The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
fantastic FOURSOME
Keep an eye on these up-and-coming local artists who excel in dance, theater, music and art and design.
Dance: Thulani Vereen
Nearly a decade after sneaking into dance classes at Spelman College while studying computer science, Thulani Vereen fuses the two. Her research centers on the use of computer science methodologies to create movement vocabulary and physical algorithmic thinking, and inform arts innovations.
“The foundation of computer science is an algorithm, a step-by-step process to accomplish an objective,” she says. “In dance, that’s how technique is created.”
A Microsoft software engineer by day, Vereen teaches at City Dance & Music. Her previous award-winning research resulted in an LED-light suit that corresponds with the choreography and music of a dance piece — physical computing, she calls it.
The former Atlanta Contemporary artist in residence with Dance Canvas is also an Idea Capital Grant winner and a 2023 Excuse the Art artist. (Excuse the Art is a Fly on a Wall works in progress series.) Vereen is taking an architectural approach to her new dance piece, “Mosaka’s Travel,” about her mother fleeing from apartheid South Africa for the promise of hope in the United States. It will debut at 7:30 p.m. April 17 at Synchronicity Theatre as part of its Stripped Bare arts incubator initiative.
“Each dance move is its own little piece of code,” Vereen says. “I’m always thinking, ‘What’s the best architecture for these pieces to come together to create a fully working software — a fully working dance?’” — Angela Oliver
Art and design: Kelly Taylor Mitchell
“Rememory” — Toni Morrison’s notion of recalling the forgotten — largely guides the practice of Kelly Taylor Mitchell, artist and assistant professor of art and visual culture at Spelman College.
The origin of Mitchell’s practice is the memories and work of her grandfather, Millard C. Mitchell. She received his personal slide archive when he died in 2016. His longtime research about
their family and Black folks in his native Garysburg, N.C., and her native Bucks County, Pa., catalyzed her intrigue with maroon communities and how African spirituality carried over.
“These bits and pieces of information also allow me to imagine the things that aren’t written or spoken, but embodied,” she says. “My practice isn’t just about researching these stories, it is a type of ancestor worship — it’s my offering to them.”
Her artworks are spiritually utilitarian and reflect the meticulousness of hand-making and passing down skills. She uses materials such as logs from the Great Dismal Swamp, hammered kitchenware and “ancestral technologies” such as sewing and beading, honoring their power and significance in the lives and survival of her forebears.
Mitchell recently received the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta’s Nellie Mae Rowe Award alongside Arturo Lindsay. Their works comprise the museum’s “Through Lines” exhibit in the lobby of the Nia building in Pittsburgh Yards, through March 30.
Mitchell is getting noticed by other organizations, too. She is a 2023-24 Midtown Alliance artist-in-residence, a 2023-24 Arts & Social Justice Fellow at Emory University and a 2023-24 BIPOC Lyndon House Arts Foundation Fellow.