Spring preview: Four Atlanta creatives to watch this arts season

A Microsoft software engineer by day, Vereen teaches at City Dance & Music. Her previous award-winning research resulted in an LED-light suit that corresponds with the choreography and music of a dance piece — physical computing, she calls it.

The former Atlanta Contemporary artist in residence with Dance Canvas is also an Idea Capital Grant winner and a 2023 Excuse the Art artist. (Excuse the Art is a Fly on a Wall works in progress series.) Vereen is taking an architectural approach to her new dance piece, “Mosaka’s Travel,” about her mother fleeing from apartheid South Africa for the promise of hope in the United States. It will debut at 7:30 p.m. April 17 at Synchronicity Theatre as part of its Stripped Bare arts incubator initiative.

“Each dance move is its own little piece of code,” Vereen says. “I’m always thinking, ‘What’s the best architecture for these pieces to come together to create a fully working software — a fully working dance?’” — Angela Oliver

Credit: Photo by Nydia Blas

Credit: Photo by Nydia Blas

Art and Design: Kelly Taylor Mitchell

“Rememory” — Toni Morrison’s notion of recalling the forgotten — largely guides the practice of Kelly Taylor Mitchell, artist and assistant professor of art and visual culture at Spelman College.

The origin of Mitchell’s practice is the memories and work of her grandfather, Millard C. Mitchell. She received his personal slide archive when he died in 2016. His longtime research about their family and Black folks in his native Garysburg, North Carolina, and her native Bucks County, Pennsylvania, catalyzed her intrigue with maroon communities and how African spirituality carried over.

“These bits and pieces of information also allow me to imagine the things that aren’t written or spoken, but embodied,” she says. “My practice isn’t just about researching these stories, it is a type of ancestor worship — it’s my offering to them.”

Her art works are spiritually utilitarian and reflect the meticulousness of hand-making and passing down skills. She uses materials such as logs from the Great Dismal Swamp, hammered kitchenware and “ancestral technologies” such as sewing and beading, honoring their power and significance in the lives and survival of her forebears.

Mitchell recently received the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta’s Nellie Mae Rowe Award alongside Arturo Lindsay. Their works comprise the museum’s ”Through Lines” exhibit in the lobby of the Nia building in Pittsburgh Yards, through March 30.

Mitchell is getting noticed by other organizations, too. She is a 2023-2024 Midtown Alliance artist-in-residence, a 2023-2024 Arts & Social Justice Fellow at Emory University and a 2023-2024 BIPOC Lyndon House Arts Foundation Fellow. — Angela Oliver

Credit: Courtesy of Xavier Dubois Foley

Credit: Courtesy of Xavier Dubois Foley

Music: Xavier Dubois Foley

Last season, composer-performer Xavier Dubois Foley was the hero of his own music. With the Atlanta Symphony, he was the virtuosic soloist for the world premiere of his ”Soul Bass,” a concerto for bass and orchestra. The music was inspired by the ‘70s TV dance party “Soul Train,” and Foley’s concerto was at once sexy, snazzy and swingin’ good fun. His aim was to infuse “a more traditional form of writing with the taste of soul.” Charismatic and pitch-perfect, his playing was alive with emotion. The audience gave the soloist-composer a euphoric ovation.

“Soul Bass” was an ASO commission. Now it’s Spivey Hall’s turn. A Marietta native, Foley started with the ASO’s Talent Development Program, which was aimed at nurturing diverse young musicians. Now in his late 20s, he’s traveled far in a hurry, with commissions stacked up from Carnegie Hall and with orchestras from Miami to Chicago to Portland. Spivey’s project pairs Foley, as composer and bassist, with the esteemed Ying Quartet. All five musicians will be making their Spivey debut.

“When the Ying’s agent proposed a co-commission with Xavier, I jumped on board in a heartbeat,” says Katie Lehman, Spivey’s executive and artistic director. “For music that speaks to us right here,” she says, “there’s no better way than Xavier’s work for the people of Atlanta.” In this April 21 concert, Foley’s new piece will sit on the program with a chestnut, Dvorak’s beloved String Quintet in G. — Pierre Ruhe

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Credit: Courtesy of Lee Osorio

Credit: Courtesy of Lee Osorio

Theater: Lee Osorio

Actor, director and playwright Lee Osorio is having the best of times and the busiest of times this spring. He’s currently appearing as Sydney Carton and a variety of other characters in “A Tale of Two Cities” at the Alliance Theatre while also preparing for two world premiere productions of his own plays.

While his main character in the Dickens adaptation is driven by unrequited love, Osorio finds the larger questions posed by the script to be most intriguing.

“What excites me about this piece are the big questions that it boldly asks, and it does not provide answers,” he said. “This is not a play that has a political agenda beyond asking these big, seemingly eternal questions. This isn’t preaching to anybody. It’s really asking us to take a look at the current political system we live in and ask if this is what justice looks like — if this is the version of reality that we want, how we arrived here and where we should go from here.”

Osorio also wrote and stars in ”Prisontown,” a one-man show premiering at Savannah Repertory Theatre in May. He conducted interviews with people in his Georgia hometown of Lumpkin who are affected by its prison complex. In addition, he will direct a show at Stage Door Theatre, ”Native Gardens.”

His play, “A Third Way,” which won the Del Shores Foundation Writers Search in 2023, premieres in October at Actor’s Express, where he has performed multiple times. Osorio described having one of his own scripts there as heartening. “The biggest thing to come from the production so far is more confidence in my writing,” he said. — Benjamin Carr

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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