The Goat Farm Arts Center

Lyrics

Alright, everyone, gather close. Mind your step on the cobblestones.
Breathe it in. That's not just dust.
That's turpentine, wet clay, and a century of industrial trust.
You are now standing at 1200 Foster Street. Welcome.

Before the easels, before the sound checks,
this was the Atlanta Pottery Company.
These kilns baked earth.
That long building over there? A cotton gin from 1889.
You can still feel the vibration in the floorboards if you stand just right.
The ghosts of machines, sleeping under the floor paint.

This is the Goat Farm.
Where the reverb from a rehearsal space shakes dust from a rafter beam.
Where a sculptor's torch sings next to the bleating of the herd.
This is the first draft of the Westside's new chapter.
Written in rust and pigment.

It was mostly ruins when Marianne Lambert saw it.
1995.
Just brick and kudzu and potential.
She handed out keys to the painters, the dancers, the makers.
They built their walls, ran their own wires.
They didn't clean it up, they just filled it up. With work. With noise. With light.

This is the Goat Farm.
Where the reverb from a rehearsal space shakes dust from a rafter beam.
Where a sculptor's torch sings next to the bleating of the herd.
This is the first draft of the Westside's new chapter.
Written in rust and pigment.

My favorite story?
An open studio weekend, I think it was 2003.
One of the residents, a little white goat named Pica,
wandered into a painter's studio.
Got his nose in a can of cerulean blue.
They found him later, wearing a smock of abstract expressionism.
He became a living installation.
That's the spirit of this place. You can't make it up.

Listen.
Hear that?
That's the sound of something new being born in something old.
Alright, our next stop is through this courtyard.
Watch for Pica's descendants. They have an eye for color.