Hypercreative: Mapping Creativity with Joseph Veazey — Gavin Guidry

Photo: Gavin Guidry | Atlanta Worldwide Gallery

Here’s the Headline:

Cardinal directions are the key to unlock the creativity around you. Yes, cardinal directions as in North, South, East, and West.

Here's why it matters:

On a micro level, creativity requires movement, connection, and inspiration.
On a macro level, flourishing cities are inherently creative. But in order for creativity to thrive in a city, you need to be able to point people in the direction of other great creatives.
“Creativity clusters”, meaning hotspots of creativity are always emerging in dynamic cities. Knowing where the hotspots are near you means you can game the system to find constant sources of inspiration.

Successful cities co-create

What are the key characteristics of a successful city? A booming economy, or perhaps world leading policy? But what about creativity? In our interview about the future of cities, journalist and Atlanta griot King Williams predicted that in the future, successful cities will be the ones that co-create. Creativity may feel like a nice-to-have on the list of success metrics for a city, but cities where creatives consistently collaborate with business owners, investors, policy makers, and fellow creatives have the potential to build innovative solutions for their citizens for years to come. To understand how we can create this future, we asked King, “what tech or cultural advancements are needed to bring this prediction to fruition”? King’s answer was surprisingly, know your cardinal directions.

“We need cardinal directions. And I bring this up because when we talk about facilitating creativity, there's a lot of people in Atlanta right now who don't know Atlanta. The number of kids I meet who are just glued into their G.P.S., they don't know North, South, East, West. They don't even know street names now. So if you're saying something like, ‘I’m going to meet up and have a pop-up over at Hurt Park, I guarantee maybe the couple of kids who go to Georgia State know what that is. But there are probably thousands more people who don't know how to get there, even if they're in downtown Atlanta already. If you look at cities across the board that have a vibrant culture and a vibrant art scene, usually they're also anchored by very good directions.

Creativity clusters. Let's say if you were to go to New York right now, you could know [where you are] just by where you see people moving on the subway, where you see people walking, where you see the street signs, where you see the conversations that this area has, this type of activity related to it. So if you want to go to East Village, West Village or Greenwich Village, all of those things are adjacent to NYU, which is a college. So they're not directly close, but obviously the creativity moves in different ways. If you're like, ‘Oh, I want to have an experience today around Atlanta– I want to have artistic experience, I want to have an upscale experience, I want have a more conservative experience, I want to have a more academic experience’– I don't know where to go because I can't physically see it. And it's not tangible. There's no map. There's nothing that says this experience is here and I can't move that way.

So that actually kind of relates to creativity– if you can't see yourself in a creative experience, you're not going to have a creative experience. And that's one of the issues that we have in Atlanta, both metaphorically but also physically, because the cardinal directions we have don’t indicate where this thing is at.”

How to map creativity with the Atlanta Rap Map

As King was mentioning “creativity clusters”, yet in Atlanta there’s “no map”, I looked over my shoulder to one of my favorite pieces of art hanging on the wall of my office. It was the “Atlanta Rap Map” by Joseph Veazey of Veazey Studio. In an almost Where’s Waldo style of illustration, this piece is a dazzlingly intricate depiction of Atlanta imagined through the impact that its Hip-Hop forefathers (and mothers) made on it. People say that Atlanta is a city built on its Hip-Hop roots, and this map literally shows the blueprint. You can get lost staring at it for hours, finding a new Easter egg or nugget of information every time. According to this map, if you travel Southwest, you’ll find yourself in the same area where Andre 3000 and Big Boi came together with Organized Noize to make classics in The Dungeon. Or follow the map to the East, and land in Gucci Mane’s “Zone 6” and find more artists he influenced with his East Atlanta sound. It’s a work of art and history lesson that details how Atlanta became the Hip-Hop capital, and the different areas where creativity clustered.

I caught up with Joe at Atlanta Worldwide Gallery so he could teach us how the creativity that he captured in the Atlanta Rap Map moved, grew, and built the city of Atlanta into what it is today.

“I envisioned the poster as a way of honoring the music and almost existing as a love letter to the city.”

Gavin: What prompted the Rap Map?

Joseph: Throughout my career I found myself having a persistent urge to do really detailed illustration work in traditional media, at larger and larger scales. This culminated in a series of event posters I illustrated for Adult Swim while I was working there as a Senior Designer. I was really proud of the end results, but working this way for a client was frustrating. I was doing everything by hand on paper, so any changes requested by the client required a lot of extra physical work. Plus deadlines were often tight so I was pulling all-nighters, and I didn’t own the art after it was created. So I decided to embark on an even larger scale poster illustration (24x36”) that would be self-initiated. This way I could take my time and be able to own the rights to the print once it was done. I knew the subject matter had to be something I really cared about, so it was easy to settle on Atlanta Hip Hop. I had grown up obsessively listening to it and already had a vast knowledge of the genre. I would greatly enjoy the research process for the project as well. From Raheem the Dream to Outkast, Gucci Mane and Young Thug, Atlanta Hip Hop has always been the one genre that I've stayed connected with throughout my life, and I envisioned the poster as a way of honoring the music and almost existing as a love letter to the city. I also wanted to make something that would give back, so 100% of the proceeds from the first year’s sales were donated to HOPE Atlanta to fight hunger and homelessness in the very neighborhoods featured on the Map.

Why a map? Why not a comic book, graphic novel, zine, Instagram page?

I originally started the research not knowing exactly what I'd do with it. I had envisioned perhaps a digital map where you could zoom in and hear samples of the music. But the truth is, I've always loved printed objects - digital art/design has never really done it for me the way a printed physical product does. I love the idea of creating things that will become future artifacts or might show up in a Goodwill one day. I've also always loved maps and diagrams, especially illustrated ones, so it was an easy decision. I referenced a lot of older illustrated maps for ways to lay it out and communicate the information.

What did you learn by putting the map together?

I learned a lot while working on this project. Visually, I learned how to relay a ton of information while still keeping it organized and approachable. My concern throughout the process was that the whole thing would end up looking like one big muddy mess. I found that dividing the poster up into a portrait border and an inner map section, and having the map have denser areas inside a surrounding forested area helped to give it hierarchy and keep it balanced. Musically, I learned about numerous artists that had come out before my time. Researching the 80s and 90s introduced me to amazing Atlanta artists like Mojo, Pac da Great, Born Dead, and many more. Business-wise I learned how to produce and market a retail product. In terms of the content itself, one interesting thing that stuck out was that due to gentrification and the shifting of the demographics of the city, older artists mostly came from the inner city, while newer artists are increasingly coming from the suburbs.

How does Atlanta’s geography and city structure affect its creativity?

Atlanta is a very large, sprawling, spread out city. It's often talked about how you can spend an hour and a half driving in a straight line and never have left the Metropolitan area. I think this has allowed for sub-regional movements and styles to evolve at certain times - like the Dungeon Family sound coming mostly from rappers in Southwest Atlanta, or the proliferation of underground groups that sounded like the Rich Kidz, coming from the West side in the 2010s. Also, traditionally certain areas are more or less well-off economically, which can affect access to resources and the way artists are forced, or enabled, to approach their creativity and process.

How have/do Atlanta’s creatives affect different parts of the city or even the way the city operates?

I think one of the most obvious ways is by giving the residents of an area a sense of pride about where they are from. Especially in Hip Hop, Atlanta’s most visible creative outlet, individual neighborhoods, apartment complexes, streets and zones are repeatedly referenced in songs, giving the area status. An example of this is how once Gucci Mane rose to fame repeatedly mentioning East Atlanta in his lyrics, we had a wave of artists over the next decade representing East Atlanta. I hardly found any other artists mentioning East Atlanta specifically, before he made it popular. I believe that regional culture is an incredibly important aspect of human life - and has been since the beginning of humanity. True regional culture is disappearing by the day in our corporate American world, especially since the rise of TV and the internet, but people still crave it. I truly believe it's a basic human need and adds greatly to our quality of life.

Any examples about how proximity or geography produced a specific creative output?

One example is how the West side of Atlanta is the most economically disadvantaged, but has managed to birth such an incredible amount of highly original artists and new sounds that ended up influencing the entire world. I think this speaks to how not having money or opportunity can cause you to be more resourceful and create a way, when one isn’t given to you.

Most surprising revelation about one of the areas of Atlanta?

The biggest revelation was probably how much public housing shaped the city over the last 80 years. Techwood Homes, formerly in Midtown, was actually the first permanent public housing project in the country - so you could say the projects were invented in Atlanta. I think I remember reading somewhere that at one point 10% of all Atlanta residents were living in the projects. They were then systematically torn down starting in 1996 for the Olympics, until they had all been razed by 2011. And that actually made Atlanta the first city in the nation to demolish all of its own public housing. Around this time many of the aging apartment complexes in the suburbs flipped to Section 8 and took in the displaced lower income residents from the city. This paved the way for gentrification and the overtaking of the inner city by developers and the wealthy, in a surprisingly rapid amount of time.

What are other ways creatives can do something similar in their cities?

There actually have been a few other interesting examples that I’ve come across. There is another “Atlanta Rap Map” created by Georgia State University (theirs actually predates mine) that marks location-specific lyrics on a digital map. The Rap Quotes campaign by Jason Shelowitz installs street signs with location specific lyrics at the corresponding locations in major cities across the country - you may have seen some around town.

How can creatives benefit from knowing their cities better?

As we continue to live in an increasingly digital world and the concept of a true “Metaverse” seems to be inevitable at this point, real culture still does and always has come from actual real-world communities. Knowing your city and being active in your community leads to so much creativity and organic opportunities to grow and learn, that are very hard to come by solely online. Its also just a happier way to live and create.

Through the Atlanta Rap Map, we can see not only that creativity clusters, but where those clusters are happening can have a direct impact on what creative output it produces. The finances, demographics, policy, and history good or bad all shape what parts of a city look like, sound like, and move like. Like Joe Veazey, can you plot the points of creativity on a map of your city and draw connections between them that can inspire new ideas and innovations? I believe looking at this map could give us our own blueprint to follow and possibly predict how creativity will move and grow in our city so that as creatives, we can facilitate more co-creation opportunities in our own cities.

Get moving, get creating.

Going back to our interview with King Williams, he went on to say, “The reasons why so much money flows through [cities like] New York [are not] that they are so much better, or so much smarter. It's just that there are more opportunities to get into a business idea or there's more opportunities to just have an idea and actually implement it because everyone is moving around each other in real time. So I think that that could be something we really borrow heavily and do in Atlanta.”

Creativity generates movement– movement of ideas, capital, and influential people. When there are new and innovative experiences in a city, it creates more opportunities for collaboration and the cross pollination of ideas between different groups of people who may not otherwise be in the same location.

But if you don’t know where creativity is happening around you, then you don’t know where to move. And if you’re not moving, the odds are you’re not creating– and stasis is the death of creativity. With the lack of in-person contact post-pandemic and untrustworthy social media algorithms, it’s hard to know everything that’s happening at all times. You’re not always going to be able to punch the name of a venue into your GPS and follow it to a bastion of unbridled creative activity. Sometimes you may need to just head to where you know people will be doing creative things, living creative lifestyles, doing live art, filming something, or just throwing great parties. And to do that, you have to know your directions.