Atlanta Contemporary

This guide to Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta follows Louise Shaw, who in 1987 looked at a derelict truck repair garage on Means Street and decided it was exactly right for her scrappy photography nonprofit, Nexus. It traces Nexus back to a 1973 grassroots cooperative of photographers pooling dues to show work no Atlanta gallery would touch, and the seven-year, nearly two-million-dollar campaign it took to reopen the garage in 1994. Shaw went on to run the space for fifteen years, staging shows on AIDS and apartheid on a street most of the city had written off.