After months of strenuous planning, Victoria Camblin strode around the Art Papers Auction & Party on this unusually balmy winter night recounting the awesome talents represented in this year’s show.
“Art Papers is cool because historically we haven’t been super-formal and it’s never been just about the recognized artists,” she says. “It’s also always been about artists just off the radar. Maybe because they’re not in New York or maybe somehow underrepresented or coming from a different educational background or no educational background at all.”
Art Papers Auction returns to Atlanta
In her fourth year as editor of the famous magazine and artistic director of the venerable organization, Camblin was game this night to serve as both host and herald. Soft music played in the background as guests looking to bid on some of the boldest and abstract art pieces you could imagine mingled with one another while enjoying hors d’oeuvres.
Atlanta’s art scene is alive and well, thank you, in large part to the years of service publications like Art Papers have done to promote it. Camblin says part of that has to do with the liberties the artists themselves have engendered.
“I think art is an interesting area in which to talk about important stuff in freer ways,” she says. “For instance, if you’re a scientist or politician or something, I feel that the constraints around those conversations you can have are a lot more strict, whereas an artist can go in there and talk about language, identity, geographies. They can talk about color and all these other things, and the potential for dialog and the potential for experimentation is just much bigger, but you can still be talking about very important issues.”
This year’s event marked the group’s 19th auction and party. Held on Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018, the event attracted some of Atlanta’s best-dressed movers and shakers to a huge entertainment space adjacent to the old Macy’s building on Peachtree Street downtown.
“Some of the artists on the wall at Art Papers right now are talking about affordable housing, gerrymandering and other things,” she says, emphasizing the concept of art as a lens for the real world.
Camblin, who studied in New York before moving to Berlin and being captivated by the art scene there, says that even in her early years she was interested in visual art, but only as a professional has she fostered a love for the contemporary variety.
Patrons at the Art Papers Auction & Party on Feb. 24, 2018. Photo credit: CJ Johnson. Top photo: Camblin, artistic director of Art Papers at the event’s annual auction and party on Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018. In the background is a piece by Jaymerson Payton. Photo Credit: T. Waters.
“In college, I studied philosophy and ended up double majoring in art history,” she adds.
She credits Berlin’s avant garde cultural scene with exposing her to the wonders and possibility of contemporary art. “The art scene there was just exploding,” she says.
Camblin says that Atlanta’s hip-hop scene and the energy around it reminds her of how Berlin’s art scene was. “It was just like that,” she says.
Art Papers were founded in 1976 by artists in the Atlanta Art Workers Coalition, a nonprofit organization that formed to promote the local art scene and support its artists.
As word grew, the group eventually produced a newsletter, the first one being a single-paged hand-typed flyer.
The publication started off covering local artists, but quickly went regional, finally evolving into an international magazine. Today, the group, which has just a handful of employees, is a critical voice with immeasurable global prestige in contemporary arts circles.
Camblin said the key to the organization’s longevity has been its ability to remain astute at keeping its pulse on Atlanta and other parts of Georgia, at the same time covering arts happenings across the country and the world.
She says that she’s been encouraged by the support Art Papers has garnered through the years.
“I think its very cool,” she says. “The community that has formed around the Art Papers is really impressive because they’ve really rallied around the organization for decades and there have been times — about once every 10 years — when things were really hard for arts organizations locally and people have just rolled up their sleeves and kept it afloat.”
“That was one of the main reasons why I was attracted to Art Papers, actually, because people really seemed to care.”
It’s also true that Camblin herself cares deeply about the arts. She says she’s vested in finding new and emerging artists in Atlanta and the surrounding region.
“I personally go into a lot of young artists’ studios or, for instance, I’ll go into classrooms or programs, like at Georgia State [University], I’m in that art department a lot,” she says. “We’ve done some class visits at Agnes Scott, I did a workshop at Spelman and we did a little dossier about art that’s in the college’s collections. Also, our interns keep me plugged into the art scene,” she says.
