Donald Locke at the Nexus of Atlanta and the World

Guyanese-born Grace Aneiza Ali is a Curator and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Florida State University and is a 2024-25 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at The Huntington Library, Los Angeles. As a curator-scholar of contemporary art of the Global South, her curatorial research practice examines the links and slippages at the nexus of art and migration. Her book, Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora explores the art and migration narratives of women of Guyanese heritage. Ali serves as Editor-in-Chief of the College Art Associations’ Art Journal Open and member of the Board of Advisors for British Art Studies. She is a 2024 recipient of the Rose Library’s Donald C. Locke Research Fellowship.

In the Fall of 2024, I will be a Guest Curator for Atlanta Contemporary, where I will be mounting the exhibition, Donald Locke: Nexus. The exhibition is scheduled to be on view from October 24, 2024 to February 2, 2025.  Through the Donald C. Locke Research Fellowship at Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, I was able to access archival material within the The Donald Locke Papers that were instrumental to the exhibition and greatly informed and elevated its curatorial thesis.

In 1992, when the then 61-year-old Donald Locke (1930-2010), artist, teacher, critic, and poet, moved into his new brick-wall warehouse studio space at Nexus, the grassroots artists’ cooperative that would later become Atlanta Contemporary, a leading contemporary art center in the city, he remarked, “I feel that this is the beginning, the nucleus of something.” In honoring Locke’s penchant for the literary, the poetically abstract, and the unknowable, the exhibition Donald Locke: Nexus engages the multiple meanings of “nexus”—to bind or tie, to connect—to reveal Locke’s practice as one shaped by the intersection of ideas, mediums, temporalities, and geographies. The exhibition brings together seminal works, including painting, sculpture, and ceramics, that span the artist’s dynamic 60-year career. Placing works made during Locke’s time at Nexus and in Atlanta (1992-1997) as a centerpoint, the exhibition extrapolates how this time and space indeed served as a “nucleus of something” for Locke. Linking these Atlanta-made works to the artist’s journey across Guyana, London, and Arizona, the exhibition probes the ways in which a pursuit of nexus permeated his work in both tangible and symbolic ways. Donald Locke: Nexus engages Locke’s legacy, as a Guyanese-born immigrant and transnational artist whose global perspective reflected an increasingly global Atlanta—the city and the people who shaped him and the prolific last chapter in his oeuvre.

Earlier this summer, in June, it was invaluable to spend time in the Donald Locke Papers, examining materials that would help shape a narrative of Locke’s years at Nexus in Atlanta and how those years informed and catalyzed his future practice and trajectory as an Atlanta-based global artist. I particularly looked at correspondence, photographs, newspaper clippings, ephemera, and other archival and exhibition-related materials during the decade of the 1990s—a watershed period in the artist’s practice and presence in Atlanta. The archival material I looked at gave character and nuance to a very fertile time when Locke moved to Atlanta, received a five-year grant to be in residence at Nexus, participated in the Atlanta Biennial, received a commission for a public sculpture from CODA (Commission for Olympic Development of Atlanta) and had his work acquired by major institutions. Reading through Locke’s various letters and email correspondences, I was particularly struck by Locke’s rigorous and ambitious pursuit to not only solidify a place for himself within the city’s artistic landscape, but his relentless advocacy for the community of Atlanta-based artists as well. In both pursuits—for himself and his contemporaries—he had always been championing the city of Atlanta as important and central to not just the artistic landscape of the American South, but to global art history as well.

My findings from this research time at the Stuart A. Rose Library has helped to strengthen the curatorial arc of the Fall 2024 exhibition, inform an exhibition essay, and opened up several possibilities for proposed public and education programs that aim to educate young audiences and students about Locke’s contribution and pivotal role to Atlanta’s cultural landscape.

Finally, I was in awe of the breadth and range of material that had been collected and organized in the Donald Locke Papers. What they revealed was the incredible commitment of Brenda Locke, director of the Donald Locke Estate to open up the artist’s legacy for future scholarship and exploration. I was also reminded of the visionary prowess  of the late Pellom McDaniels, curator of African-American Collections, who always acknowledged the importance of Donald C. Locke as an artist of global influence and the importance of preserving his intellectual and artistic legacy. The existence, care,  and stewardship of the Donald Locke Papers at Emory is a beautiful example of the importance of libraries to artists and vice versa.