Old Rabbit Gallery is mid-exhale as Atlanta photographer and artist Artemus Jenkins comes downstairs.
It’s a Monday in June, just days before Jenkins’s latest exhibition opens, and the Castleberry Hill space is in transition — the remnants of Muddy, a pop-up pottery shop, still being cleared for something altogether different. Jenkins moves through it all unhurried, the way a man does when he’s produced enough shows to know getting the work on the wall is only the first part.
“From Afrique, With Love” arrives just as Atlanta’s World Cup summer begins, the first time the city has hosted a global event of this scale in 30 years. The timing is deliberate. Jenkins paid to mount the show — on his own terms in his own vision — because he sees the moment as once-in-a-generation and the show as a statement about what Atlanta can hold.
Upstairs, in the gallery’s office, Jenkins settles in and starts talking about his upcoming exhibition, “From Afrique, With Love.” He starts by describing himself as “a cultural custodian.” “Custodian,” he says, because the word carries the weight of care. “The custodian gotta make sure all this s*** — whatever it is that they’re focusing on — is looking like and working like how it need to work,” Jenkins says. “Somebody gotta care about how this all looks.”
What is ‘From Afrique, With Love’?
The work began with a trip he didn’t plan.
In 2019, during Ghana’s Year of the Return, a friend called Jenkins with an offer: someone needed a documentarian to travel to West Africa and record a woman meeting her birth father for the first time.
“Is that even a question?” Jenkins says of his response. He went. He stayed 35 days.
That trip produced the image that gave the show its spirit — two Black men on a beach in Guinea, arms around each other, easy in their joy. Other Africans in the background, playing in the water. And scattered throughout the frame, three white people, all of them looking directly into his lens. Nobody else was paying attention to the camera, and Jenkins saw that contrast as part of the point.
“It was like an ironic postcard,” Jenkins says. “Like if somebody asked, ‘How’s Africa?’ It’s like, ‘We good. You know, people still in our business, but we good.'”
“To paint it and also have lived the experience and recorded the experience and brought it back … I’m just trying to make sure as much of me is in the work as possible.”
Culture custodian artemus Jenkins
Two photographers. One parallel story.
“From Afrique, With Love” is a collaboration. Photographer Nyeusi Mwezi traveled through the Gambia, Senegal and Ghana during the same period Jenkins was moving through Mauritania, Senegal and Guinea. Together, their images form what Jenkins calls a parallel narrative — two Black American photographers looking at the same world from different coordinates. The show will feature at least 20 total works, underscoring that shared perspective.
The trips continued. Jenkins returned to Benin Republic in 2021 and 2022 to document Prometra, an NGO focused on traditional healing practices and reconnection to African spirituality. In 2024, Lauren Tate Baeza, curator of African art at the High Museum of Art, organized an artist exchange to mark the 50th anniversary of the Lagos-Atlanta sister city relationship. Jenkins and painter Myra Green became the first Atlanta artists to travel to Nigeria as part of that exchange.
Read More:
• High Museum’s Lauren Tate Baeza talks the U.S. debut of Ezrom Legae’s ‘Beasts’
• Atlanta arts community rallies around City of Ink amid zoning battle
What distinguishes the prints in the exhibition is how much of Jenkins is literally on them. He painted on them. Embellished them by hand. Returning to traditional retouching methods not for nostalgia’s sake, but because a print made from a file no longer feels quite complete to him.
“It ain’t enough of me on it,” he says. “To paint it and also have lived the experience and recorded the experience and brought it back … I’m just trying to make sure as much of me is in the work as possible.”
“From Afrique, With Love” is part of a broader cultural exchange Jenkins wants to foster at Old Rabbit during World Cup. He’s also planning live music, DJs, artist talks, West African artifact displays, and culinary experiences throughout the month. A full ecosystem, he says, for the audience he believes Atlanta already has – and our visitors.
“So many of us just be ready to leave this city because it ain’t enough to satisfy our curiosities,” he says. “From Afrique, With Love” is intended to act as evidence that Atlanta can satisfy more than people expect.
Jenkins is also documenting the process, producing a podcast throughout the month, building on his ongoing “How to Be a Dope Artist” series, which explores what it actually means to exhibit work, manage a physical space, and go through the full arc of showing.
Jenkins leans back and thinks about what it will mean to tell his daughter about this summer, 30 years from now. A show he built himself. During a World Cup. In the city where his artistic career took off. To him, that’s the evidence that the work matters.
“I think that’s pretty dope,” Jenkins says.
“From Afrique, With Love” opens June 12 with a reception starting at 7 p.m. at Old Rabbit Gallery and My Garage ATL.
