BeltLine Live Stream Allows Artists To Showcase Their Works Along The Corridor Virtually
Art on the Atlanta BeltLine showcases the works of hundreds of visual artists, performers and musicians along the Atlanta BeltLine corridor, which touches nearly twenty communities. BeltLine Live Stream returns for its second year, a series of performance works and talks by artists in the 2020/2021 exhibition. “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes spoke with Miranda Kyle, the arts and culture program manager for Art on the Atlanta BeltLine, along with one of the featured artists Jessica Caldas.
Interview Highlights:
This year’s programming:
“I think one of the unique things to point out is that BeltLine Live Stream was really born out of this desire to continually support performance, musicians, and other artists who traditionally work in venues during COVID. A lot of those artists lost those venues and those gigs and thankfully because we are a public art platform, we were able to provide them space to perform and a platform like Zoom, or Instagram, or Facebook in which to share those performances that they created along the corridor,” said Kyle.
She continued, “We decided to continue it again this season and sort of expand the inclusion of who all could be a BeltLine Live Stream performer. We also wanted to include our artists-in-residence and Jessica is one of the participates from our residency. And because performance is such a big part of her work, anyway, this felt like a really good fit.”
About “The Endeavor:“
“It’s a large figurative soft sculpture and at her full length, I think she was about 85 feet long. She’s big and she’s also been dyed this sort of fuchsia-red color and she’s made from recycled military parachutes that I hand-dyed and sewed together. She’s stuffed full of this poly-fiber fill, so she’s the most giant, softest pillow you’ve ever thrown your body on,” chuckled Caldas.
She continued, “She was installed in mid-May and only for one week. I really did hope that people would engage with her and rest on her and lie with her at her resting site, which was just next to the Old Fourth Ward skatepark on the hill overlooking that nice field. Unfortunately, the problem is that people were so enthusiastic about their play with her that overnight folks were jumping into her too much and maybe being too aggressive. They were basically tearing her open overnight, so each morning I had to end up coming back and repair her and sew her up. It was a little bit excessive. She ended up being removed from the site after five days because they kept pulling her apart. Instead, I’m still going to do these three performances and they’ll become a precessional funeral and celebration of ‘The Endeavor’s’ life and all the things she ended up representing, both intentionally as I began, but also through the development and sort of violence and the changes that occurred as a result of what happened.”
Featured BeltLine Live Stream artists include:
- Jessica Caldas, Artist-in-Residence, with “The Endeavor.”
- Nedra Deadwyler, Scholar-in-Residence, with “Historic Preservation as Advocacy.”
- Full Radius Dance with “Restructure.”
- BeltLine Walls panel with muralists Jenevieve Reid, HENSE, Ricardo Moody, ARRRTADDICT, and Brandon Sadler.
- BeltLine Spaces artists’ talk with sculptors Grace Kisa and Ellex Swavoni.
- Performance and artists’ talk with Liquid Sky.
- Elisabeth Herrera Very, Curator-in-Residence, with “Camaraderie: A BeltLine Box Project.”
BeltLine Live Stream runs June 1-30. The schedule for this year’s virtual events can be found here.
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