Art Matters: Engaging the Community through Embedded Arts Journalists.

In April 2013, Macon Arts Alliance (a Knight Arts grantee) announced two grants to support Art Matters: Engaging the Community through Embedded Arts Journalists, a one-year initiative designed to engage the community through high-quality arts journalism. The project received a $40,000 National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works grant and a matching, $40,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The project, a collaboration with Mercer’s Center for Collaborative Journalism (CCJ), embeds arts journalists in local arts organizations, hosts a critic-in-residence at Macon Arts Alliance who works out of the CCJ, and offers a series of six public symposia pairing artists and critics from a variety of fields.

The first symposium in the series will focus on the role of visual art and art criticism in society, current trends, and how the changing media landscape is affecting the fields of art criticism and arts journalism. Susannah Darrow, Shara Hughes and Rachel Reese will be the panelists, and critic-in-residence Steve Murray will moderate the discussion.

According to a release by the project:

• Susannah Darrow is the executive director and co-founder of BURNAWAY, an Atlanta-based nonprofit arts organization dedicated to providing critical coverage and dialogue about arts in Atlanta and the Southeast through an online publication, public programs, and an annual print edition. She serves on the Board of Directors of ART PAPERS magazine. Darrow received a BA in Art History from the University of Georgia (2007) and an MA in Art History from Georgia State University (2013).
• Shara Hughes is an Atlanta-based artist represented by American Contemporary in New York City, Michael Andersen Gallery in Copenhagen and Berlin, and Metroquadro in Turin. She had her first solo show in Atlanta at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center in April of 2013 and was reviewed in the July/August edition of Modern Painters. Hughes is one of the 2011-2012 recipients of the Working Artist Project at the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia and will have a solo show at the end of her award grant in April 2014. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
• Rachel Reese is currently the communications manager of the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. She is an independent curator and arts writer, and former editor of BURNAWAY. She is a native Atlantan recently relocated back to her hometown after several years in Philadelphia and New York. She produces Possible Press, a free, curated publication of artists’ writings. Reese writes for Bomb Magazine online, BOMBlog, and her writing has also appeared in Temporary Art Review, ArtSlant, ART PAPERS, and TWELV Magazine. She currently teaches a critical writing course at Georgia State University.

The first symposium in the series will be held at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, Ga. on October 22. A light lunch will be served at 11:30 a.m. and the symposium will begin in the auditorium at noon. Admission is free and open to the public.

To learn more about Art Matters, visit www.maconartsalliance.org/art-matters.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works. Matching funding provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.