Downtown Atlanta marked Xernona Clayton's 95th birthday in late August 2025 with a public art project staged at the spot that already carries her name. The commission, titled Legacy in Bloom, brought work by three local artists into Hardy Ivy Park, the site where the city named Xernona Clayton Way and the adjacent Xernona Clayton Plaza in her honor in 2011.
Clayton's résumé explains why the city keeps returning to that spot. A civil rights leader and broadcaster, she was a close friend of the King family and played a central role in desegregating hospital facilities across Atlanta. She hosted The Xernona Clayton Show on WAGA-TV, the city's CBS affiliate, the first regularly scheduled prime-time television talk show in the South with a Black host. In 1993 she founded the Trumpet Awards. Her life story has since been told in both an autobiography and a documentary film.
The birthday party took place on the evening of Thursday, August 28, two days ahead of her actual birthday on August 30. WSB-TV's Fred Blankenship served as emcee. Hank Stewart read poetry, Melvin Miller and Kathleen Bertrand performed live music, and DJ Sed the Saint played a set while guests picked up ice pops and visited food trucks on site.
Legacy in Bloom came together over the preceding few months. Noa Hecht, the creative placemaking lead for Atlanta Downtown, brought in the arts nonprofit Dashboard to curate. According to Dashboard's Abigail Justman, Clayton herself set the starting condition for the selection: every artist would be a woman of color.
The three selected were Grace Kisa, Chloe Alexander and Sayma Hossain. Kisa placed a series of sculptures among the native plant garden at the site. Hossain hung an installation overhead inside the park's Carnegie Education Pavilion. Alexander suspended lanterns from the plaza's trees, lighting the space after dark.
Dashboard built the project around those recently installed native plantings, and the artists drew on ideas of growth, blossoming and adding color and life to the park. Yellow became a shared thread across the pieces because it is Clayton's favorite color. A sculpture of Clayton, installed in 2011, is also part of the setting.
Hecht, who works with both Atlanta Downtown and Central Atlanta Progress, described the project as part of a broader approach to public space: bring in art, nature and community activity, then watch how people respond and adjust from there. She said people from the building next to the plaza have started tending and watering the garden themselves, a sign the attention paid to the space is being returned.
Dashboard's Anna Akpele made a related point about public demand. Visiting, photographing the work and engaging with the artists online, she said, shows the city that residents want more projects like this one, which in turn helps groups like Dashboard bring more of them to Atlanta.
For Blankenship, the evening was personal. He told the reporter he has felt Clayton's presence since arriving in Atlanta 18 years earlier, and he described the party as having the feel of a family gathering. He openly set aside any claim to journalistic neutrality where she is concerned.
Legacy in Bloom was scheduled to stay on view in Hardy Ivy Park through October 28, 2025.
Original reporting by Isadora Pennington for ArtsATL.