Located in the manically gentrifying Westside close to Georgia Tech and the Atlanta University Center, Atlanta Contemporary was founded as Nexus by a group of photographers in 1973. It has since become a fixture on Atlanta’s art scene as a hub for contemporary art exhibitions, a kind of creative campus with 13 artist studios and home to the semi-annual Art Party and Open Studios events.

Atlanta Contemporary has buoyed the careers of studio artists such as Craig Drennen, Sergio Suarez, Dianna Settles and Paul Stephen Benjamin, who have gone on to exhibit nationally and win recognition from organizations like the Guggenheim Foundation and Artadia.

Credit: Courtesy Atlanta Contemporary

Credit: Courtesy Atlanta Contemporary

Despite being well-known in Atlanta’s insular art world, Hall says the biggest challenge for the institution is “generations of people in the Atlanta area who don’t know who we are.”

Hall’s goal is to have people embrace Atlanta Contemporary the same way they do Atlanta: fiercely, protectively, enthusiastically.

“And I think once we do that, then the growth in visibility will be exponential.”

A graduate of Morehouse College where he studied math, and then the Georgia Institute of Technology where he received a BS in mechanical engineering, Hall has had a slightly circuitous route to his present berth at Atlanta Contemporary.

He initially worked in aerospace engineering for Lockheed Martin. In 2007 Hall moved to New York City to attend Columbia University’s MBA program and spent a semester in London studying business.

While working in New York, Hall produced his first podcasts, interviewing fellow business students from Boston, Hong Kong, Ukraine. More than 800 podcasts later, that format has become an expressive constant in Hall’s life — a diary, a creative outlet, a learning tool and a way to engage with the world.

“Media and strategy were my focus areas in NYC,” said Hall of his graduate school days. “So, from that standpoint, I thought podcasting represented a really interesting shift in the media landscape … that would end up affecting every other industry.”

Though he has shifted from aerospace to the arts, Floyd said that, rather than two different industries, the arts and sciences have “always been integrated for me. There’s always been a fluidity there.”

Speaking from the Atlanta Contemporary’s bright lobby, Hall is dressed in a crisp white shirt and stylish olive jacket. He has the squared away, cosmopolitan vibe of someone who is savvy operating in many different worlds.

“I’ve worked just about every job you can have in an arts center except the artist’s role,” said Hall. His diverse stints in Atlanta’s art world began in 2012 when he was a media manager with the grassroots arts organization WonderRoot. Although he still loves the sciences, Hall says WonderRoot was where he discovered he liked contributing to projects with a shorter turnaround time and where he could make a bigger impact.

“The arts ended up being the area where I felt most comfortable and supported,” he said.

Since then, Hall has worked at the Atlanta public art organization Flux Projects, as a creative-in-residence at the online arts magazine ArtsATL, at East Point’s ArtsXchange and as a podcast creator for Spelman College. Before he took the job at Atlanta Contemporary, Hall was the interim director for a year and a half at Science Gallery Atlanta at Emory University. He is also the co-founder and creative director of the community journalism project Canopy Atlanta, which he describes as “fostering more agency for people in neighborhoods to have some ownership in their own story.”

Credit: Atlanta Contemporary

Credit: Atlanta Contemporary

At Atlanta Contemporary, Hall steps in after former Executive Director Veronica Kessenich’s eight-year tenure, and he plans to maintain some of the changes she initiated including the free admission policy.

“I think us maintaining free admission keeps the barrier as low as we can,” he said, pointing to that and free parking as ways to make patron access easy. To that end, encourages patrons to become members to ensure the free admission policy remains in place for future generations. He wants people to think about it like an Amazon Prime membership, he said.

“We exist as a public good the same way that parks and pools do,” he said. “And I think we just want to invite people to invest in that.”

After the departure of Atlanta Contemporary curator Daniel Fuller in 2019, Kessenich mounted exhibitions using a rotating group of visiting curators. It’s a program Hall also wants to continue because of the opportunity it offers emerging curators.

“I want us to be a place where we can attract curators of all ages and levels to do amazing work,” said Hall.

Hall’s approach to Atlanta Contemporary feels very much like his commitment to Atlanta, a city he once described in an ArtsATL story as a place of enormous promise, especially in the arts.

“(W)hen people say that Atlanta is Wakanda, even in jest, I often bristle at the thought because it both sells short the generations of Black struggle in Atlanta while ignoring the vulnerable legacy of that struggle in the present, as income inequality, economic immobility and violence upon the Black body pose consistent and dire threats to the city’s Black culture,” Hall wrote.

At Atlanta Contemporary, Hall said his goal is to celebrate the city of his birth without losing sight of its shortcomings — a critical part of what contemporary art offers in its engagement with issues of race, gender, politics, climate change and social issues.

“I want us to be able to connect to the Atlanta diaspora. The people who are here, the people who pass through here, the people who just love Atlanta from afar — I want us to be able to connect all of those different audiences via contemporary art,” said Hall.

As a longtime resident of a city he has seen grow and change, and witnessed both as an insider and an outsider, his desire for Atlanta Contemporary is straightforward.

“I want it to be like Atlanta,” he said. “We’re global. We’re local. We’re all of the things.

VISUAL ARTS

Atlanta Contemporary. Exhibitions currently on view include works by Timothy Curtis, Coulter Fussell, Chrissy Brimmage, Mimi Onuoha, Stephanie Dinkins and more. Noon-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Free. 535 Means St., Atlanta. 404-688-1970, atlantacontemporary.org