Review: ‘Drawing Inside the Perimeter’ celebrates Atlanta’s artistic gifts

Bottom line: This group drawing show featuring all local artists is an important, long-overdue testament to Atlanta's rich artistic landscape.

Atlanta artists have long had a tempestuous relationship with the High Museum of Art. For decades, many have complained about the lack of shows devoted to work by area artists and the large divide between this gleaming white citadel on the hill and the artists unable to breach its walls.

But “Drawing Inside the Perimeter,” a group show featuring 41 Atlanta artists, feels like nothing short of a sea change for spotlighting local talent.

It is a show organized by the High’s very on-the-scene, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Michael Rooks with contributions by another Atlanta art insider and curator, Marianne Lambert, that offers the curatorial version of a high-five to Atlanta’s art scene. All 56 works in the show, save one, were acquired for the museum’s collection by Rooks. It’s a notable achievement and acknowledgment of the city’s talent, now archived in the High’s collection for subsequent generations.

It’s also a rarity. Beyond a show devoted to Atlanta artist Radcliffe Bailey in 2011, it’s hard to think of a moment in the past 20 years when the High offered such a profound, far-reaching and impressive celebration of Atlanta’s unique artistic achievements.

Viewers with any interest in what Atlanta artists are up to who haven’t visited one of the many galleries around town — Get This Gallery, Beep Beep, Barbara Archer, Sandler Hudson, Whitespace — that regularly feature their work should consider “Drawing Inside the Perimeter” their Cliffs Notes.

The show is filled with great work and has the added advantage of being surprisingly comprehensive. Rooks has done an admirable job of bridging the next artistic crop of millennials working in the city and the established, longtime cultural producers who have taught and influenced some of that younger generation: Joe Peragine, Philip Carpenter, Donald Cooper and Rocio Rodriguez — representing Atlanta’s old guard.

Linked by the medium of drawing (although the term is almost absurdly broad here, including Brian Dettmer’s “drawing” with an X-Acto knife and Daniel Biddy’s collaged media imagery), scale and approach are wildly different. The ultimate example of scaling institutional walls, the graffiti artist Alex Brewer, who initially plied his trade on abandoned buildings, has created a work on one of the gallery walls, a wild style explosion of color: acid green, hot pink and mauve acrylic paint splashed across one wall, a frenetic balance to the more meditative, earthy color scheme of the second commissioned wall-drawing by Rodriguez.

Using scale in an entirely different way, Seana Reilly’s exquisite miniature “Artifacts (Nine Drawings)” in liquid graphite can only be truly discerned with the magnifying glass on hand. Peering through the glass, these miasmas of gray and black magically transform to reveal seascapes and figures.

Atlanta artists of late have often shied away from political messages and social commentary, but there are reminders here that it was not always so, in the still powerful work of a onetime fixture on the Atlanta art scene, Charles Nelson — who died in 2009. His smart, funny, piquant work often talked about identity, especially African-American identity. Two of Nelson’s works in watercolor and graphite shown here and inspired by Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” envision Nelson as a castaway figure struggling for acknowledgment, present but invisible in the world.

Also embracing politics and taking a lyrical approach to the AIDS crisis, artist Robert Sherer offers a powerful piece from his series created with HIV-positive and -negative blood. In Sherer’s “Hookups,” images of tiny humanoid butterflies meld art nouveau and psychedelia into an unsettling, beautiful whole.

What “Drawing” proves at every corner is how fascinatingly diverse the art landscape is, tendering expressions of angst and lyricism reaching back to cubism and surrealism and then drawing visibly from a subculture of tattoo art, graphic novels and graffiti. A pair of delightfully quirky pen and ink drawings by Harrison Keys explode with color and wit and balance the more melancholy, haunting intimations of loss and disaster from Yanique Norman, Jason Kofke, Katherine Taylor and Tristan Al-Haddad.

As a whole, this is an important and long-overdue show that finally brings to the fore — and to a new audience — the many artists who have made Atlanta’s art scene complex and dynamic. But it is also a show of artists who can hold their own in any city.