...and we're open...

for now.

The Georgia Museum of Art has been closed since May for bringing our fire suppression system to state-of-the-art levels. We will again close, likely for more than 18 months, beginning this November as we expand another 30,000 sq. ft.

I was included on Newsmakers with Tim Bryant last Friday on News-Talk 1340 WGAU to talk about the re-opening. Link to the podcast of the interview, which includes U.S. Senate candidate Vernon Jones and Mr. McGuinty, is [here].

As mentioned in the interview, we open with a special, temporary exhibition organized by the San Diego Museum of Art: Everett Gee Jackson/San Diego Modern, 1920-1955. The display is "the first comprehensive look at Jackson's artistic output since his death in 1995. As a pioneer of progressive art in southern California, Jackson held a lifelong interest in vanguard aesthetics and formalist compositions. The exhibition chronicles his career, from his youth in east Texas to his early training at the Art Institute of Chicago to his extended Mexican sojourn -- where he encountered the influential work of the Mexican muralists -- to his long and distinctive presence in the art community of southern California. During his travels and work, he encountered numerous other American artists, including Jean Charlot, Fritz Winold Reiss and Edward Weston. An exhibiting artist, book illustrator and important teacher, Jackson reflected the broader understanding of 'modernism' in American art in his work." Everett Gee Jackson features about 50 of the artist's paintings and works on paper.

To go along with the Jackson exhibition, we pulled together From the Collection: The Authority of the Mexican Muralists. Numerous American and Mexican artists were profoundly influenced by the modernist work of José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Siqueiros. Several artists, including Lucienne Bloch, Jean Charlot, and Ben Shahn, in this display worked with Diego Rivera on his mural projects. James Guy studied with Orozco; Harold Lehman worked under the leadership of Siqueiros; Syd Brown, Francis Chapin, and Joseph Marguiles traveled to Mexico. Other artists featured in this From the Collection are Thomas Hart Benton, Dorr Bothwell, Paul Cadmus, Lamar Dodd, and Charles Sheeler, each -- like Everett Gee Jackson -- impacted by the aesthetics and philosophies of Rivera and the other Mexican muralists.

Plus, we have put up favorites: from the Kress collection to Pierre Daura to Winslow Homer's Taking Sunflower to Teacher [just back from the Homer watercolors show at the Art Institute of Chicago] to Georgia O'Keeffe to our great American landscapes, and much more.

Images: (1) Everett Gee Jackson (American, 1900-1995), Spring in San Diego, 1931; Oil on panel, 34 1/4 x 29 1/4 inches. Jackson Family Collection. (2) Jean Charlot (American, b. France, 1898-1979), Untitled (Mother with Child on Back), 1941. Watercolor on wove paper, 29 1/16 x 21 3/4 inches (sheet). Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; gift of Mary and Lamar Dodd, Athens, Georgia. GMOA 1973.3180