Arts & Events

These are Atlanta's 500 most powerful leaders. We spent months consulting experts and sorting through nominations to get a list of the city's most influential people—from artists to chefs to philanthropists to sports coaches and corporate CEOs. In this section, we focus on arts, film, music, entertainment, and sports.

The new 32-minute original documentary, produced by the Atlanta History Center under its new Atlanta History Center Originals banner, premiered Wednesday night at AHC and illustrates the history of the world’s largest confederate monument by tracking the timeline of its birth.

The installations at the Museum of Design Atlanta’s new exhibition, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, include experimental visualizations, development proposals, facade studies, and building designs. Each riffs off of hip-hop’s methodologies—deejaying, emceeing, b-boy dancing, graffiti, remixing, sampling—to translate hip-hop’s energy into built form.

The pandemic was a time of reckoning for Brooklyn-based industrial designer and educator Stephen Burks, as it was for many. “We were forced to reexamine who we were as people, as a family, as a community,” he says. “We were confronting our domestic laws again.”

In psychology, the “shadow self” is the part of ourselves that we struggle with and choose to reject—our dark sides, if you will. Fascinated by the concept, Lynne Tanzer, a creative consultant, curated a show for Echo Contemporary Art, located with Guardian Studios, that explores this theme.

For a graffiti writer, the tunnel—a mishmash of graffiti art, tags, murals, and festival flyers—was the perfect canvas because the bridge provided cover and its concrete pillars framed the artwork. It served as a platform for young artists to prove themselves.

When guests visit the High Museum exhibit, they can follow a chronological path of Monir Farmanfarmaian’s work. Her stunning mirrored sculptures will be on display—she used a 17th-century Person technique called Āina-kāri, a mirrored mosaic made with paper thin mirrors—but the exhibit goes far beyond that.

Drawing inspiration from similar crawls in other cities, Bunnie Hilliard, owner of Brave + Kind Bookshop in Decatur, and her events coordinator, Vania Stoyanova, are encouraging readers of all kinds to get out and support the local bookstores around the metro.

Sloomoo dubs itself as a “celebration of sensory play.” Glue-based slime is the main attraction, and here, it comes in an endless assortment of textures and colors. Kinetic sand, familiar sounds, and meditative abstract videos provide other methods of well-paced simulation.

In the coming months, the NEXT Movement will begin airing a video series featuring brand-new works from five acclaimed local artists, each filmed in a decommissioned vintage MARTA car. Think of NPR's Tiny Desk series, but on MARTA.