Lonnie Holley was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama. From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood.

Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events. His work is now in collections of major museums throughout the country, on permanent display in the United Nations, and been displayed in the White House Rose Garden. In January of 2014, Holley completed a one-month artist-in-residence with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva Island, Florida, site of the acclaimed artist’s studio...Read More.

During Holley’s residency, he created Mixed.

Cosmo Whyte is a Jamaican-born, trans-disciplinary artist who employs drawing, performance, and sculpture to create conceptual work that explores how notions of identity are disrupted by migration—particularly migration as an unfinished arc of motion whose final resting point remains an open-ended question. He situates his work in the liminal space between early culture shock and final acclimatization. Cosmo's creative process begins through the interrogation of his own body and the personal memories that are embedded within it. He uses this archive as his entry point into collective political interrogations.

During his residency at Elsewhere, Whyte created Guess Who is Coming to Dinner.

Iman Person is a visual artist and sculptor based in the Atlanta area. Her use of natural materials and ritual consciousness, create a hybrid reality between physical space and ethereal realms. Coupled with the concept of authentic nature; she embeds qualities of the feminine, primordial memory and anthropological customs to illustrate lineage and identity within the new, synthetic landscape.In 2010 she received her B.F.A from Georgia State University and has become a fixture both in exhibition spheres and public art arenas. In 2012, she was included in Barbara Archer Gallery’s, “Talent Loves Company”, and named one of the 30 most influential artists in Atlanta. She is a member of the Atlanta based collective, Dashboard Co-Op, is a 2011 Hambidge fellow and is 2013-2014 Walthall fellow.

Iman created All Acts of Pleasure during her time here.

Martha Whittington’s constructed environments speak to the tenderness and innocence of the human spirit as it faces the harshness and treachery of life and labor. By recreating the history of significant objects and ideas such as manual tools, antique devices, and life experiences of laborers, she builds an immersive experience. This new view of life and labor asks the audience to re-examine concepts, archetypal associations and connotations. Whittington has been the recipient of artist residencies at the Bemis Center in Omaha Nebraska and the Hambidge Center-Creative Arts in Rabun Gap Georgia. In support of her work, she has been awarded grants from the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia (WAP), Office of Cultural Affairs Atlanta and Austin Green. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally with shows at Moot Gallery, Hong Kong, Dans Kamera Istanbul, Turkey, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville Florida, Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, and the AMOA-Laguna Gloria Austin Texas. Whittington received her B.F.A. in Sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute. She received her M.F.A. in Sculpture From Tyler School of Art.

Nikita Gale is a self-taught conceptual artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a BA in Anthropology (Archaeological Studies) from Yale University and exhibits regularly throughout Atlanta, Georgia and New York City, New York. She was an Artist-in-Residence at The Center for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, New York in 2011 and is currently in the Studio Artist Program at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. She currently serves on the board of directors for BurnAway, and Atlanta-based non-profit arts publication.Her work can be found in numerous collections including the Howard Greenberg Gallery collection in New York. Gale has had work featured in ART PAPERS, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Headline News, and Oxford American and has been profiled and reviewed by numerous publications including Frank151 and Artforum. Listen: Interview with WUNC's The State of Things July 16, 2013, Live from Triad Stage

John Q is an idea collective whose name references “John Q. Public.” The “public” is left understood, though the work is considered a kind of public scholarship, and the “Q” is left hanging to reference the group’s interest in queer history and politics. The collective consists of Wesley Chenault, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr. John Q has been funded by Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue (New York) and has participated in the 2012 National Queer Arts Festival at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco.

Joey Orr holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an ABD Arts and Sciences Fellow at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. His dissertation, Practicing the Past: Socially Engaged Remembering in Contemporary Art, looks at cooperative memorial practices at the intersection of memory studies and art history. The study includes a practice component in the context of the collective, John Q, of which he is a founding member. Joey also currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal for Artistic Research (Bern, Switzerland). Past projects have been reviewed by Art Papers, Art in America, ARTnews, Contemporary (UK), Public Art Review and Sculpture magazine, among others.

Wesley Chenault is a certified archivist and head of special collections and archives at Virginia Commonwealth University’s James Branch Cabell Library. His interests in memory, place, and identity take forms as diverse as collection development, exhibitions, public art, teaching, and traditional scholarship. Chenault’s work on Atlanta LGBTQ archives, history, and memory includes the book Gay and Lesbian Atlanta; public artworks, exhibits, and publications with idea collective John Q; and exhibitions at the Atlanta History Center and online through OutHistory.org. He holds a PhD in American studies from the University of New Mexico and a MA in women’s studies from Georgia State University. 

Elsewhere Project | Untitled (Books)