Atlanta Glows With the Success of Black Arts Festival : Culture: Sixty-plus events give spirit to the talents and creativity of African-American artists.

With the Second National Black Arts Festival, says Fulton County commissioner and festival founder Michael Lomax, “Atlanta celebrates the rich artistic and ethnic legacy of black Americans. If there’s any city that symbolizes that legacy, it’s got to be Atlanta.”

With crowds of nearly a million anticipated in Atlanta by the time it concludes on Sunday , the 10-day, $2.4-million festival testifies to the black strength of this Georgia capital city, which prides itself on being “the city too busy to hate”--home to the civil rights movement and a black population exceeding 60%. Recently hosting Nelson Mandela and serving as home base for former Mayor Andrew Young’s bid to be the state’s first black governor, Atlanta has long been the Southern hub of black political life. The festival boosts the city’s status as the region’s cultural nexus and, arguably, the nation’s center of black arts power. The festival is expected to pump more than $20 million into the local economy; more than 2,000 artists are expected to attend.

“Our purpose,” says Stephanie Hughley, artistic director of the National Black Arts Festival, “is to celebrate and educate, to showcase the cultural achievements of people of African descent.”

But the fest’s 60-plus events also bear witness to the political challenge and innovative technique of American art at a time when the national art scene could use a boost in self-confidence. Practitioners and fans of art that takes risks can find a spirit of affirmation, social awareness and political struggle in this year’s festival.

Conceived and first mounted in 1988 by Lomax, chairman of Atlanta’s Fulton County Board of Commissioners, the biennial festival strives to offer the classic and the cutting edge in film, visual art, folk art, literature, dance, music, theater and performance art.

“My idea,” Lomax said, “was to marry the creativity of festivals I’d seen at universities in the ‘60s and ‘70s to the organization municipal sponsorship can provide.” The city also benefits, he said, because “the festival potentially represents a very strong, continuing tourist attraction. Atlanta gets the best of two worlds--the artistic and the commercial.”

This year, said Hughley, “an international component” builds upon the African-American emphasis of the 1988 (and first) festival: African, Brazilian and Caribbean work broadens the stylistic variety on display and stresses the theme “Today’s Roots.” The influence of black art on Western culture has been obvious ever since Picasso utilized Congo masks; the fest’s Third World art points out that such impact is vital and continuing.

Kicked off with a July 27 downtown parade, the festival’s global perspective was soon apparent. Starting with an African percussion ensemble and ending with a shout gospel jubilee, African and American dancers, local politicians and celebrities--from Mayor Maynard Jackson to a carload of Atlanta Hawks--were cheered by nearly 100,000 onlookers, many in Day-Glo T-shirts featuring such icons as Mandela, a street-smart, black-face Bart Simpson and Air Jordan.

During the festival, predominantly black audiences have gathered at more than 40 locations throughout the city, enlivening what is usually the doldrums of Atlanta’s hot summer. The work on view is in keeping with Lomax’s aim that this year’s event be more “artistically consistent and thematically coherent” than 1988’s.

Of theatrical works, “Paul Robeson” by Paul Hayes Dean is the festival standout. Singer and scholar, Marxist and athlete of the 1930s, Robeson demands a giant to play his story, and finds one in Avery Brooks, best known as TV’s brawny good-guy Hawk on “Hawk” and “Spenser for Hire.”

Among the more than 40 galleries offering shows in conjunction with the festival, the High Museum of Art’s “Black Art--Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African American Art” is particularly comprehensive. Its strengths are sculptural--from totemic West African-derived life-sized work by Renee Stout, to the miniature, sandstone, Egyptoid pieces of Mr. Imagination, to Ed Love’s playful, Calderish metalwork that honors the zest and agony of black musicians. Nexus Gallery presents Afri-Cobra, an arts group started in the politically heated atmosphere of 1968. Especially notable are Wadsworth Jarell’s massive, eye-searing homages to Muddy Waters and Angela Davis.

“Faith Ringgold: A 25-Year Survey” at the High Museum at Georgia Pacific Center is a review of Ringgold’s narrative-art quilts--the folk-based medium that has taken on the political resonances of feminism, the pattern-and-decoration arts movement of the 1970s, and “The Names Project,” better known as “the AIDS Quilt.”

Making clear that black cinema didn’t start with such ‘70s blaxploitation films as “Shaft” and “Superfly’ nor end with Atlanta-born Spike Lee, a repertory entitled “The Black Cinematique” ranges from the 1929 “Black and Tan” with Duke Ellington to the avant-garde imagery of “Icononegro: The Black Aesthetic in Video Art.”

“Camp De Thiaroye,” a series highlight by Senegalese author Ousmane Sembene, tough-mindedly critiques colonialism. Stark in style, it analyzes the discrimination facing West African heroes of World War II returning to their French-owned homeland. Having helped free Paris from the Nazis, the soldiers face racism from the Gallic imperialists for whom they’ve just shed blood.

“Chameleon Street,” the 1990 U.S. Film Festival winner by director/actor Wendell Harris Jr., is the true-life tale of master trickster Douglas Street, whose scams included impersonating a surgeon and a Time magazine reporter, and whose cunning provides a metaphor for black resourcefulness in a white culture.

Performance art at its edgiest comes in the form of Atlanta’s own “Live at Club Zebra: The Third Annual Final Negro Rhythm & Blues Revue.” A kind of guerrilla cabaret, Zebra rises to fury with Pearl Cleage’s “Mad at Miles,” a monologue excoriating Miles Davis for abuse of women. “Praise House,” a multimedia piece by New York’s Urban Bush Women, rejoices in the visionary experiences of Southern folk artists.

“Dance: Expressions of the Diaspora,” while also presenting solid work by the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica and Philadelphia Dance Company (Phildanco), was remarkable primarily for a performance last Saturday by Les Ballets Africains, the National Dance Company of Guinea. Crowding the vast stage of Atlanta’s Civic Center, the dancers and drummers offered up a round of controlled frenzy, their intricate, athletic maneuvers providing not only a burst of African authenticity, but suggesting the stylistic source for some of today’s hotter vogue-ers and rap-dancers; M. C. Hammer comes to mind. With the title of the evening’s performance referring to the diaspora, or historical dispersion of African peoples throughout the world, the Guinea dancers are emblematic of the festival’s general theme of searching out continuities between African and black American art and experience. “Roda de Capoeira Angola,” a dance company from Brazil, underlines the motif--the troupe’s male “challenge dances” are an indigenous form of martial arts whose swift, sharp movements parallel stateside breakdancing.

The spoken and written word finds expression in “An Evening of Poetry,” featuring more than a dozen national and local poets, and starring the often-anthologized Amiri Baraka, perhaps the dean of American black poetry of the heightened street-talk, activist strain.

Finally, music at the festival runs the gamut from the torchy romanticism of Anita Baker and the hot funk of London’s Soul II Soul to the classical music of 16 living black classical composers. Olatunji and His Drums of Passion is the highlight of the Third World contingent. The Nigerian Olatunji, one of the world’s premier percussionists, helped Spike Lee with the music for “She’s Gotta Have It,” and shares something else with Lee--both have Atlanta’s Morehouse College as their alma mater. The Atlanta Jazz series wraps up the festival on Sunday with an outdoor show by expatriate South African composer and pianist Abdullah Ibrahim.