The Sun ATL, Rialto Center partnership brings Bahindwa’s World Cup-inspired paintings downtown

Before Raphael Bahindwa’s paintings of Pelé and Maradona ever reached the Rialto Center for the Arts, the partnership that put them there started with a conversation at a downtown networking mixer.

Shawn Vinson, owner of The Sun ATL gallery on Edgewood Avenue, said the collaboration began after he joined Central Atlanta Progress, a downtown business group, and met Christopher Duenow of the Rialto at a networking meeting.

“They used to do rotating art exhibitions here before COVID, and then they stopped at COVID, and they’ve done nothing since,” Vinson said. “They started thinking they wanted to start showing art again, just to have something active going on in their theater lobby. And so when he heard that I’m a gallery owner and curator, he asked if I would be interested in doing it, and I said yes right away.”

The Rialto’s first show under the partnership, staged last year, paired photographers Jim Alexander and Sue Ross with jazz photographer and musician Michael Jackson, timed to a planned Joshua Redman performance. Bahindwa’s exhibition is the second.

“This is a great place to show it for people who might not necessarily come over to Edgewood and visit The Sun,” Vinson said. “It’s a theater, it’s performing arts, so it’s the demographic that we want, people who appreciate art.”

Bahindwa’s show, drawn in part from work also on view at The Sun ATL, centers on the theater’s World Cup programming and includes portraits of Pelé and Diego Maradona alongside scenes of children playing soccer. Vinson said the artist had extra paintings from the Sun ATL show that could round out the Rialto installation.

Bahindwa said the exhibition has already drawn notice from home. Democratic Republic of the Congo Ambassador H.E. Yvette Kapinga Ngandu visited the show with her team, he said.

“She saw the old work, and that really felt (special),” Bahindwa said.

For Bahindwa, the exhibition traces back to Vinson’s earlier support, including a show that followed Alexander’s solo exhibition at the Rialto.

“Having people like Shawn from The Sun ATL, who was actually the one who brought this to me,” Bahindwa said. “We had Jim Alexander before that. He asked, would you be willing to work on something? I’m like, bro, I’m literally cooking something with the World Cup right now because my country is coming. Do you want me to present that? And he’s like, yo, this is gonna be cool. And then now look at us.”

Bahindwa said the reception in Atlanta stood apart from that in other cities where he has had showings.

“In New York, they’re not gonna just give it to you like that. You gotta be a big known artist,” he said. “Atlanta is different. It’s really different. People really have a different mentality here.”

For Vinson, the Rialto partnership fits into a career that began entirely outside the art world. He worked as a photographer and publicist in the music industry before taking a job as an art handler in 1991, moving to Atlanta in 1993, and opening his first gallery in 1998.

“If you do something long enough, it works out, I suppose,” Vinson said. “It’s all been organic. There was no business plan or master plan from the start. It’s just kind of, I’ve just been going with the flow all this time.”

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