Before Shanequa Gay’s newest work becomes a monument on the Atlanta Beltline, it begins with something less permanent but just as powerful: a conversation.
Gay, an Atlanta-based multidisciplinary artist and Spelman College professor, has been selected by Atlanta Beltline Art to create a major public artwork for the Westside Beltline Connector. Her sculpture will be installed in the greenspace between Jett Street and Western Avenue, near historically Black neighborhoods including English Avenue, Vine City, Washington Park and Grove Park.
Gay’s project is one of two new monumental commissions announced by Atlanta Beltline Art. Artist Ayokunle Odeleye will create a large-scale work for the Northeast Trail near Piedmont Park. Both projects are in the design and community engagement phase, with installation schedules to be announced.
But Gay’s work has already begun.
On Wednesday, Sept. 23, artists, scholars and community leaders gathered at Spelman College for “Black Women, Place, and the Future of the American South,” the first public engagement connected to Gay’s project. Presented in partnership with the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art and moderated by Rose Scott, host of WABE’s “Closer Look,” the symposium explored Black women’s roles in preserving history, building community and shaping Atlanta’s future.
For Gay, those ideas are deeply personal.
“My understanding of community, my understanding of love for self as well as love for land, that would be my foremothers,” Gay told the audience.
She named generations of women in her family, including her great-grandmother Estella Battle, who lived to 102.
“These are big-arm women with a heavy hand, who fed me, who nurtured me, and who built up their communities,” Gay said.
Those histories are central to Gay’s broader project, “Stewardship of Locality: Care, Conservancy & Commitment to Place.” The two-part public research initiative will bring residents, historians, students, artists and cultural leaders into the development of the sculpture. At its center is Gay’s premise that “stewardship is the art of staying.”
Wednesday’s discussion offered a glimpse of what that stewardship can look like.
Scott recalled learning her own family history while sitting beside the stove as her mother pressed her hair. She remembered hearing stories about Mississippi, perseverance and “what it means to show up in this nation as a Black woman.”
“I knew I was going to get a story,” Scott said.
Today, she continues the tradition while braiding the hair of younger relatives.
“No more hot comb, but still got some grease,” Scott said. “But I’m telling those stories.”
The conversation eventually moved from remembering the past to considering who will preserve those stories for the future.
“Give Black women the ball,” Gay said.
She described oral histories, including stories that remain undocumented or unpublished, as an important form of preservation. For Gay, art can also create space for counter-narratives and for imagining worlds that do not yet exist.
“That is what I desire to do in my own body of work,” Gay said. “That is what I desire to do within my community, and that’s what I believe I was charged to do by my foremothers.”
That charge will eventually take physical form along the Westside Beltline Connector. For 16 years, Atlanta Beltline Art has incorporated art and cultural programming into the corridor through installations, performances, murals and permanent commissions, connecting public space with the histories and communities surrounding it.
Gay’s monument is still taking shape. But Wednesday’s gathering showed that its foundation is already being built, not in concrete or steel, but through the women who stayed, the stories they carried and the communities they sustained.
Soon, those stories will have a permanent place in Atlanta’s changing landscape.
