creative discourse, fresh ideas, and for sharing resources

See you there!!

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981, removed by popular request in 1989

As debates over the economic stimulus thunder overhead, BurnAway has decided to experiment with new avenues of reporting. We will be launching a handful of features this spring, starting with two distinct, but related, series:

1. Public Art (which started Monday with Meghan Norman)
2. Art and the Economy

According to The Atlantic, nonprofits working in the arts generate “$166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs, and send almost $30 billion back to government” every year. To state it plainly, not only is visual art a viable industry, but it is also a significant part of our economy and, most importantly, worthy of investing more money. The article makes the case for investing in public art as a means to stimulate the economy.

Whether or not you “buy” the argument is up to you. The economy is simply too massive to understand in any clear-cut way. But on the other hand, it might help to consider these issues on a much more local, everyday scale. How does the economy affect you? And how does it affect artists and arts-related organizations in Atlanta? Keep reading BurnAway for more updates, and if you have comments or suggestions, feel free to email us at:

burnawayga@gmail.com