Downtown has a new piece of free, walk-in art that is not going anywhere. "Love Is," a four-painting body of work by the Atlanta artist Dr. Dax, is now installed in The CTR's South Lobby indefinitely, with no admission charge. Its companion show, "Love Was," ran next door at Gallery FC and closed July 30 after a one-week extension past its original run. Both exhibitions were curated by Neda Abghari, founder of The Creatives Project and ASHA Advisory, who co-leads Gallery FC with A.R. "Coop" Cooper.
The two halves were made in opposite conditions, and that is the point. Dax painted the "Love Was" canvases outdoors in the Florida Everglades while staying with his mother and working through a broken heart. Wind and rain landed on the wet surfaces and he left the marks in. He described making them at a furious rage of speed, comparing the process to cursive handwriting done without thinking, and called the resulting energy masculine and aggressive. "The work was very liberating," he said, describing it as emptying his heart of darker, deeper material.
"Love Is" was made here in Atlanta in what Dax called a controlled environment, with air conditioning and endless supplies, and he described its energy as calmer, more patient, closer to ballet. One canvas in the South Lobby is roughly the size of a school bus, painted on location over the course of a week, its surface built out of layers of overlapping lettering. Once your eyes adjust to the hand styles, a message emerges from inside the paint: "Time is all we're allotted in this life. Make it count" — a line taken from a journal kept by Santisouk "Joy" Phrasavath.
Grief runs underneath both rooms. A painting titled "Unseen Angels" grew out of conversations between Dax and Abghari about friends they had each lost in Atlanta, including the artist Radcliffe Bailey and the b-boy Phrasavath. Those conversations, Dax said, were part of what set the whole project in motion before either of them knew what they were building. A July 23 reception at Gallery FC, "A Celebration, With Love," honored the artist and both shows.
Dr. Dax is not a newcomer to this city's walls. He has been part of Atlanta's creative underground since the early 1990s, when he emerged as a visual force within the Dungeon Family, the collective behind OutKast, Goodie Mob and Organized Noize, and helped shape the city's underground aesthetic through intricate hand styles. His work has since been shown or recognized by the Museum of Graffiti, MOCA Los Angeles and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, alongside commercial collaborations with Nike, Adidas, Mercedes-Benz and Red Bull.
For downtown workers and residents, the practical takeaway is simple: the Everglades half of the conversation has closed, but the Atlanta half remains on the ground floor of The CTR, free to see, with no ticket and no end date announced.
Original reporting: Rough Draft Atlanta (2026-07-29)
