With only wire and empathy, artist Noah James Saunders connects with viewers

The violence fell like a hard rain on Saunders. It was like “legalized hatred,” he said of how some of his Pope High School classmates treated him. “People would be, you know, physically assaulting me in the middle of the hallway or in the classroom of my school.” Teachers didn’t intervene.

Saunders’ eponymous solo exhibition at the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art is a reflection of those formative years the artist spent in Cobb. In a kind of full-circle moment, the Athens-based artist is returning to the Cobb County of his childhood — the one that, for a time, tried to mandate cruelty.

Another person might carry those wounds their whole life, allowing that experience of hatred to impede them.

But Saunders chose a different road.

Credit: Dan Johnson

Credit: Dan Johnson

Aided by a group of what he calls “adopted parents,” Saunders joined a grassroots group, the Cobb Citizens Coalition, fighting the resolution. He had a kind of spiritual epiphany he said was inspired by author Henry David Thoreau’s quiet activism and civil disobedience.

“I suddenly humanized all the people that were, you know, perpetuating violence against me, realizing that it was just their last desperate attempt to stop the inevitable.”

Instead of hating his tormentors, he practiced a kind of radical compassion and used it to inform his artwork.

“I really learned empathy,” he said.

Credit: CRAIG GUM

Credit: CRAIG GUM

But it’s also the place where his elementary school teacher Deanna Dodd encouraged him to start working in his favorite medium, crafting wire into layered, complex sculptural portraits that Saunders likens to line drawings. Dodd recently showed up for a class Saunders was teaching at the Marietta Cobb Museum on wire art, the roles of student and teacher now flipped.

Inspired by Dodd, Saunders began to create artworks when he was just 10. By 12, he had his first gallery show at a space in Little Five Points. He had his first solo show at age 16 at Frameworks Gallery on Johnson Ferry Road in Marietta and has had one show a year ever since.

Saunders’ wire portraits feel like magic. Hung in a gallery or museum, their complexity from every angle can be appreciated by viewers as a three-dimensional sculpture. But the real alchemy happens when viewers shine a special flashlight used in scuba diving onto the suspended sculpture, creating an intricately detailed twinned image in light and shadow on the wall.

Marietta Cobb curator Madeline Beck was thrilled at how excited audiences have been by the interactive nature of his work.

“The ability for guests to physically engage with a piece of art, to firsthand experience how light and shadow convey certain shapes and moods,” she said, has made the show appealing even to audiences that tend to have more traditional tastes in art. Beck has been impressed by the variety of people who come to see the work and linger in the gallery for hours. At his artist talk, Saunders said many in the audience were in tears as he described how his difficult teenage years transformed into art.

Saunders has figured out a way, using various gauges of wire and countless hours creating his sculptures, to create portraits that change and shift with a range of expressions depending upon where the light is cast. His ambition is to capture not mere portraiture but something of his subjects’ souls. The work has similarities to cinema and to shadow puppet shows and, when he projects his sculptures onto buildings, to public art. But Saunders estimates that he is one of only 25 artists worldwide working in wire. And he’s the only one of them working exclusively in portraiture that strives to capture the nuances of human emotion, or what the artist laughingly called “face-based art.”

His solo show at Marietta Cobb is a full circle “positive outcome of my experience of growing up under the antigay resolution,” he said.

And it turns out progress did, in fact, win.

In 2021, 20,000 community members signed a petition to allow a Pope High School transgender student to use his preferred name during his graduation ceremony.

The experience of growing up amid full-time hate in the 1990s was transformative in other ways, said Saunders. Having navigated violence and hatred made him fearless.

“When I was 19, the idea of becoming a full-time artist did not scare me at all.”

Saunders draws inspiration for his art from a variety of places. Some of his work on view at Marietta Cobb was inspired by his friend Marc Zegans’ book of poems “Lyon Street,” about his coming of age in 1970s San Francisco.

Credit: (Courtesy of Pound Media)

Credit: (Courtesy of Pound Media)

Saunders also finds portrait subjects in the intriguing people he comes across online.

“What I’m doing is, I’m finding the same emotions within these people that I see within myself. So in a way, everything I’m doing is almost like a self-portrait, in a sense.”

In some works, Saunders is motivated by strangers whose troubles touch him and make him want to do something to help. His 8-by-6-foot creation “Sheltering In: En Vie,” for instance, is a testament to both the rigor of creating his work and also the humanity and empathy that drives it. The piece took an entire year of five-hour days to create. It is a portrait of a Venezuelan refugee living in Argentina whom Saunders met online and who was about to be evicted from his home. Saunders figured out a way to help while also creating art about the experience by paying the man to model for the sculpture, taking 4,000 screenshots in order to compile a three-dimensional portrait. And the money Saunders paid him meant the man would not lose his home.

“All the work that I do is about me connecting to others,” he said.

“I’m not creating this art in order to feel a sense of acceptance by others. It’s different. It’s more like I’m creating this work to feel a sense of community … a sense of belonging within this greater community.

“So when someone is looking at my art, and if they’re feeling moved, I want them to know its true origin was here in ’93.”

And Saunders’ takeaway from a lifetime of creating this work is simple.

“You know, no matter how bad things get, the good will always eventually triumph.”

IF YOU GO

“Noah James Saunders”

Through June 8 at Marietta Cobb Museum of Art. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Fridays-Sundays. Adults, $10; students, military and ages 65 and up, $8; under 6, free. 30 Atlanta St. SE, Marietta. 770-528-1444, mariettacobbartmuseum.org