The Beautiful Dread Exhibition
On a chilly October night, a few weeks before Halloween, The Bakery presented its new group, show The Beautiful Dread to a crowd of black-clad art-goers and curious macabre enthusiasts. Faces scrunched in disgust and fascination as eyes wandered around the artworks, as a troupe of contemporary dancers meandered throughout the space.
Beautiful Dread Reception by Lindsay Thomaston (2025)
The gallery’s walls, full of stretched-out rabbit guts and depictions of rotted flesh, were in eerie juxtaposition to the glimmering stars and bright bubblegum-pink walls a few feet away in The Supermarket. The show brought together artists from an array of disciplines, from performance art to painting to sculptural installation, to bring forth a complex narrative about the beauty in the grotesque. In creating these works, these artists of disparate backgrounds became a part of a conversation that opposes pristine aesthetics and palatability.
In an image saturated world where algorithms prize the images it finds most beautiful,symmetrical and digestible, these artists resist legibility and as a result create a portal for the audience to question how they can also resist coherence.
Through abstraction, manipulation of form, and mediums these artists explore how disgust and fascination are often interchangeable emotions.
Beautiful Dread Reception by Lindsay Thomaston (2025)
Angelica Credle’s piece, Family Reunion (Thank You Lord For Our Circle) (2023) explored the grotesqueness of alienation and proximity to death within the Black American experience:
“Rooted in wake work, my painting practice explores Black existence through figuration, engaging with the afterlives of slavery, systemic violence, and oppression. Inspired by Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, my work interrogates what it means to live in the wake, a state where Black life is defined by a slow, relentless push toward death and the enduring legacies of racialized trauma.”-- Angelica Credle
Family Reunion (Thank You Lord For Our Circle) (2023) Angelina Credle
The piece depicts a shadowy gathering of hazy disfigured faces. Credle uses the inversion of colors to suggest the slow diminishing of the black spirit as it’s ground way by racialized trauma.
Here Lies Frankenstein (2024) Jess McAran
Fine art photographer Jess McAran displayed their work, Here Lies Frankenstein (2024), where a shadowy skeletal figure is ominously adorned with webs of crisp, almost rotting flowers. On the way to being shipped over to the U.S., this piece experienced something every artist might fear, but ended up carving out an even darker meaning of the work:
“In shipping the work, encased in glass, to the United States. Jess welcomed the kismet to act on the piece as an additional collaborator. The shattering of glass in transit marred the print and left delicate traces of time’s impact on memory and temporal wounds.” – Jess McAran
Through these works, The Beautiful Dread is calling for the Atlanta community to see beauty in all the eerie, disgusting things they might encounter, the cracks in the pavement like arteries or gnarled bark on a tree twisted into a smile. The Beautiful Dread is on view at The Supermarket until Nov 2, 2025.
You can read through the gallery booklet to discover more featured artists and the intentionality behind their pieces.
Photos by Lindsay Thomaston and Arantza Pena Popo
Beautiful Dread Reception by Lindsay Thomaston (2025)
