Our Team
-
Ben Steele
FOUNDER & FACILITATOR
Ben Steele is an artist, educator, and community organizer living in Atlanta, GA. His oil paintings have been exhibited in galleries locally and nationally in addition to The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and The High Museum. He studied at Washington University in St. Louis, Yale University, and Maryland Institute College of Art. His recent oil painting series “The Shape of Things to Come” is inspired by futuristic architecture, special effects cinematography, and the historical practice of landscape painting. Steele is co-founder of SeekATL and is Visual Art Department Chair at The Westminster Schools in Atlanta, GA.
-
Jennifer Dudley
FACILITATOR
Jennifer Dudley is an artist who works across medias, engaging modalities of narrative from fan-fiction and folklore to adaptation and translation. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Dudley received her BFA from the University of Georgia in 1998, her MFA from Yale University in 2005, attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006, and is a recipient of the CAA Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowship. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer of Painting and Drawing at Georgia State University's Ernest G. Welch School of Art in Atlanta, GA.
-
Madeline Beck
SOCIAL MEDIA SPECIALIST
Madeline Beck is currently the curator of the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art in Marietta, Georgia and serves on the ArtsATL Advisory Council. Beck studied art history at Kennesaw State University and served as the curatorial assistant for the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, Georgia. She began her work with the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art in 2015 and was brought on as the museum’s curator in 2017, having since curated over thirty exhibitions. She has also had the opportunity to judge and/or curate various art exhibitions throughout the community.
-
"Let's go to a new artist's studio each month and see how long this lasts."
Artists Ben Steele and Shara Hughes met at a High Museum artist's talk in 2008. Both had experienced art school communities as students and knew the generative dialogue that an artist's community could bring, but both felt that their practices in Atlanta lacked artist-to-artist engagement beyond what could be found meeting for events at galleries and museums or scheduling individual studio visits. Atlanta has a few artist studio centers that can facilitate a sense of community, but as artists with live-work —or home studios—both Steele and Hughes felt cut off from the rest of the population.
After talking with several people who had short-lived experiences attempting to curate a specific group like a set group with closed enrollment, Steele and Hughes decided that opening the invitations to the visits to any artist would be essential to sustaining the project. Always seeking new artists and new friendships, new opportunities to have interaction and dialogue, SeekATL would be sustained by connecting artists and viewers in conversation. Steele said, "Let's go to new artist's studio each month and see how long this lasts."
Over its 14-year time span, SeekATL has evolved. The project was envisioned to build and sustain community and eventually became a community connecting over 200 artists. Each year's studio-visit program was thoughtfully and intentionally planned and connected different areas and neighborhoods of the city and different kinds of existent communities; visits were at the Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artist Program and at The Goat Farm, at University MFA programs and at studios in artist's homes.
Artist Brendan Carroll had been a regular SeekATL participant and was a great fit to work with Steele after Shara Hughes departed Atlanta. After Carroll also relocated, Beth Malone joined SeekATL. Malone, who was founding executive director of Dashboard for 11 years, brought another new perspective and curatorial input. Malone suggested expanding SeekATL's organizing team to include a third facilitator and introduced painter Tori Tinsley to the project.
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, also known as MOCA GA, began partnering with Seek ATL in 2018, to include visits with the annual recipients of the Working Artist Project. In 2022, after a two-year COVID-19 related pause, artist Jennifer Dudley and curator Madeline Beck have joined Steele and Tinsley to relaunch SeekATL's programming with the same commitment to creating opportunity for substantive dialogue and connecting communities in Atlanta.
-