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This Sunday: Opening Reception

This Sunday, from 2 to 4 p.m., at the Lyndon House Arts Center, the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art are co-hosting the opening reception for the annual juried show along with the Lyndon House Arts Foundation. The exhibition is always a highlight of the year, with a great range of art in tons of different media from local artists both new and renowned, and the two co-hosting organizations are partnering to encourage membership in both of them.

Museum and art news

* New York Times: "Los Angeles Tar Yields Mammoth’s Skeleton."

The excavation for a parking garage near the La Brea tar pits here has yielded the site’s first intact mammoth skeleton as well as a trove of other bones that could double the size of the site’s already large collection of fossils from the last ice age.

Researchers from the George C. Page Museum, at the tar pits in Hancock Park, announced the find on Wednesday, although museum excavators have been reporting online about the recently uncovered fossils for several months.

Most of the material is in 23 crates of tar, clay and mud that were removed in 2007 during the digging of an underground parking garage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which also sits next to the tar pits.

* www.ansa.it: "Rome celebrates Futurism."

The Italian capital is joining the country's Futurism frenzy, with a host of events celebrating 100 years since the launch of Italy's most famous modern art movement. Nearly 50 separate events have been lined up for coming months, including exhibitions, plays, conferences and installations...

The centrepiece of the capital's planned exhibitions will be a large-scale exhibition at the Quirinale, opening in Rome after a hugely successful run in Paris last year.

The show, which later moves on to London's Tate, invites visitors to re-evaluate the impact the movement had on modern art, concentrating on its origins.

* Art Institute of Chicago: Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth. From the AIC's web site:

The Edvard Munch of popular imagination—a tortured, bohemian rebel who seemed almost a living version of the famous figure in The Scream—was in fact a myth, carefully constructed during Munch’s lifetime by critics, historians, and the artist himself. Since then, this persona has been reinforced by our collective fascination with his many pictures of existential suffering. But there are many other sides to the artist and his work that have been eclipsed by the traditional emphasis on his supposed emotional imbalance and artistic isolation. In addition to his depictions of death and anxiety, for example, are moody, calm landscapes and pictures of bathers that celebrate the vitality of the human form in nature.

Image: Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863–1944), Moonlight, 1895. Oil on canvas, 93 x 110 cm (36 5/8 x 43 1/4 in.) The National Museum for Art, Architecture, and Design, Oslo, NG.M.02815 Woll 381

* High Museum of Art, Atlanta: The Treasure of Ulysses Davis. Perhaps overshadowed by the two "blockbuster" exhibitions -- Chinese terracotta army and the Louvre -- at the High, this exhibition might be the most interesting. From the High's site:

The first major traveling exhibition of works by Ulysses Davis in more than 25 years premieres at the High...

Davis was a barber in Savannah, Georgia, who was also a self-taught woodcarver of remarkable talent. He created a body of highly refined sculpture that expresses his humor, dignity and deep faith. The exhibition offers an opportunity for audiences to appreciate Davis' remarkable work, which is rarely seen outside of Savannah.

Image: Ulysses Davis, Jesus on the Cross, 1946, Carved cedar, mahogany, toothpicks and paint. High Museum of Art, Atlatna. Purchase with general funds and funds from Friends of the Museum.

Family Day: Origami Valentines

You might think that the museum has no events planned these days, but let me reiterate that we certainly do, and our schedule of Family Days in particular has not slowed down. This Saturday, Valentine's Day, provides a lovely opportunity for the last one to be held in our Carlton Street building, after which they will take place at various venues, from the State Botanical Garden of Georgia to the Lamar Dodd School of Art to the Lyndon House Arts Center, as part of GMOA on the Move. From 10 a.m. to noon, families can learn about the art of origami from Hijiri Hattori, outreach coordinator for the Center for Asian Studies (which is cosponsoring the event), then work with volunteers to make folded hearts and boxes and get Valentine's treats in the café. The Red and Black, UGA's student-run newspaper, had an article on the event yesterday, in which the reporter spoke with Hattori and a few members of the museum staff. The event is free and open to the public, but if you can't make it, here's a great YouTube video that explains how to fold an origami heart:

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

Classic Film Series: Hitchcock

Mark your calendars for tonight, film appreciators! The Georgia Museum of Art will be screening the third film in its four-film series on the films of director Alfred Hitchcock, "Marnie", introduced, once again, by Dr. Janice Simon, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Art History in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. "Marnie" will be shown in the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium at the museum's Carlton Street location at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

The long trailer for the film, which is embedded below (unfortunately not in the best quality), gives some idea of its strangeness, even within Hitchcock's oeuvre, although one can certainly see connections to "Psycho" and "Spellbound" in its portrayal of the psychological dramas of its main character, played by Tippi Hedren.



For those interested in examining gender issues in Hitchcock's films, "Marnie" presents particularly fertile ground. Jodi Ramer, for example, includes the film an analysis of the "Hitchcock blonde," and it is, overall, a fun film to probe, as well as a compelling character-based drama with strong Freudian themes.

We hope to see you here tonight for either the film or for our life-drawing class, which meets in the Ed and Phoebe Forio Studio Classroom from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., sans instruction, and costs $5.

Congratulations, Art!

We mean Art Rosenbaum, of course, the celebrated painter, Lamar Dodd School of Art instructor for many years, and documenter of folk music, who snagged a Grammy Sunday in the "Historical Album" category for his work in that area. Athens blogger Gordon Lamb has a nice post about Art's award, complete with a YouTube video of Art discussing his The Art of Field Recording II, and the Athens Banner-Herald has an article today by Julie Phillips complete with a sampling from The Art of Field Recording I, the set for which he received the Grammy.

Art had a retrospective here at the museum in 2006-2007, which produced an exhibition catalogue, Weaving His Art on Golden Looms: Paintings and Drawings by Art Rosenbaum, that also includes a documentary by his son, Neil Rosenbaum, It's Not What You Think It Is. The documentary covers Art's history, his approach to painting (which he takes from the Old Masters, building up layers of color to produce deeper, more vibrant flesh tones), and his recording work. An excerpt from the documentary can be watched below:



For ordering information for the exhibition catalogue/film, click here.

Snite’s ‘Disegno’ transports viewers

Full article text [here]. Excerpts:

There’s something about walking into a gallery filled with old Italian art that can’t fail to please lovers of traditional art. Multiculturalists and postcolonialists would strongly disagree with me if I said that all art museums should be at least partially filled with old Italian art, so I won’t say it. I will say, however, that looking at a 17th- century Italian drawing in a dimly lit gallery provides the classic art museum experience — do it, and you’ll be able to convince yourself that you’re somewhere in Europe, in a venerable museum with giant columns flanking the front doors, no matter where you actually are.

Aside from assembling an impressive collection of works on paper, “The Art of Disegno,” an exhibition of Italian prints and drawings currently on display at the Snite Museum of Art, offers just such an experience.

The exhibit, which has been organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, features dozens of drawings, prints and other works on paper from the 16th through the 18th centuries. The disegno of the show’s title translates literally as drawing or design, but its meaning in the history of art is a little more subtle; an artist with a mastery of disegno had control of the foundation of art, according to commentators of the time, and with it, the ability to accurately reproduce nature, as all art should strive to do. These masters of disegno included such familiar names as Tiepolo, Parmigianino, Canaletto and Veronese, all of whom are among the many artists represented in the exhibition. ...

All of the works are accompanied by excellent text panels that provide both biographical details about the artists and extensive contextual information about the individual pictures. They add considerably to the sense of the show’s art historical significance and make the exhibition a wonderful opportunity to immerse oneself in the most famous era of Western art.

Image: Tribune Photo/SANTIAGO FLORES
Antonio Canaletto’s print “View of a Town With a Bishop’s Tomb” “View of a Town With a Bishop’s Tomb,” one of the works featured in “The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art” at the Snite, is as meticulously detailed as his more famous cityscapes.

Reimagining the Museum lecture

In looking for some museum studies topics on the internet, I happened to come across an entire lecture (presented as one in an series on "Reimagining the Museum" at Michigan) given by a former mentor and member of my dissertation committee, Ray Silverman, now Professor of Art History and Director of the University of Michigan’s Museum Studies Program. Ray is particularly interested in how African cultures are presented by Western museums.

His lecture, given at the UM Museum of Art back in 2007:

The closing of the Rose

Many of you have probably been following the decision of the trustees of Brandeis University to shutter the Rose Art Museum and sell off its collection in order to make up a budget shortfall. The Rose's collection includes approximately 6,000 works of art, including paintings by paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and the trustees' actions have, understandably, provoked considerable controversy. Today's New York Times contains an article by Roberta Smith that expresses the real loss that would be felt if their plan comes to fruition. Smith writes,

What the university’s president, Jehuda Reinharz, and the trustees don’t seem to realize is how their actions stain the reputation of Brandeis itself. He characterized the choice as “painful” and “difficult,” but it had all the earmarks of a desperate quick fix rather than a rational decision. He even said it in no way diminished Brandeis’s commitment to the visual arts, pointing out the university could turn the museum into an arts studio and study center. But the decision was devastating for the university’s art and art history departments, which have always relied heavily on the museum.

At the museum on Friday, Aliza Sena, a 19-year-old sophomore, said that graduating seniors in art and art history were especially traumatized. “It’s like the school telling them that their degree is fluff,” Ms. Sena said. She transferred this year from Tulane University after deciding that she wanted to major in art rather than business, and the Rose was a major factor in her choice.

“I’m devastated,” she said. “It’s crushing to figure out this school’s priorities, and sad that they can make a decision without consulting anyone knowledgeable. It really makes me reconsider being here.”

It is true that, at a time of rarely precedented financial crisis in the United States and abroad, reprioritizing is frequently in order, from the household to the governmental level, but it is also important to recognize the role of university museums. William U. Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art, heads up the professional practices committee of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), which has expressed "strong objection to Brandeis University's proposed plan to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its collection." Eiland reiterated the centrality of university art museums to the teaching and scholarship missions of those educational institutions and expressed forcefully his feelings that the decision of the Brandeis trustees will result in a terrible loss.

Jim Barsness

Coming up this Wednesday, February 4, at 5:30 p.m. in the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium at the museum is the annual Willson Center for Humanities and Arts/Georgia Museum of Art Annual Lecture, which will be delivered by Jim Barsness this year. Barsness was born in Bozeman, Mont., in 1954, and currently teaches as an associate professor in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia. His work was recently featured in "More is More: Maximalist Tendencies in Recent American Painting," organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, Tallahassee; and "New Directions,"organized by the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Ga. Barness will discuss his recent work in the lecture, which is free and open to the public, and is cosponsored by the museum and by the Willson Center.