Atlanta Beltline
In 2007, I think ? — I’m too scared to find the actual date — I got a grant from the Atlanta Printmaking Society to do a project on the Atlanta Beltline, which was a ring of old railroad tracks that an urban planner had proposed be converted into a bike walk/path. Like, look at this stuff — this was not the Atlanta of the time! The beltline proposal was genius and clearly both going to go forward and change the areas around the tracks.
I labored over the printmaking project (my first artistic grant!!), completely overspent my grant on supplies, created a very poorly bound book whose pages may or may not have stuck together (I insisted on making the paper by hand — why?! — and then printed on both sides of them) and a poster that’s fairly dark and depressing, and… it wasn’t a big success. But years later, I looked at just the photos, quickly turned them black and white, and was like… hey the actual photos are pretty great and I wish I had made the whole thing a 1000x less complicated and just shot from the hip, instead of overthinking and overdoing everything. (I’m still trying to wrap my head about why I even wanted to make my own paper.) But hey, it was my first art grant, and honestly, I hadn’t even done a thesis in undergrad, so this was maybe the first project I was in charge of, period.
I think a part of it was just my stress about sort of loving these abandoned tracks as they were then, only accessible to those that dared, and knowing that the beltline urban proposal was genius, quite useful for the city, and the way forward. I guess I’m still stressed about stuff like that!
In grad school, I really quickly printed the photos out and made a cheap tabloid sized zine out of them, and it was perfect. (That’s where the laid out pages are from.) The stuff that’s overgrowing everywhere in the photos is kudzu. It is really, really wild wild super fast-growing weed.
