Art in Atlanta

Savannah College of Art and Design professor Marcia Cohen spent the month of April in a residency at the American Academy in Rome, which SCAD has endowed. Cohen was the first visual artist to receive this fellowship. While in Rome, she continued a long career of color research, studying the palette of the Roman cityscape and the colors of antiquity.   

Cohen also completed a 110-foot-long installation (at left) that infuses the academy’s cryptoporticus, or covered corridor, with ethereal blue light.

Meanwhile, Kennesaw State University has received a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for KSU professor Matt Haffner‘s planned multimedia installation in the foyer of KSU’s visual arts building. Haffner, who teaches photography, will create a two-channel video about working-class people and project it on painted and cutout figurative silhouettes.

“It is a great honor to be recognized for my work by the NEA and for them to feel it is worthy of a grant from them,” says Haffner, who had never applied for the grant before.

Both artists have been recipients of Working Artist Project awards, administered by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. In 2011, Cohen toured Tunisia and Morocco on a Fulbright Hayes fellowship.