"Self Portrait" from ”Plastic Bodies.” Bright takes on the dangers of beauty culture by melding real bodies with Barbie dolls.

Evidence of her inquisitive spirit, the three series of photographs sampled here also demonstrate her aesthetic chops, particularly her ability to match the visual means to the subject she explores. For full review, see my story in the AJC.

Sheila Pree Bright: "Classic C II." Bright xplores gun culture in recent work.

Eric Waters: Untitled

Waters approached the project with obvious tenderness. And empathy: The floods ruined much of his life’s work as well. He arrays clarinets like fallen soldiers in some of the images, and in others lays flowers beside them as if in a funeral display.

To my eye, the less artifice the better. The most touching images are the close-up views, in which rows of clarinets fill the picture frame like a tapestry. The photos are as beautiful as they are sad. Ironically, corrosion has left gorgeous patinas of shocking turquoise and shiny rust, which plays off the solids and voids of the brass keys and air holes.

A clarinet may not be significant in the grand scheme of losses endured, but somehow these pictures serve as a metaphor for Katrina tragedies large and small. As White has said, “The instruments no longer sound, but they still can speak.”

Sipp and Waters, who now lives in Atlanta part time, have turned their work into a book. Autographed copies of “The Solemn Sounds of Silence,” which includes the photographs, poems and an essay by Sipp, will be available at the gallery on August 20 for $40.

Shana Robbins performing "Supernatural Conductor"

Robbins’ performances, which generate the rest of her work, represent the desire to absorb the power of the natural and spiritual worlds, which are, in many cultures, one and the same. The persona she’s developed suggests a fusion of human, animal and plant spirits, as signaled by the wearing of antlers made of branches. In the video of the performance “Monstrous Feminine,” she is wrapped head to toe like a mummy (also like the strappy dresses and shoes now in fashion) in strips of green fabric, so that she merges with her wooded surroundings.

Aside: Some of her costumes bear an uncanny resemblance to those worn in African masquerades. Compare, for example, Phyllis Galembo’s photo (left) at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery to Robbins’ headpiece for “This Is Me. Be Careful.”

The performances are variations on a theme and format. The masked artist performs slow-paced, ritualized movements that involve interactions with the landscape setting (from Georgia woods to Iceland seascape) and/or the symbolic trees on view in the gallery.

Shana Robbins: "Tree Ghost II"

The drawings depict scenes from the performances, but they stand on their own because of Robbins’ technical skill and their evocative power. In fact, to my mind, the two-dimensional work and the costumes, which alternate between body-hugging pieces and multi-layered Victorian gowns, are Robbins’ best work. Ironically, despite their importance as sources, the performances are the weakest link in her oeuvre.

Robbins has an eye for visually arresting images. A professional model, she is comfortable with her body and knows how to present it. Her presence and imaginative costumes account for the impact of her performances. But her actions don’t hold the extended attention that a time-based medium asks of its audience, as demonstrated by her opening night performance.

Robbins will speak Saturday at 11 a.m. The show will run through September 19.

Here’s the schedule:

Shana Robbins: "Axis Mundi at Blue Lagoon," detail

11 a.m. Shana Robbins discusses “Supernatural Conductor,” her solo show at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

1 p.m. Pandra Williams talks about “In Significance,” her collaboration with Annette Gates, at Kiang Gallery.

2 p.m. Sheila Pree Bright and others will discuss hip-hop culture, gun culture and body image, as it relates to her solo show “Girls, Grillz and Guns,” at Sandler Hudson Gallery. (Kiang is next door, so you can easily do both.)

10 a.m.-5 p.m. “Thousand Kisses, In My Living Room,” Gyun Hur’s performance at Get This! Expect to see ritualistic cutting of garments and, according to the press announcement, green house plants waiting for kisses and whispers.

Participants also include Astolfi Art, Emily Amy Gallery, Octane Coffee Bar, Saltworks, Tanner-Hill Gallery and Twin Kittens. Check the website for details.

In Atlanta, Cox has made significant and strategically canny acquisitions and mounted a series of diverse exhibitions. Photographers whose works entered the High’s collection during his tenure range from Eugéne Atget to such contemporary artists as Sze Tsung Leong, Taryn Simon and Alec Soth. Amassing 325 photos from the civil rights era, the largest trove in a U.S. art museum, is Cox’s signal achievement, and one already raising the museum’s profile. “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968,” which the High debuted in 2008, has traveled in the United States and is likely to continue internationally.

Just as importantly, Cox made genuine and substantive connections with the community. An active participant in its life, he also helped promote careers by exhibiting and acquiring work by local artists — Sheila Pree Bright, Angela West and Ruth Dessault among them.  

High chief curator David Brenneman, who recruited Cox and will conduct the search for his successor, says the museum values his talents and tried to get him to stay — Brenneman declined to discuss specifics — but said he understands the call of professional advancement that the new position offers.

“Julian had discussed with me his desire to take on more administrative duties,” Brenneman said, adding that the move is the natural progression up the ladder.

One consolation: Cox’s accomplishments, Brenneman said, have made the search easier. “Julian has made the job into a much better and more attractive position.”

In the following interview, Cox speaks with affection and pride about his five years in Atlanta, his reasons for leaving and his hopes for the High’s future.

Catherine Fox: From the get-go, you were involved with the local community. How did that come to pass?

Julian Cox: I had this terrific experience when I came to interview for the job. Photographer Arthur Tress had told me to look up Lucinda Bunnen, who had some of his work in her collection, so the Saturday before my interview, she invited me for tea. She was very welcoming and invited me to a friend’s 75th birthday at the Fox Theatre that night. I had a great time cutting the rug with Lucinda, and the people I met — Nancy Solomon, Ben Apfelbaum — gave me the sense that this is a really interesting community.

That set the tone. On subsequent interviews, I met others. I came in wanting to be engaged, and that read held to be true.

Fox: The feeling has been mutual. You’ve been blessed with a lot of passionate patrons.

Cox: I’m grateful to the museum and the community for their supporting me so that I could do projects at a level that I feel pride in…. It’s definitely bittersweet to be walking away from that. I believe in this city.

Fox: Why did you decide to leave?

Cox: There are a medley of reasons, some professional, some personal — my family’s California ties. I’ve given a lot to my institution, and I was ready for a fresh challenge, but I wasn’t hungrily on the hunt when I was made aware of this opportunity.  

The position is an opportunity to continue what I’m doing in photography and expand into other areas. I will have major responsibility for curatorial programs in American art, contemporary art, international textiles and costume and art of the Americas. It’s an opportunity to broaden my awareness, knowledge and skill set. That’s very exciting to me. That was the decisive factor.

The museum wants to get serious about building its curatorial staff, a number of whom are approaching retirement. I’ll be a part of that. I’ll have a significant role in shaping the institution. That’s very exciting.

Fox: You’ll have some unfinished business when you leave in August.

Cox: [Atlanta artist] Chip Simone is on the schedule for 2011, and the commissions from artists Martin Parr, Kael Alford and Shane Lavalette. The show is the companion to the 2012 MOMA exhibition of  photographs of New York City from its collection. The next curator will curate that show and select the work for the collection, just as I picked up [former curator] Tom Southall’s exhibition of Harry Callahan’s Eleanor pictures.

Martin will be photographing in and around Atlanta. Two events that he has expressed an interest in are the state fair in Perry and the Atlanta Steeplechase. Kael is working on a multimedia project documenting the effects of coastal erosion in southeast Louisiana and its impact on the indigenous communities, which is all the more relevant now. Shane is a young Boston artist in his 20s, who I think is going to be very successful. He’ll be doing work on Southern music.  

Fox: You’ve said you believe that the High’s four-year partnership with the Museum of Modern Art, in which curators from both institutions will create a series of exhibitions for the High, has incredible potential for our community. How so?

Cox: The museum knows it needs to make changes — to reach a younger audience and the next generation, and find relevancy for them. The MOMA project has the potential to connect with them in ways the Louvre couldn’t. It also has the potential to reinvigorate the base. 

Fox: What do you mean by “base?”

Cox: There are two audiences. There’s the general audience, and then there’s the community that’s highly informed. They want the museum to be a bit riskier, fresher. One thing we talked about with MOMA is changing the art ecology of the museum and Atlanta. The 2012 show exhibits three new bodies of work that will enter the collection. It’s about building a collection in an assertive manner to show people we have these aspirations. That’s the side I’ve been most invested in.

Fox: Hallelujah. This constituency has felt left out for a long time.

Cox: The museum’s desire to effect some change is genuine. It wants the dialogue. The community needs to be convinced of that.

The masters of documentary photography of the 1930s and ’40s line the walls of Atlanta’s Lumière gallery. Berenice Abbott. Walker Evans. Dorothea Lange. You won’t, however, find any of their names on the label of that piercing portrait of a sun-wizened Georgia farmer dressed in his city clothes (below), or on the view of a sign-laden New York storefront. Those photographs represent the vision of Peter Sekaer.

Who?

The Danish-born photographer may be a cipher now, but that is bound to change, thanks to the High Museum of Art’s groundbreaking exhibition “Signs of Life: Photographs by Peter Sekaer,” the first in-depth survey of Sekaer’s work, and the eponymous publication that accompanies it.

The exhibition, curated by High photography curator Julian Cox, also chronicles Sekaer’s life and times. An aspiring New York painter turned on to photography by a class with Abbott and encouraged by his friend Evans, Sekaer (pronounced see-kare) was clearly a quick study.

The Rural Electrification Administration hired Sekaer only two years after his class with Abbott, and he continued to work for various government agencies until 1943. During that time he crisscrossed the country, sometimes with Evans, on such assignments as the documentation of slums for the United States Housing Authority.

Along the way, the work became a vocation as well as a livelihood. Sekaer felt deep empathy for the people he encountered and wanted to use his photographs to help ameliorate their hardscrabble lives.

Reasoning that pity only repulses viewers, he believed that humanity was the route to empathy. “He showed that [his subjects] were people you would like, like anyone else in difficult circumstances, trying to make the best of it,” says his daughter, Christina Sekaer.

For example, the image of a toddler on his mother’s knee in “Macon, Georgia, 1936,” posed in the convention of Madonna and child, radiates dignity despite the family’s obvious poverty.

Cox admires Sekaer’s sympathetic but unflinching portrayal of Depression-era life and culture. “I see him as a forerunner to Robert Frank,” who focused on society’s margins in his landmark 1958 book, “The Americans.” “Both were outsiders with a highly tuned social consciousness,” Cox says. (Frank is Swiss.)

Cox also admires Sekaer’s versatility and artistry. The exhibition demonstrates his prowess in photographing big-city architecture as well as rural life. It alternates between the premeditated compositions of “Macon” and the engaging spontaneity of the high-spirited children playing in an alley behind a Charleston tenement. The show also reveals the photographer’s puckish sense of humor and, like Evans, his love of signs, both as abstract form and as cultural markers.

In short, in showcasing his skills, Cox is making a case for Sekaer’s place in the canon of Depression-era photography. And he’s confident enough to have acquired 53 vintage photographs and received 17 more as gifts or promised gifts from Sekaer’s estate to make the High’s holdings the largest museum collection of Sekaer in the country.

The curator had only a passing familiarity with the artist before New York dealer Howard Greenberg, who handles Sekaer’s estate, encouraged him to take a look at the photos a few years ago. 

“The light bulb went off,” Cox recalls.

Besides being impressed with the quality, he saw that Sekaer’s interest in the South and his engagement with the African-Americans he photographed had yielded some of his best work. “I though it would be a good fit, considering our missions to build a collection relevant to the region and to reach diverse communities,” Cox explains. “Since prices hadn’t risen like Evans, I thought we could have a huge impact on our collection and a big bang for the buck.”

The curator turned to his stalwart benefactors for help. Retired businessman Robert Yellowlees, who has a long-term commitment to building the High’s photography collection, agreed to fund the lion’s share of the acquisitions and support the publication.

“It is excellent work, the subject matter is appropriate, and the book is an important contribution to scholarship,” says Yellowlees, who owns Lumière. “I think it adds unique value to the collection.”

Yellowlees says he couldn’t resist the temptation to tout Sekaer by showing his work with his more famous peers. Photography scholar John Hill, who wrote the essay in the Sekaer museum catalog, visited Lumière recently and reported that Sekaer held his own in that illustrious company.

As Hill notes in his essay, Sekaer had begun gaining notice before his death at age 49. The Museum of Modern Art had purchased and exhibited three of his pictures, and photography guru Edward Steichen included him in every publication of “U.S. Camera” that he edited.

Cox attributes Sekaer’s current relative invisibility to his early death and the absence of a photography market at the time. Without an agent to push for his legacy, the photos languished in the obscurity of his family’s basement until 1980, when his daughter Christina, a psychiatrist, took an interest in them. Though the efforts of her and her mother, aided by Hill and the Howard Greenberg Gallery, the work began to get out. Still, there was no traction until Cox became interested.

His efforts are already beginning to bear fruit. He is in discussions with the International Center for Photography in New York about hosting the show in 2011.

All this is very gratifying to Christina, who has been hoping for this day for a long time. “The show is very well curated,” she says. “Julian really got who he was and what he did.”

But it was the audience that touched her most of all. “I was struck by how many African-American visitors were looking at the photos,” she says. “My father was in the South in 1935. Seeing some potential descendants of the people he photographed standing there looking at them was very moving. I now consider the High as the home for his photos.”

“Signs of Life” will continue at the High Museum through January 9. Lumière gallery will host “Peter Sekaer . . . in Context” through August 21.

Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, Van Stiefel, John Otte: "Hinterland," installation detail

Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, its curator and star, based the show on the theme of porous boundaries between urban, suburban and natural spaces, an idea that has animated her work for some time. The Atlanta native, now living in Philadelphia, invited artists who share her interests — six Philly peers and Atlantan John Otte — to participate. Each contributed smaller works, hung in the first gallery, and large-scale pieces expressly made for the second gallery.

“Hinterlands,” an installation she made with Otte and spouse Van Stiefel, suggests an artist in command of her materials and ideas. As in the past, Lathan-Stiefel has built a spidery network made of pipe cleaners twisted into a variety of patterns, which creeps along a collaged wall designed by Otte, across the ceiling and onto the floor.

Arden Bendler Browning: "Blindspots." In foreground,Thomas Vance: "Plan: Cloud and Rock."

Though one might enjoy the piece as a wondrous transformation of trash and common materials, Otte’s contribution shifts its effect to the dark side.

NOTE: Lathan-Stiefel is among the 25 artists who won a commission from Flux Projects.

Julian Cox, curator of photography at the High Museum of Art since 2005, has announced his decision to become the founding curator of photography for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and chief curator of the de Young Museum. Julian’s last day at the High will be Friday, August 20, and he will assume his new position in September.  

UPDATE: read my ArtsCriticATL exit interview with Julian Cox.

Artists the Paper Twins and gallery owner Lloyd Benjamin discuss a figure in the Twins' "Wanderers," part of "Art on the BeltLine"

Even as that chapter unfolds, two artists represented in the “Art on the BeltLine” project, on view through August 31, offer an engaging footnote. The women, who call themselves the Paper Twins, created “Wanderers,” a series of eight painted plywood figures depicting the people who ride the rails without a ticket.

Most of us associate train-riding with the men of the Depression, who did so out of necessity, and the hobos who still do. These grizzled characters appear in “Who Is Bozo Texino?,” filmmaker Bill Daniel’s evocative 2005 portrait of the train subculture, centered on a search for the boxcar graffitist famous for his drawing of a man wearing a hat shaped like an infinity symbol.

But they aren’t the only ones. There’s a youthful cohort of men and women who have taken to the tracks. Some are disaffected outsiders, like the older generation. Others are attracted to the freedom of the zero-carbon-footprint life, the adventure of (free) travel, and/or the thrill of operating beneath the radar, against the law. 

Mike Brodie: Savannah

The old guys have only their graffiti to mark their existence. The young riders, children of the Internet, bring cameras, document their experiences and post them on Flickr. A few, such as Mike Brodie, even hang them in art galleries.

Lloyd Benjamin’s gallery Get This! is Atlanta’s ground zero for such art. The dealer, who started riding trains as a teenager, screened Daniel’s film in 2005 and showed Brodie’s “The Lost Boys and Girls of the Modern Day Railway” in 2007. 

The Paper Twins: Homage to boxcar graffitist Bozo Texino (detail)

Twin No. 1 saw the film, and it made an impression. One of her pieces in “Wanderers” is a cutout depicting a Texino figure drawing his signature image, which she mimicked on a rusty old box beside the BeltLine’s path. Family history may have fueled the rest. Her grandfather road the rails during the Depression, after losing his job as a telegraph operator. He might have cooked a meal over a fire by the side of the tracks just like in her tableau “Mulligan Stew.” 

Twin No. 2 took her imagery from Brodie’s photographs. (Benjamin helped her contact him for permission.) When the Twins took Benjamin to see “Wanderers” recently, he immediately recognized Twin No. 2’s cutout of a disheveled girl (see image above) as Savannah, Brodie’s ex-girlfriend. He also identified the pillow of the sleeping figure nearby as a bag of coal.

Brodie doesn’t live on trains anymore, Benjamin says. Uncomfortable with the art-world success of his photos a few years ago, he quit the rails to get a degree in diesel engineering. Now, after an apparent change of heart, Brodie is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery in New York. Daniel, 51 and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, is on to other subjects. 

The Paper Twins: "Mulligan Stew"

Benjamin, 31, is still not beyond taking a ride now and then. Just last month he hopped a train with Doodles, a 22-year-old California street artist who had completed a mural for Atlanta’s “Living Walls” project. Benjamin showed me an iPhone video he made during the ride — a hypnotic view of tracks and trestles whizzing by as seen through a hole in the bottom of the train car. 

Benjamin went as far as Philadelphia, visited friends there and took a plane home. A bit of countryside, a bit of Zen, a bit of whiskey, a bit of fellowship. Not bad for a weekend wanderer.

Micah and Whitney Stansell: A still from their video projection "Between You and Me"

Many of the projects, which include video projections, performance, dance, music, sculpture and light and sound installations, will be mounted in Castleberry Hill during Flux, a one-night arts event coming Oct. 1. In keeping with Flux Projects’ mission to merge art and daily life, others will show up anywhere from office buildings and restrooms to parks and parking lots.

Projects include “Lima Lives!”, a roving video projection about a peripatetic zebra, by Ed Calhoun, Linda Calhoun and Ralph Brancaccio; Project 7 Contemporary Dance Company’s “The Movement Gallery,” a multi-sensory installation and performance with dancers in a glass terrarium; and “Chance: Atlanta,” a walk performance directed by rolls of the dice by Robert Ladislas Derr (at left).

Many of the artists will be familiar to those who follow Atlanta’s art scene. Sarah Emerson will do a storefront installation. Micah and Whitney Stansell will screen a five-channel video projection. Stefani Byrd and Wes Eastin, whose piece was a hit at last year’s Castleberry event, Le Flash-Atlanta, will  contribute an interactive video installation. A complete list will be available on the Flux Projects website later this afternoon.

Serving on the selection committee were Flux Projects executive director Anne Dennington; board members Susan Bridges, Kristen Cahill, Louis Corrigan, Amy Miller and Marcia Wood; and artist-curator Stuart Keeler, who co-founded Le Flash, the Castleberry Hill event on which Flux is built. 

Although the roster of commissioned projects for the Castleberry Hill event is complete, Flux Projects welcomes proposals for self-funded independent projects. It will call for proposals for the next cycle of commissions in November.