Art review: A stroll through Georgia’s artistic past at MOCA GA

Bottom line: An illuminating, occasionally uninspiring stroll down Atlanta's art-world memory lane.

A stroll through Atlanta's art history, "Selections From the MOCA GA Founding Collection" at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia reminds you of the full spectrum of Georgia's scene, and the richness that can often be eclipsed by newer, fresher flavors.

It’s a reality in contemporary art, as in many aspects of American life, that trendiness can often rule the roost. It is often new-to-the-scene or younger artists who attract attention, curated again and again in group and solo shows. It’s not always a negative, but it can mean more established, road-tested artists can be pushed to the margins. Atlanta galleries and group shows can often feel like a continually recast parade of the usual suspects, the popular, of-the-moment kids, and “Selections” should be a reminder and prod to curators and gallery owners to consider the full scope of Georgia’s art scene.

“Selections” is a reminder of not just some of the artists who form the bedrock of the Atlanta art scene, often going on to instruct the next generation, but of the primacy of an institution like MOCA GA in representing the broad range of the arts in Georgia. MOCA GA was founded in 2000 with a mission to collect and archive work by Georgia artists. Today it boasts a collection of more than 1,000 works by more than 250 artists from the mid-1940s until today.

Another interesting aspect of "Selections From the MOCA GA Founding Collection" is evidence of the evolution of still-prolific artists in earlier stages of their work. There are revelations about specific artists like Don Cooper, who has moved into transcendental abstraction in recent years, as seen in a recent exhibition at Sandler Hudson Gallery. But in a 1982 work in oil painted on a shingle, Cooper offers up a different mode and sensibility in a haunting portrait of a disembodied face with glowing eyes emerging from a murky swirl of color, a painting with intimations of Cooper's metaphysical, hypnotic work to come.

There are the expected players: Radcliffe Bailey and Benjamin Jones, who still have an active presence on the Atlanta art scene. There are reminders of former Atlanta favorites, like the wonderful artist David Ivie, who for a time showed up in many city shows when the compressed angst and delightfully oddball attitude of his tiny Gothic, Edward Gorey-esque paintings were in keeping with the local art world's love of Southern Gothic.

And there are, at least to me, less familiar artists, like Jackson Lee Nesbitt, a Midwestern artist who eventually settled in Atlanta and whose black-and-white lithographs like “Auction Barn” of a cattle auction offer up a vision of American life shaded with melancholy and an affinity to Thomas Hart Benton (a mentor of Nesbitt’s at art school at the Kansas City Art Institute) and George Bellows. It’s also nice to get a visual reminder of the wildness, paranoia and apoplectic imagination incorporating aliens and dinosaur-monsters that often serve as a backbeat to folk art’s whimsy evident in a work by Howard Finster, “Road of Eturnety.”

There are some memories in the mix you’d rather not stroll down memory lane with, including didactic commentaries on race and some “Miami Vice”-worthy pastels that make the ’80s seem like a crazy, candy-colored dream, one we’ve happily woken up from.