When Shanequa Gay thinks of her Atlanta, she envisions old school Crown Vics and Cadillacs painted with brand logos and rolling on 24-inch spinners. She remembers the ’90s-era Black college student spring break celebration, Freaknik. She laughs reminiscing about trips to The Mall West End, which she affectionately calls the United States of Black People. However, the Atlanta of Gay’s youth is much changed.
As the City in a Forest becomes the Hollywood of the South, multimillion-dollar mixed-use developments have replaced historically Black communities. Gay, 44, spent her early childhood on the south side of the city. When she was in second grade, her family moved to Riverdale in nearby Clayton County. At the time, the now predominantly Black area was mostly white, and Gay recalls feeling like Dorothy in “The Wiz.” But over time, like Dorothy, Gay adapted, listening to heavy metal and adding films such as “The Breakfast Club” to her pop culture lexicon.
Reconciling her love of a bygone Atlanta and her experience of girlhood has become the focus of Gay’s recent work. In her collection, “The Beautiful Tale of Atlannahland,” her enchantment with the city as an urban playground and her affinity for incorporating fauna in her work coalesce. Little girls, whose faces are represented by zebras, wear crowns composed of the remnants of old Atlanta. The crowns are adorned with peaches, watermelons, and images of the city’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, as well as the Pink Pig ride at Rich’s department store, Blue Magic hair grease, and hot Cheetos.
Atlanta artist Shanequa Gay (Photo by Chuck Marcus)
Pieces from “The Beautiful Tale of Atlannahland” have been exhibited at the Jackson Fine Art gallery and Syracuse University’s Community Folk Art Center. They’ll soon make their way, along with new work, to the 2022 Venice Biennale as part of the “Personal Structures” exhibition, curated by the European Cultural Centre.
Looking back on a childhood of scribbling on her bedroom walls, Gay recognizes that the love and support of her family has been essential to her success. Gay, who earned her bachelor’s degree from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from Georgia State University, says that homing in on girlhood has given her the chance to create a universe where the people she grew up around are celebrated.
Bitter Southerner contributor Kelundra Smith sat down with Gay; her mother, Malinda Bell; and her son, Yasir Shakur, to talk about childhood memories, the labor of art, and cultivating creativity.
Carry the Wait, 2021
Shanequa Gay poses with her mother, Malinda Bell, and son, Yasir Shakur. (Photo by Chuck Marcus)
Kelundra Smith: I want to talk about the appearance of the natural world in your work. I recall the image of deer heads on human bodies being chased by police in some of your earlier pieces. Now, it seems to be about something else.
Shanequa Gay: When I started The FAIR GAME Project, it formed from my dreamscape. I kept having dreams about Black men running from each other and police officers. I was bothered by that because the work I was creating at the time was more on tropes of Blackness, like church scenes. I decided to tackle it against my own better judgment. When I look at it now, it’s didactic. I was in the space of correlating Black men leaping and jumping with godlike forms. On Egyptian tombs, you always see them amalgamating themselves with animal forms. All cultures combine themselves with the animal. There’s a reason why, here in America, all these sports teams are named after wolves, tigers, ravens. We see in all animals some form of courage that we aspire to [have].
When it comes to Black women, the reason I was drawn to the zebra is because they are so community-driven. I read somewhere that a zebra will not sleep unless another zebra is next to it. When I think about Black culture, I want to see that.
KS: Who are the divine women in your life?
SG: I grew up in a village of loving women. In some tribal cultures, mother means home. On my father’s side, these women are a representation of what power looks like. They have girth and they are swarthy. They have the grandmomma arms that make good collard greens. I never felt like I looked like them. I never had meat on my bones until COVID-19. Now, I’ve earned it. On my mother’s side, I think about how the power women in Shakespearean plays had was in their language. They have power of the tongue to will things.
But I also saw how they would cower under men — all of their strength would be taken to please men. I wondered, what is the place called where they don’t have to do that in order to be loved? How do I create a world where they are larger than life, more than enough, and powerful?
Care Watch, 2021
Creation, 2019, archival pigment print
KS: Recently, you created these crowns in your work that are inspired by “old Atlanta.”
SG: Atlanta is a representation of Black freedom. ... “Atlannahland” is inspired by “The Wiz,” and I think our wiz would have been Maynard Jackson. When I think about honesty and integrity, I think about Maynard Jackson and Three Stacks [another name for rapper Andre 3000].
KS: Let’s talk about girlhood, which is your artistic focus as of late.
SG: All of this is a makeup of my memory — of what I needed or did not have as a Black girl. I didn’t see myself in the movies and books I loved, like “The NeverEnding Story,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “The Little Mermaid.” When you think about these stories, a lot of the time, they are pulling from African folklore. ...
I am making up a wonderland in the continuation of “The Wiz,” because I don’t know where we go beyond that. I’ve never seen it, so I have to make it up as I go along. How and when do Black girls see themselves on white wall spaces?
KS: Do you recall a specific incident of feeling othered?
SG: In second or third grade, I went to G.W. Northcutt Elementary in Atlanta, a predominantly Black school. When we moved to Riverdale, I went to E.J. Swint Elementary, and one of the white kids who went to school with me at Northcutt was in my class at my new school. She turned to me and asked, “What do you feel about this new school? There aren’t as many n-----s.” I remember hearing that word as a term of endearment among my family, but I never heard it in a racist context. I was trying to understand [if she was] calling me a n-----. I took that to my mom. I asked her, “What are n-----s?”
I have this collection I’m working on called “Practicing Blackness.” I’m Black, but there’s also this white-girlness. I’d go to my cousin’s house and they would make fun of me. My mother was shoving good diction down my throat and my cousins were popping their tongues and asking, “Why you talking like that?” I remember going in the bathroom to practice talking Black because it seemed like such a challenge. My Blackness was not the same as theirs. ... Now, I feel like I create this Black work to prove that I’m Black, always trying to identify with the person I am.
Recovering Maynard, 2021
Acceptance, 2019, archival pigment print
KS: Ms. Malinda, I understand you started keeping a journal of what it was like to raise an artist. When did you know Shanequa had artistic talent?
Malinda Bell: Sending [Shanequa] to her room was never punishment, because she would draw, color, and read. When she was about 11 or 12, we sent her to her room and she came out hours later and she had drawn these huge caricatures all over her wall. As a parent, my first reaction was, “I know you didn’t draw on my walls.” But they were so good. When she was about 13, we started getting her art classes. I knew she was gifted, and I knew it would open doors for her.
Her junior year of high school, she had an art teacher and they used to bump heads to the point that Shanequa asked me to transfer her out of the class. I refused because I felt like the teacher saw something in her and she was trying to draw the extra out of her. At the end of the school year, when they had honors night, the teacher invited her. She ended up winning artist of the year. Sometimes, we can see things our children can’t see at the time.
KS: As a parent, did her pursuit of art ever scare you?
MB: It never scared me. As a parent, I just wanted to make room for her creativity. Can I say it always went the way I thought it should go? No. ... She’s always been strong-willed. She was born with her fist up in the air.
KS: How did you make home a space where she could create?
MB: She always had a lot of books. If you look at her home now, there are a lot of books. We made readily accessible to her things that would allow her to do what she wanted to do, especially in the arts. She started playing the violin in third or fourth grade. I think all of those things helped develop another level of creativity in her. She’s a creative genius — she’ll challenge things we believe to be normal and make it her own. The way she can see things in her mind and translate it on paper is just phenomenal, and yes, I’m prejudiced because I’m her mom.
Malinda Bell and her daughter, Shanequa Gay (Photo by Chuck Marcus)
Shanequa Gay and her son, Yasir Shakur (Photo by Chuck Marcus)
KS: Yasir, you’re a drummer and producer. What kind of music did your mom play when you were growing up?
Yasir Shakur: A little bit of Lil Wayne, a lot of Common, Mos Def, De La Soul, KRS-One, and A Tribe Called Quest. I was raised as a golden-age-of-hip-hop child. I had my uncle, who was playing Gucci Mane, Ludacris, and Young Jeezy. Then, my dad is a recording artist, and when I lived with him, he introduced me to everything about hip-hop. ... [Mom] dumped all of this amazing hip-hop music onto me. She played so much music, but her favorite album to play when I was a child was “Be” by Common.
KS: How did your mom encourage your creativity?
YS: Mom doesn’t have a lot of leisure time. She works hard to share her work with the world. Seeing her in that mode has made me want to create my own path and do something for myself. I want to make something great for myself because she did it. Every generation should do something different. Mom says we’re all educators and we love to educate people in different ways. One of our cousins is a talented baseball player. He’s started a program to teach kids. We have a cousin [who was a researcher] at Duke, another who does photography. It can only inspire a young person to not want to be a copycat and be great.
KS: What do you wish you had known before pursuing this path?
SG: I wish I had known that I don’t have to do it by myself. Help is an OK thing. [As an artist, people] tell you to say yes to everything, but I’ve learned that when I say no to more things, [I end up] where I want to go. I’ve always had an unbelievable belief in myself, and that came from my grandfather. He instilled in me that I was special, beautiful, and necessary. He and my uncles would always call me queen. They put food in me that I have never digested.
Kelundra Smith is a playwright, theater critic, and arts journalist whose mission is to connect people to cultural experiences and each other. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, Food & Wine, American Theatre, and elsewhere. She is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. She also teaches workshops about addressing cultural identity in cultural criticism at theaters and universities across the country. Follow her on Instagram @anotherpieceofkay for musings on life, art and everything else.
Chuck Marcus is an Atlanta-based freelance photographer. Born and raised in New York City, he has over a decade of work shooting for brands such as Adidas, Nike, Kith NYC, Footlocker, New Balance, and Red Bull, just to scratch the surface. In 2012, he began ChuckMarcus Photography, a digital and print brand that organically communicates concepts and ideas through photography and creative direction.
