Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
OBM has worked to ensure that each of our sites within A&E Atlanta serves as a community asset through a unique combination of signature design, public art, and meaningful community content. Since the launch of our first sign in September 2019, OBM has invested $7 million dollars in donated signage time to nonprofit organizations, local artist’s, culture institutions and museums to support programs and initiatives throughout Atlanta.
Three years into the making, Orange Barrel Media and A&E continues to find new ways to highlight art and culture Downtown by supporting Atlanta artists and expanding the creative programming in the community.
Genevieve Gaignard
The mixed media installation of Gaignard’s work Look at Them Look at Us (As We Shine Brighter Than They Ever Imagined) is a three-dimensional assembly of materials, including neon–style illuminated letters, hand–woven fencing, and sidewalk projections.
Gaignard is known for multimedia work that addresses questions at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Placing this public commission adjacent to a digital screen offers an enticing opportunity for local artists to engage Gaignard’s message.
Gerald Lovell
Looking at us directly with a faint smile, Grace exudes confidence and warm friendliness. A powerful image, an embodiment of thoughtful grace. Lovell’s signature impasto painting style combines flat, minimally articulated backgrounds with densely layered brushwork on painted figures.
OBM partnered with Living Walls, an organization who advocates for social change through public art, to translate Lovell’s painting style to architectural scale.
Jiha Moon
The artist Jiha Moon often returns to the color yellow in her work because of the many meanings and associations it can have. It is a high-key color used to signal caution or grab attention. It is also a color we associate with iconic images such as The Simpsons and the blonde hair of Goldilocks. Yellow can also be used as a derogatory term referring to Asian and Asian American people. Instead, for the artist, it represents her hope for the visibility of the Asian community in America. The massive, dynamic yellow brushstrokes, combined here with shades of bright blue, are like a powerful and ever-moving wave or river. The colors and forms of this work create a dialogue between symbols of nature, culture, and politics.
Alex Brewer (HENSE)
“The imagery I created for the lenticular wall is based on recent public art projects as well as my studio work from the last few years. I wanted to create a bold design that would read as one unified composition but also break up into interesting areas when viewed from different angles. This is also the first time I’ve worked digitally to create a piece that would be printed and installed on site. As always with my public work, I’m considering the context, architecture, and overall space.” – HENSE
Ash "Wolfdog" Hayner
“The concept for this piece was both about bringing color and excitement to an otherwise bland landscape, and about bringing people together. Utilizing the cement texture of the bridge as the background allowed for the bright abstract shapes to tease the larger, solid image of color on the opposite side of the bridge. Similarly, people from all walks of life use this space to connect from building to building. My hope with this piece is to provide an uplifting and unexpected meeting place for years to come.” – Ash “WOLFDOG” Hayner
Featured Artists
Genevieve Gaignard
Genevieve Gaignard (b. 1981, Orange, Massachusetts; lives and works in Los Angeles) received her MFA in Photography at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and her BFA in Photography at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. She had a major solo project, Smell the Roses, at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in 2016, and more recently a solo exhibition, I’m Sorry I Never Told You That You’re Beautiful, at Susanne Vielmetter Gallery in 2019. She has participated in group exhibitions throughout the United States, including shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the California African American Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography. A newly commissioned work of Gaignard’s was included in the Prospect.4 Triennial, The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, in New Orleans in 2017. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, W Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and Artforum, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem; California African American Museum; Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; the FLAG Art Foundation, New York; the Seattle Museum of Art; and the San Jose Museum of Art.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
Gerald Lovell
Gerald Lovell is an Atlanta-based artist who has gained nationwide recognition for his distinctive style of figurative painting. Lovell’s artistic practice focuses on his own life as a means of self-discovery and self-articulation. The subjects of his vivid portraits are moments from his own life, captured in semi-candid photographs and then memorialized on canvas. Each portrait thoughtfully reflects details and expressions that create an intimate view into the lives of his subjects and Lovell’s own urban millennial experience. One of the elements that defines Lovell’s unique aesthetic style is his bold, expressive layering of paint. Background elements rendered in exaggerated flatness contrast with focal points are emphasized through thick and mottled paint. Lovell’s heavy application of the impasto painting style translates his subjects into three-dimensional figures within a flat canvas.
Gerald Lovell was born in 1992 in Chicago, Illinois, to Puerto Rican and African American parents. Lovell is a is a self-taught artist who began his career after he left the graphic design program at the University of West Georgia. Lovell is represented by P·P·O·W, New York and his work has been displayed at national institutions such as the Harvey B Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, The Houston Museum of African American Culture, and Swim Gallery, Los Angeles.
Lovell has strong ties to the Atlanta art community and has displayed work at local galleries including MurMur, The Gallery | Wish, Hammonds House Museum, Mason Fine Art, and Notch8 Gallery.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
Jiha Moon
Jiha Moon (b. 1973) is from DaeGu, Korea and lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Her works have been acquired by Asia Society, New York, NY, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, GA, Taubman Museum, Roanoke, VA, the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, The Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN and Rhodes College, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Memphis, TN and James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY. She has been included in group shows at Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MI, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA, Asia Society, New York, NY, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, White Columns, New York, NY, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC. She is recipient of prestigious Joan Mitchell foundation’s painter and sculptor’s award for 2011. Her mid-career survey exhibition, “Double Welcome: Most everyone’s mad here” organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum has toured more than 10 museum venues around the country until 2018.
Moon’s gestural paintings, mixed media, ceramic sculpture and installation explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. She says “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” She is taking cues from wide ranges of history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, fruit stickers and labels of products from all over the place. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify, yet stay in a familiar zone.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
Alex Brewer (HENSE)
Alex Brewer, also known as HENSE, is an American contemporary artist, best known for his dynamic, vivid and colorful abstract paintings and monumental wall pieces. He utilizes unique color and composition in his installations to evoke a bold presence in the varied spaces they inhabit. Brewer, a native of Atlanta, Georgia began his career painting and writing on the walls around the city at a young age. He discovered his love for creating art in public spaces through graffiti in the 1990’s. He produces numerous public works worldwide through a combination of techniques learned through graffiti writing and the formal language of abstract painting.
Conscious of the supporting architecture, Brewer dramatically transforms his environments byre-creating existing objects and surfaces and infusing his work into the existing landscape. Best known for his works in the public area, Brewer applies the same processes and techniques in his public art as he does on his interior installations. Through wall drawings and a dialogue between various shapes, color and composition, his process produces larger-than-life abstractions creating textured surfaces and a layering of forms and color. Brewer employs a great deal of thought arranging the shapes he uses, inspiring dramatic compositions and gestures in his finished products. His use of unique colors and patterns, his play with shifting shapes and surfaces, and his intense line quality are a contemporary counterpart to the post-modern masters working in minimalism and abstract expressionism in the mid-twentieth century. Brewer’s use of simplified geometric forms, un-modulated color and hard-edges common in minimalism is perfectly paired with the spontaneous mark making that was common in abstract expressionism. These influences on Brewer’s work exemplify a comprehensive look at contemporary, abstract painting.
Brewer has received recognition as a contemporary abstract painter, exploring, color, form and material. His works in the realm of public art have garnered him national and international attention. He has also received numerous notable commissions internationally and throughout the United States. His largest commissioned work is in Lima, Peru amassing an impressive size of 137 feet tall and 170 feet wide.
With the ability to transform a gallery space or City’s landscape, Brewer’s paintings can act as a unifying thread in a community. Brewer is always inspired by creative expression and process in the public realm and creates works that play an important role in the visual interactions and dialogue of a community.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
Ash “Wolfdog” Hayner
From a young age, Atlanta-based Ash Hayner has been a visual artist. Hayner, who goes by the moniker Wolfdog, began his career as a graphic designer, and has progressively distilled his visual language to the bare necessities of color, line, form, value and texture, crafting images that merge the fundamental characteristics of expressionism with his personal interpretation of technological layering. An accomplished designer, Hayner has exhibited works in both public and private settings across the United States.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District