SWG
Atlanta Art Fair
Oct. 3-6, 2024
Pullman Yards, BOOTH J-50
225 Rogers Street NE | Atlanta, GA
VIP Viewing:
Thurs, Oct 3: 5-9pm - VIP Exclusive (by invitation)
6-9pm - Fair Pass Holders
Public hours:
Fri, Oct 4: 11am-7pm
Sat, Oct 5: 11am - 7pm
Sun, Oct 6: 11am-6pm
Susanna Gold brings together three contemporary artists -- Lavett Ballard, Nazanin Moghbeli, and Richard J. Watson -- highlighting their conceptual and aesthetic connections while emphasizing their different goals and practices. In the work of all three artists, memory and tradition play a significant role in how each artist approaches their work as a portal to their pasts, and as a space to process their current experiences.
For all art inquiries,
acrylic and mixed media collage with found objects on panel, 18.5” x 20” framed to 20” x 21.5”, $3,500
acrylic and mixed media collage with found objects on panel, 13” diameter x 1.5”, $4,000
acrylic and mixed media collage with found objects, 22.75” x 30”(variable) x 2.5”, $3,000 each or $9,000 total
acrylic on leather mounted on panel, 24" x 22" framed to 24.25” x 22.5”
acrylic on found photograph, 11” x 14” framed to 17” x 20”, $3,000
Much of Richard J. Watson’s work relates to his experiences as an African American man. His imagery-filled mixed media collages and assemblages recall recent and distant memories of his upbringing in the rural South, and his formative experiences in the urban Northeast. Social politics in Sunrise over Money and The Usual Suspects, and ancestral references in The Three Phases of Eve and Queen Victoria, are balanced by the aesthetically fresh abstraction of On a Clear Day. Weighty compositions built from layers of collected materials and found objects – gemstones, metalwork, coins, fibers, beads, toys, and pop culture imagery – bring disparate memories together with the contemporary experience of “real life,” while the vivid color, texture, and pattern in his paintings tie him to the academic tradition in which he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
mixed media collage with gouache, metallic foil, digital archival photos, Gelli prints on Stonehenge paper, 22” x 30” framed to approx. 27” x 35”, $4,500
mixed media collage on birchwood panel, 36” x 36” framed to 37.5” x 37.5”
mixed media collage with Gelli Print and handmade paper on Stonehenge paper, 26″ x 40” framed to approx. 29” x 45”, $5,000
Lavett Ballard, Ashe (So Be It), 2022, mixed media collage on reclaimed wood fencing, 71” x 29.5”, $8,000
Lavett Ballard shares with Watson a grounding in personal memory and a collage technique, but her work is more specifically focused on the role of Black women in the US, including the obstacles they have encountered, the achievements they have made, and the memories they have stored. In addition to creating her compositions on traditional fine art surfaces, Ballard often uses reclaimed wooden fences as a support for her work, as a symbolic reference to how fences can keep people both in and out, just as racial and gender identities can do the same. In Ballard’s work, Black women throughout history appear as embodiments of grace, wisdom, and quiet perseverance, and are depicted as inheritors of our honor and respect. By re-inserting historic photographs into contemporary contexts and hand-embellishing them with a range of materials – metallic foils, abstract prints, burns – Ballard generates new narratives about Black women that bridge past and present.
mixed media on photogravure, 20” x 15” framed to 22.5” x 17.5", $1,400
mixed media on photogravure, 20” x 15” framed to 22.5” x 17.5", $1,400
photogravure monoprint, 20” x 15”, unframed, $1,200
#3 of 5, 20” x 15”, unframed, $750
photogravure, #1 of 5, 20” x 15” (sold)
photogravure, #4 of 5, 20” x 15” (sold)
ink and graphite on paper, 22” x 28” framed to 26.5” x 34.25”, $1,900
ink on paper, 22.25” x 28.25” framed to 26.75” x 34.5”, $1,900
The density of detail and complexity of materials that Ballard and Watson incorporate into their work is balanced by the simplicity of the visual language found in Nazanin Moghbeli’s work. A Persian-American artist, Moghbeli works with a subdued, monochrome palette and works with traditional Iranian calligraphy wooden reeds called ghalams. She uses traditional techniques to create abstract works, paying homage to materials used for thousands of years, while also making it her own. Overlaying her bold ink gestures are fine markings in of graphite and ink, many of which contain reference to historic and contemporary Iranian poetry. Including references to the culture she came to know during her childhood in Tehran before she fled the civil wars of the early 1980s, as well as to the continued struggles of women’s freedoms in Iran, Moghbeli presents a vision of Persian culture as the inspiration for something new and reimagined – steeped in the past, but liberated by a freedom which eludes those who remain in her homeland.
About the artists
Lavett Ballard (b. 1970) holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and a dual BA in Studio Art and Art History with a minor in Museum Studies from Rutgers University. Two of Ballard’s works have appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, first in March 2020 for their special multi cover edition for the 100th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage, and again in February 2023 for Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s essay about her book CASTE: Origins of our Discontent. Recent honors and awards include a 2023 NJ State Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, and the 2024 NAACP Image Award for the inclusion her work in The New Brownies' Book: A Love Letter to Black Families by Karida L. Brown & Charly Palmer.' Ballard’s artwork has also been used in film, television, and literary publications in addition to being acquired by many private and public institutional collections nationally and internationally.
Nazanin Moghbeli (b. 1974) is a Persian-American artist with training in traditional calligraphy, miniature painting, and music. She borrows techniques from Persian calligraphy to create abstract drawings with traditional bamboo “ghalams,” or quills. Rather than using these techniques to create religious objects as they were originally used, she explores the secular meaning of line in and of itself. She seeks the complete dissolution of words and prefers instead to create abstract images, her alternative to religious object making.
Moghbeli grew up during the turbulent years of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. In her art, she grapples with her dual identities as an Iranian and American to shed light on what happens when that which seems disparate comes together. The simultaneous contradictory presence of violence and beauty, conflict and harmony, bloodshed and community are central to her work.
Richard J. Watson (b. 1946) is an icon in the Philadelphia art world. Much of his work relates to his experiences as a Black African American man. His work ranges seamlessly between surreal imagery, haunting portraits, mysterious landscapes, and abstractions, collages, and assemblages. Watson is a graduate of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1968), has taught at his alma mater, and has served in the Exhibitions Department at the African American Museum in Philadelphia since the 1980s. He has been exhibiting his work for decades, and has an extensive bibliography. His work is held in the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Uniworld Corporation; Sony; the Federal Reserve Bank; the City of Philadelphia; Sprint; the Church of the Advocate; the poet Dr. Sonia Sanchez; and the Woodmere Museum of Art, among many others.
For questions about the art and artists,