Tucked into Underground Atlanta, the Public Art Futures Lab is Fulton County Arts and Culture's laboratory for what public art might look like next - and over the past two years it has quietly become one of downtown's most interesting rooms.
The lab's residency program runs in partnership with Downtown Atlanta Inc. (then Central Atlanta Progress) through the district's arts and entertainment program, which places an artist-in-residence in the space for an extended, public-facing project. Two residencies stand out.
In October 2024, artist-in-residence Jordan Young curated 'Eyes on the Floor,' a group exhibition of five photographers documenting Atlanta's queer nightlife - the dance floors, drag stages, and after-hours communities that have long anchored the city's LGBTQ culture but rarely make it onto museum walls. Young followed it on November 1, 2024, with a solo show, 'Look at Your Eyes,' closing out a residency that treated Underground's subterranean galleries as an extension of the nightlife it was documenting.
In May 2025 the district announced Shelly Boehm as the lab's newest artist-in-residence. Boehm's project was a 14-week, technology-forward exploration of projection art, using the lab as an open studio where the public could watch the work develop rather than only see the finished piece. Her first open studio was held May 2, 2025.
The lab's location is the point. Underground Atlanta, the 1969 entertainment district built into the viaduct-covered streets of the original city, has been through several lives - tourist attraction, nightlife strip, near-vacancy - and its current owners have leaned on arts programming to bring people back below Alabama Street. A county-run art lab with a rotating residency gives the district something Woodruff Park's inflatables and the Broad Street Boardwalk's markets do not: a room where the work is still being made.
Fulton County Arts and Culture lists the lab among its public-art initiatives, and its own site, publicartfutureslab.com, carries the current residency and exhibition schedule.
Source: Public Art Futures Lab (Fulton County Arts and Culture); residency announcements via Be Downtown, October 2024 and May 2025, published May 2025.
