LISTEN: Ahead of the 2025 Ideas Festival Emory, GPB's Kristi York Wooten interviews Randy Gue, curator and assistant director at Emory University's Rose Library, about the definitions and meaning of various forms of street art.
The annual Ideas Festival Emory is back with a full-slate of in-person programming at its Oxford campus on Saturday, Oct. 18, including discussions around public art, architecture, movies, and more.
Event headliner and Grammy winner Rosanne Cash will participate in a live taping of the Sing for Science podcast with host Matt Whyte and Dr. Robyn Fivush, Distiinguished Professor of Psychology at Emory at 5:00 p.m. The all-day featival features exhibitions, live music and performances, games for kids, food and drinks, and conversations and presentations. It's free with registration.
Randy Gue is the assistant director of collection development at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. He's hosting a forum at 11 a.m. called Who Did That? Public Art and the Walls of the City, featuring nationally recognized street artists, Jonesy and Poest.
He spoke with GPB's Kristi York Wooten about the topic.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kristi York Wooten: Did you come up with this "public art and walls of the city" topic? And if so, can you tell me a little bit about how and why.
Randy Gue: So I did not come up with this. Daren Wang, assistant director for Emory University's Center for Public Scholarship and Engagement (CPSE), actually approached me about doing it. So Daren knows of my interest and the Rose Library's interest in graffiti and style writing and public art. We have collections at the Rose Library that are related to this. And so he approached me and said, "Would you be interested in having a conversation with a graffiti writer and also with a street artist at the Ideas Festival?" And I thought that was a fantastic idea. So I went out and located some folks who would be happy to participate in that and kind of give folks a little bit of a behind the scenes look at what goes on to do public art.
Kristi York Wooten: I grew up knowing about the Keith Harings of the world and a lot of New York subway art. It was a turning point when it did become art. In other words, "Oh, it's graffiti. It's horrible. Look at that." And then, all of the sudden, graffiti was like, the thing. So I feel like we're in a different phase of that now, where public art is much more curated, much more planned. Since you're an archivist, what trends you have seen in either acceptance of graffiti art or just in the way artists view their role in it? That's a big question, but maybe that can get us started on that topic.
Randy Gue: That is a big question. And I guess we should start kind of with some definitions first. "Public art" is kind of a newer term that embraces both the "G word," which is graffiti, right? The people who do it do not use that term. They say they are "writers," and what they do is "writing" because they are focused on typography. They care about letters. So, when you're talking about subway graffiti and all that, you almost — very rarely saw figures that went with that. It was letters. It was tags. It was typography, right. They were really interested in that. And so, they call it writing. Civilians call it graffiti. They call it style writing. ... And then when you get to street art and murals, those folks aren't as interested in typography, right? You will find images, figures, designs and all that. And so that's kind of the difference between these things. So Yeah. So there are interesting aesthetic divisions, right?
So with style writing, a lot of that is still illegal. And so — there are "permission walls," right? Poest, who will be a part of this conversation, is actually the curator and custodian of the So So Def Wall on the Beltline, which is the Atlanta Style Writing Hall of Fame. Businesses also ask graffiti writers to add stuff, right? So there are permission walls, as they call them, that you can do that sort of thing now. But we had a panel discussion with a bunch of writers to go with an exhibition we had at the library and I asked them ... I can't remember the exact number, but 90 or 95% of them said they wouldn't keep doing it if it was legal, right? There's something about the adrenaline and all. You know, it's all — the creativity and the adrenaline go together. Even though some of them are getting a little old to be chased out of freight yards by police and Pinkerton detectives, but they still like that.
As far as street art goes, you're absolutely right. Developers are actually inviting, paying artists to come in and create things on their property. And that is a huge change from what went on in the past. Governments are reaching out —local city, county governments are reaching out to artists, offering grants to create this artwork in public places. So that is a huge sea change in how it's been perceived and how it's being embraced in the community. I'm going to ask both Jonesy and Poest about this on Saturday, because I'm interested in their takes on this. One [style] involves lengthy permitting processes and dealing with local bureaucracy and [the other] Involves sneaking into places and doing it under cover of darkness and all that. So I'm interested to see what they say about it. And usually when I do these types of conversations, people say, "Let me know what the questions are going to be. I want to know what the questions will be." But both Poest and Jonesy, in separate meetings, said they don't want to know. I mean, I think the reason why they don't want to is that spontaneity is part of their art and part of their creativity. And so they just want to be spontaneous within the moment. So it's going to be interesting to see how this goes.
Kristi York Wooten: [Tell us] a little bit more about Jonesy and Poest, the panelists.
Randy Gue: So Poest has been writing since the late 1980s. He began his writing career in Brooklyn, New York. And he is currently a custodian and curator of the So So Def Wall, Atlanta's Style Writing Hall of Fame. And Krista M. Jones, aka Jonesy, is an Atlanta muralist and artist. She specializes in large-scale and monumental-scale murals. The one she's currently working on is 10,000 square feet, the size of the house. It's hard to comprehend. And her work appears throughout metro Atlanta.
Kristi York Wooten: So there's a separation between style writing and what we would call the public art that we know as murals in the city, especially. But one of the things that struck me about the headline for your panel, "Who Did That? Public Art and the Walls of the City" is it almost made it sound like city walls, [as in enclosures, exclusivity]. The history of graffiti, obviously being illegal, but also being something that, "Oh, that's something you only find in cities." And now, you know, there's [both graffiti] and beautiful murals in every nook and cranny of every brick building in Georgia. As a sort of a historian and keeper of some of those stories as a librarian, can you pinpoint maybe when and why things evolved to accept different types of outdoor art?
Randy Gue: I mean, it's interesting, because I love it, because it becomes the only art I see on a daily basis, right? Like, governments throughout the metropolitan area are giving street artists grants to create murals, because it's a part of walkable spaces, making places inviting. Same reason why developers pay artists to create art on their developments, their buildings. It changes the context of the urban environment. You have something bright, colorful. That's what I love about it, just going through the city, Is during the course of the day, I will see art, art that is bright, that is colorful, that is dynamic, and most importantly, art that isunexpected, that appears in places that I don't expect it to. And so that's the appeal to me personally, but I also think that over time, people have also realized the value in that, if you will.
Kristi York Wooten: It's also kind of a placemaking element in the sense that, especially with in Atlanta, I can think of a list of murals in my head that speak specifically to the Black experience and specifically to another layer of issues experienced primarily by the Black communities in Atlanta. It's not only something, like you said, that was walkable; it's part of the community. It's art that you interact with, that you see that you wouldn't ordinarily see, but also, increasingly, it's symbolic. I'm thinking of especially the John Lewis mural that's downtown Atlanta and ... it's like a unifying thing. It's like, we can all look to that and feel something. And I think that, I think in the past decade or so, I mean, you had Banksy and things like that that weren't necessarily happening in our communities here in Georgia. You have it now where it's it feels like an urgent form of expression. It's not just "get the grant and do the mural," but it's like i can't even imagine driving and going places in the city and not having new murals to greet me or to feel like i'm in a city whereall types of people are represented in these murals. I wanted to get your take on it, too.
Randy Gue: You're absolutely right. I mean, the murals and the style writing provide an anchor, a memory for a place. I'm an Atlanta urban historian by training. And we are in the midst of our housing restock and our urban environment being completely remade. And these murals, these places are a way to remember what came before and where these places and neighborhoods, what these places were, and also people. Because as usual, Atlanta has never valued its past, right? Joel Gereau, the journalist asked, what's the most important color in Atlanta? He asked this, like, in the late '80s. The most important color in Atlanta is green, right, money. So we do not respect or really preserve the past. And so I see these works as an important way to preserve place, but also to preserve of memories in Atlanta's history.
