Perhaps you’ve seen coverage of Gregor Turk’s Blandtown banners in the AJC, Saporta Report, or WABE. With the support of the Upper Westside Improvement District and the Blandtown Neighborhood Association, along with an NPU grant from the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Turk created 25 banners which hang along the Atlanta Watershed Reservoir fence along Huff and Howell Mill Roads.
The project, entitled “Red, White, and Black,” refers to what Turk says was a primarily Black neighborhood becoming gentrified through redlining practices. Black-and-white images of the neighborhood are accompanied by various words prefixed with “re,” such as re/tell, re/claim, re/collect, and re/construction.
We hope that this project, and others like it, can help us to achieve a balance between embracing the past, letting people understand the history, and also figuring out how we can incorporate it so that we can grow in a direction where we’re creating more housing and a more livable area.
