2023 - Full Presentation Schedule
Regulating Space, Race, and Memory: Artwashing the Atlanta BeltLine
Abstract
The most frequently visited section of the Atlanta BeltLine is the Eastside Trail, a three-mile stretch which runs north from the Reynoldstown neighborhood to Piedmont Park in Midtown Atlanta. In the summer of 2020, Black artists converged here, near Ponce City Market, to create a temporary monument for police-slain Black men and women, writing their names and painting their faces on wooden boards nailed to a construction site above the trail where large block letters spelled out “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
In these moments, the Atlanta BeltLine functions as a space for public artistic expression and emotion, a place of powerful public commemoration. Yet even as high visibility of such artist installations articulate the BeltLine as an inclusive space, the murals serve as a stark border between an idealized civic utopia and the material displacement of Black Atlantans. In this paper, we analyze how the Art on the Atlanta BeltLine project functions to artwash the gentrification of surrounding areas.
Borrowing cultural capital from diverse local and global artists and publicizing a goal to “make art accessible to all,” the BeltLine project’s purported support for artistic commemorative justice rebrands the BeltLine as a site of inclusion rather than one of displacement.
Regulating Space, Race, and Memory: Artwashing the Atlanta BeltLine
CASB 108 - History, Politics, and Sociology
The most frequently visited section of the Atlanta BeltLine is the Eastside Trail, a three-mile stretch which runs north from the Reynoldstown neighborhood to Piedmont Park in Midtown Atlanta. In the summer of 2020, Black artists converged here, near Ponce City Market, to create a temporary monument for police-slain Black men and women, writing their names and painting their faces on wooden boards nailed to a construction site above the trail where large block letters spelled out “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
In these moments, the Atlanta BeltLine functions as a space for public artistic expression and emotion, a place of powerful public commemoration. Yet even as high visibility of such artist installations articulate the BeltLine as an inclusive space, the murals serve as a stark border between an idealized civic utopia and the material displacement of Black Atlantans. In this paper, we analyze how the Art on the Atlanta BeltLine project functions to artwash the gentrification of surrounding areas.
Borrowing cultural capital from diverse local and global artists and publicizing a goal to “make art accessible to all,” the BeltLine project’s purported support for artistic commemorative justice rebrands the BeltLine as a site of inclusion rather than one of displacement.