Macon Magazine

October/November 2024 | maconmagazine.com 95 See the murals! Follow @maconarts @maconmuralfest to find locations. I have worked with very closely over the last couple of years. I'm proud of Kevin for being here with us, for giving his life to the Central Georgia community when he has such incredible talent. What mentors have helped you? I was very blessed to create a curated exhibit for Theatre Macon last year after Roben Weitz's passing, who was Jim Crisp's husband. I got to put together a fully comprehensive show for Jim using all the photos that Roben had printed out over the last 30 years. Roben is certainly one person who I would like to give a shout out. He's somebody that I miss, and he was the first person I ever watched curate a gallery. I would love to shout out to Eric O'Dell. Eric was the one who taught me of the term eyeballogy, which is just stepping back and eyeballing something. A ton of faculty over at MGA that I would not be the same without, like Charles Ward, Shannon Riddle and Craig Burkhalter. I would also certainly put Melissa Macker in there. I've gotten to grow with her working at the 567 Center, as we have just transformed that space from a very small gallery and sip and paint, to a full-fledged pottery studio and a mainstay gallery community. Talk to me about a challenge that Macon artists are facing. What does our community as creatives need to change? What do we need here? Funding is obviously the crucial thing. We can't move forward without money. Artists tend to make the least amount of money that you have to jump through the most amount of hoops to get to. A lot of funds that are out there are grant-based, which is fantastic, but that means you have to partner with a nonprofit or run your own nonprofit, and there's other headaches associated with that. What work are you most proud of? I'm very happy that when we were graduating college and so many people wanted to leave Macon, I saw the same thing that so many others have seen. I wanted to hold out and stay here. I see a community that had so much talent and love and promise. I am just very proud of Macon in so many ways and proud to have been a small part of the arts, which I feel helped revitalize the downtown. It gave people the sense that was where they want to be. I feel like I can see some of the early fruits bearing on the tree from the work that we've done over the last decade, just around downtown. The biggest challenge is how quickly it is growing. We jumped from 26 submissions our very first year to our second year having 87 submissions. We had the exact same number of walls, which was five. It was a real challenge having to go through all of these incredible portfolios and just having to turn away so many different artists. We hope as we move down the line that we will be able to bring in more walls, which will allow us to bring in more artists as the submission numbers continue to grow. So it's a blind jury process? Yes. We just run through the portfolios – because we're getting so many different people from across the country, it makes it a lot easier because we don't know almost any of these people. We did have a couple of Macon artists submit, and because we had limited slots, we weren't able to secure them for a main mural, but we were able to get a couple of those artists in for the Atlanta Street Art pop up. Tell us how you found your way into being an artist. I really started off in the theatre. I was on Theatre Macon's stage since I was about the age of 10 and was in tons of productions. Through the theatre, I kind of fell in love with the world of creating in general. Whether it's the orchestra performing their music or all the design work and drawing, everything sparked an interest in me. You've become well-known for being part of a collective, the Ocmulgee Artist Guild. Why should artists work in ensemble practice? What have you gotten out of it? It goes to that hive mind effect. Since many of us met in college at MGA, we were all very accustomed to group work. It was very natural because of the institution that we came out of together. Just by having all these different minds in the room though, you might come up with a new way to tackle a problem. When you open it up to the group, there's suddenly numerous different ways that you can approach the exact same problem. Your work, in conjunction with somebody else's work, is actually stronger than both individually. We've been able to do larger installation collaborations. We're able to look at a larger space – like that bicentennial wall – and go: "Right, what can we do collectively?" Tell me about a piece of art in that's moved you lately. Kevin Scene Lewis was just working on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. piece, at one of his final speaking spot before he went off to Memphis. Kevin is somebody who

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