Decatur Arts Alliance debuts new art galleries, artist studios at Legacy Park

Opening this weekend, a showcase of decommissioned #LookUpDecatur public artworks will be the first art exhibition to grace the walls of the Decatur Arts Alliance ’s new art gallery and studios in Legacy Park.

Occupying rooms within the Hyatt Cottage that also houses Paint Love , the addition of gallery spaces and studios is only one phase of a much larger undertaking for Legacy Park’s plans for their Creative Village.

Angie Macon, Executive Director of the Decatur Arts Alliance, was able to spare a few minutes to discuss this development and all of the excitement that she and her team feel as they ready themselves for expansion.

Macon, who has been with the Decatur Arts Alliance since 2008, has been the driving force behind much of the public art programming, art festivals, and exhibitions to take place in Decatur ever since. When she first joined the Alliance, and for a number of years to follow, the organization’s intent was focused on art festivals.

Over time, Macon and her team managed to build crucial relationships with other institutions and organizations such as Living Walls and MARTA Artbound which has allowed their reach to expand beyond the Decatur Arts Festival into year-round and city-wide arts initiatives.

One such initiative is #LookUpDecatur, a recurring exhibition of paintings by local artists that are posted high up on telephone poles around Downtown Decatur.

Curated by Larry Holland since 2016, the artwork is periodically removed and then replaced with new art. When it was time to finally unveil the arts nonprofit’s new exhibition space, Larry’s decommissioned signs offered a perfect solution.

“What you’ve got to love about Larry is his spontaneity and his willingness to jump in and wing it,” said Macon with a laugh.

While the Decatur Arts Alliance is excited to unveil their new exhibition space at Legacy Park, this only scratches the surface of a larger-scale plan to integrate into the Legacy Park Creative Village.

To understand the evolution of this community asset, we have to start way back at the beginning, in the aftermath of the Civil War. With so many lives lost in battle, the overwhelming number of orphaned children became a significant challenge to address.

One man who felt called to help these children was Dr. Jessie Boring, a Methodist minister, who created the Orphan’s Home of the North Georgia Conference on farmland in Norcross. After a fire devastated their operations only two years later, the trustees of the Orphan’s Home purchased nearly 250 acres of land where Legacy Park stands today.

On the site, they constructed a number of structures that include a church, dormitories, and living quarters. There are also graves that remain on the property to this day, including that of Dr. Boring himself.

Later, in the 1930s, the Board of Trustees changed the name to the Methodist Children’s Home. Many years after that they opted to add “United” to the name. In total, the Children’s Home occupied the land at Legacy Park for 144 years. In 2017, the City of Decatur purchased 77 acres and began developing a master plan for the property.

Part of said master plan is the Creative Village, a series of four existing structures that would be repurposed into affordable housing and studio space for local artists who earn below the area’s median income. When the City of Decatur began polling residents about what they’d like to see take place at Legacy Park, access to the arts was high up on the list.

Hyatt Cottage required the least amount of renovations to be workable, and so that is where the vision truly began to come to life, with the addition of Paint Love as a tenant back in 2022. And now they will share the building with the Decatur Arts Alliance.

Art studios at Hyatt Cottage

In addition to gallery and solo studio space at Hyatt Cottage, the Decatur Arts Alliance is also looking forward to the continued development of three additional buildings which will one day become live-work spaces for artists.

Macon explained that the process to ready these buildings is extensive, and they don’t have a completion date just yet.

One structure requires all new plumbing, while another has no HVAC. Finishing these large-scale structural improvements takes time, but once they are completed, she looks forward to seeing the buildings filled with working artists who can affordably live and work on the property.

Though it’s too early for specific details, Macon said that one of the buildings will be suited for around 10 singular apartments, while another might be better suited for couples. The Decatur Arts Alliance’s role will be to select the artists to go there. They came up with a plan to offset rental prices by asking participating artists to offer quarterly studio nights.

“The thing about those other three [buildings] is that none of them are uniform, they are all very different shapes,” said Macon. “There’s one building that could be a collaborative building for a theater group or something like that.”

There are also two larger spaces that the Decatur Arts Alliance looks forward to using for intergenerational art classes. Anticipating both individual workshop sessions as well as sox-week classes, she is excited to offer art-making opportunities outside of regular business and school hours that will allow all artists aged 15+ to work on art together.

Some of the classes the Decatur Arts Alliance is planning to roll out include introduction to watercolors, drawing, printmaking, and jewelry-making.

“People want intergenerational art classes, and I love that idea,” Macon continued. “The whole reason I’m here is because I love community building through art, that’s the part of this job that gets me up every day.”

The #LookUpDecatur Decommissioned Signs Exhibition will open at Hyatt Cottage on the Legacy Park property on Fri., July 19 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Stop by to take in these artful signs as well as get a sneak peek of the Creative Village expansion as it begins to take shape.

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