Tuesday, March 31, 2009

In the News


Our director just passed along a nice op-ed by Rebecca Nagy, director of the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, on the subject of why museums matter in times of economic crisis.

The public affairs committee of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) is collecting articles about museums in the news, so if you see any, please pass them along.

American Scene elsewhere


Art Daily covered yesterday the opening on April 5 of Regional Dialect: American Scene Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, an exhibition at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, in Memphis, Tenn. The exhibition includes 57 works by American Scene painters, some of whom you may know if you visit the Georgia Museum of Art's exhibitions regularly. At least two of them, Joe Jones and Carl Frederick Gaertner, appear in the exhibition catalogue above, Coming Home: American Paintings, 1930-1950, from the Schoen Collection, which remains available for purchase from the museum shop ($35 softcover; $45 hardcover). The catalogue features 128 paintings from the numerous periods that make up the American Scene from 1930 to 1950, when the influences of the Depression and World War II contributed to styles of art variously known as Regionalism, Social Realism, Magic Realism, Surrealism, and Precisionism.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Link


The New York Times has an amazing slideshow of work by Satre Stuelke, who ran a bunch of unexpected objects through a CT scanner. The above? Chicken McNuggets. The results were surprisingly beautiful, as well as a great example of how we'll never run out of new ways to make art.

Anna Richards Brewster: American Impressionist


One aspect of the Georgia Museum of Art's activities that is not often highlighted is the museum's loans and traveling exhibitions, and as part of GMOA on the Move, we're trying to call attention to them, letting you know where you can see objects from our collection while we do not have our own gallery space. The exhibition Anna Richards Brewster: American Impressionist recently opened at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art & Science, in Fresno, Calif., and includes a painting from GMOA's collection, Moulin Huet, Guernsey, pictured above. There's a great website devoted to Brewster's work here that discusses the exhibition and even gives a virtual tour of it. So even if you're not in the Fresno area, you can visit our painting.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Coming Soon...


The Museum Shop's online version will launch (providing no more interferences arise) next week, meaning that, while you can't browse in person in its delightful atmosphere, you will be able to spend the same amount of time perusing its offerings, from museum publications to jewelry, toys and more. Check back here and on the main site for updates.

Link


Another of our favorite sites to check daily (we recommend Google Reader or something of the sort for this kind of thing) is PICDIT, which posts amazing images, including the one above, from Mason Dickson, in acrylic on reclaimed lumber.

MFA


One thing we really will miss about not having a building in which to show art for the next two years is the annual MFA exit show, which has been held at the museum since Lamar Dodd was running the art school and Alfred Holbrook was director of GMOA. It's been a great opportunity for those artists to learn how a museum works from the inside out, as they work with museum staff from start to finish on installation, labels, publicity, planning the opening reception and more. But the academic calendar goes on, so this year's crop of MFA students will have their exhibition at the new Dodd building, with an opening reception next Friday, April 3, from 6 to 9 p.m. The image above is one of Wes Airgood's, a jewelry and metalwork artist in the MFA program who contributed work to The Ring Shows: Then & Now and Putting the Band Back Together, an exhibition on view at the museum in August 2008. The MFA students have put together a website that links to all of their individual sites and looks to both the future and the past.

Across the hall from us, in our current GMOA North location, is the first-year MFAs show, titled Our Darlings, which gives a neat look at what's to come, including the giant flower pictured below, by Denton Crawford, which takes up about six feet of wall. It'll be down any day now, if it's not already.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Multitasking?

Back in February, the Athens Banner-Herald ran a story about Watkinsville experimenting with sheep control of weeds. Maybe we could combine that sort of natural invasive plant control with an art project like the below.

Sneak Peek


What else are we working on? Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection opens at the Lyndon House this August, with an opening reception scheduled for August 15 there. Our curator of American art, Paul Manoguerra, who also contributes to this blog, is busying himself with putting the exhibition together, among many other things. Carl Mullis's collection has been a great resource for the museum, and it's certainly been difficult for Paul to choose among the many R.A. Millers Carl has, but we think the resulting exhibition is going to be both fun and exciting.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Boxing experts


While most of us have been moved to GMOA North, plenty of staff and temporary help remains behind at the old building, packing and moving and doing whatever needs to be done. Lanora Pierce, one of our preparators, snapped this photo of Kenneth Kase, clearly explaining something, in front of an array of boxes at GMOA East, as we've taken to calling it.

Publications


Here's a sneak peek at the cover of our next publication, the proofs for which are on their way right now. The Historian's Eye: Essays on Italian Art in Honor of Andrew Ladis is the culmination of the symposium on early Italian art that was held at the museum in early September of 2006. It collects many of the papers that were presented there and serves as a record of the conference in other ways, such as documenting the touching tributes to Dr. Ladis given by his past and current students. The book will retail for $40. Keep checking here to find out when it will be available for purchase.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Liz Collins


Visiting artist Liz Collins, who specializes in intriguing knits, will be giving a lecture at 5:30 p.m. today (Tuesday, March 24) at 5:30 p.m. in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, room S151. The Dodd website has more details here and if you'd like to learn more about Collins, she has an extremely informative website, which includes a blog. The Visiting Artist program at the LDSOA is a great resource, not only for its students, but also for the community at large, including museum patrons interested in contemporary work and the artistic process.

Day Trip to Atlanta



Tuesday, April 7, the Collectors and the GMOA docents will be taking a day trip to Atlanta that includes:
  1. A morning visit to the home of Jack Sawyer and William Torres to view their collection.
  2. Luncheon at Ted's Montana Grill in Midtown
  3. An afternoon visit to the High Museum of Art to see the exhibition The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army
Cost for the whole day, which includes transportation, lunch and admission to the High, is $90. The group will depart from the visitor parking lot of the Georgia Museum of Art on Carlton Street at 8 a.m. and return to Athens at approximately 5 p.m. R.S.V.P. to 706.542.0830 by April 2, and follow this link for more information about becoming a member of the Collectors.

Monday, March 23, 2009

The Art of: Brew Photos

Our first "The Art of" event, The Art of: Brew, went exceedingly well, with a crowd beautifully turned out in various shades of green (to celebrate their Irish heritage or just avoid being pinched), and you can see the slideshow of photos from it below.



Be sure to mark your calendars for The Art of: Scenic Design, coming up on May 13 at Athens Community Theater and watch here for more details on that event.

Folk Art!


Those of you who don't keep up with the folk art world may not realize that the spring sale at Slotin Folk Art is coming up this Saturday (March 28, 2009), with 960 items and objects of art up for auction, from face jugs to paintings to tramp art and advertisements. Slotin's catalogue is always a great deal of fun to flip through, and they've got everything listed online if you're not on their mailing list. The B.F. Perkins painting above is on the cover of the print catalogue, and it's a stunning piece, one that reminded us of his paintings that appeared in the exhibition and catalogue Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection, the latter of which we still have for sale for a mere $48 through the museum shop (we also handle wholesale sales), which will be launching its web presence soon.


The museum also has a fabulous R.A. Miller show in the works, also drawn from Carl's collection, which will be up at the Lyndon House Arts Center this August. We're working on the exhibition and catalogue right now, so keep checking here for updates.

Friday, March 20, 2009

In the News

The New York Times has its special "Museums" section online currently, although that link is sure to expire. We highly recommend you take a look at all the articles contained therein.

Carol Vogel's "In Lean Times, Museums Find New Ways to Reach Out" discusses the ways in which museums are attempting to expand their audiences and function as general cultural centers, from yoga at MOMA to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "It's Time We Met" Flickr contest.

In "When the Gallery Is a Classroom," one of the most interesting and relevant articles to GMOA, Dorothy Spears writes about increasing the diversity of museum audiences and integrating museum offerings with school curricula.

Carol Kino has an article on the reopening of the artist's studio at the Norman Rockwell Museum, which contains this fascinating tidbit:
Along the way, there have been a few quandaries about where to draw the line between preservation and accurate depiction: for instance, how to handle the dented, blackened brass bucket that Rockwell kept beside him, which offers some insight into his personality.

Rockwell generally used the bucket as a receptacle for turpentine-soaked rags. But surprisingly for someone who had already lost one studio to fire, he also used it to knock out pipe ashes. “The rags would often catch fire,” said Corry Kanzenberg, curator of archives. “Then someone — maybe Rockwell, maybe his assistant, maybe his secretary — would throw the bucket out the door of the studio. That’s how it got dinged so badly.”

Rockwell appears to have cleaned the bucket only once, for the October 1960 photo shoot. Should it be polished up again? The curators finally decided against it. “If we take away the surface layer,” Ms. Kanzenberg said, “it takes away part of the story.”
One story we're following with particular interest, due to the involvement of our director, Bill Eiland, is the introduction in New York state of a bill regulating deaccessioning.

Finally, our shop manager, Amy Miller, sent out a link to this article in the London Times about why people go to museums. The article focuses in part on what's particularly British about such an activity, but Hugo Rifkind certainly makes some points relevant to not only U.S. museums, but also specifically to ours:
Neil MacGregor , at the British Museum, agrees. “The Great Court has become London's village green,” he says. “It's where you bring the children. It's where you meet a friend. It's the space that belongs to everyone.”

Free entry has a huge amount to do with this. That should probably be Theory 4, the credit-crunch theory. People are going to museums because museums are free. Most of Britain's biggest museums have been free for years, but, as MacGregor puts it, it's the rhetoric of free admission since 2001 that has had an impact, as much as the fact. When the Tory culture spokesman, Hugo Swire, spoke of reintroducing entry charges in 2007 there was national uproar, and a few months later David Cameron sacked him.

When I asked Redmond his best tip for getting people into museums, he snorted and said “create a recession”. Everybody going to a museum approves of free entry, even if (and this is the crucial bit) they are then paying extra to see a special exhibition, such as Picasso at the National (£12.50) or Shah Abbas at the British Museum (£12). Free admission to museums has given the public a sense of ownership over them. This ties into Theory1, and the way that many museums no longer feel like somebody else's country house. They feel like they are ours.

Second Life: What Is It?

Unless you happened to be present for one of the great presentations given by our media relations coordinator, Jenny Williams, regarding the Georgia Museum of Art's venture into Second Life, you may not know what, exactly, that is. Jenny passed along the following YouTube video that gives a good introduction to the virtual world and how users outside of individuals (businesses, governments, nonprofits) are using it to further their goals.



This second video gives a nice concrete example of a firm using Second Life:



You can register for an account and find out more about it here. The virtual museum is coming along nicely, and we're working on recording blurbs about some of the works of art on its walls that visitors will be able to listen to as they walk around inside it.

Spring 2009 Newsletter

The spring 2009 newsletter, which covers April, May and June, is already on its way to those of you who are Friends (one of the many perks of membership), but we've been playing around with Issuu, a new site that allows you to upload pdfs and other types of files and turns them into embeddable, searchable, flippable online documents, and figured out how to do exactly that with the newsletter. We're working on where to put it on our main website, and please be aware that the main site's calendar is always the place to go for the most up-to-date information, but in the meantime, check it out below. Mouse over the image for a clickable "zoom" button that will allow you to view it at full-screen size.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Slideshows

We're having a lot of fun playing around with our GMOA Flickr page, which we've started updating on a regular basis. We still have plenty of event photos at high resolution (for downloading) on our web page, here, but Flickr gives us nearly unlimited space in which to post pictures and lets you comment on and share them.

Here's a slideshow of pictures from the GMOA on the Move kickoff party:



Click around!

Office space



Christoph Niemann's piece on cables in the New York Times online certainly rang true to all of us. How about you?

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Mark your calendars


Our fourth candidate for the Pierre Daura Curator of European Art position, Alexandra Karl, will deliver her lecture, "Cercle et Carré: Reconstructing the Events," on Thursday, March 19, at 4 p.m. in room 116 of the visual arts building on Jackson Street (GMOA North). The lecture is free and open to the public, as always, and we continue to encourage the general public to show up, as the lectures provide a unique insight into who might fill the position and take charge of the museum's European holdings (as well as direct the Daura Center). Karl teaches art history at the University of Utah and received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2007. She has served as a curator and lecturer at art museums and is especially interested in evidence of Darwinism in late-19th-century German painting. Please give us a call at 706.542.GMOA (4662) if you need directions or more information.


On Friday, March 20, at 6 p.m., the Lamar Dodd School of Art will hold an opening reception for At the Beginning: Early Paintings by Lamar Dodd from the C.L. Morehead Jr. Collection, an exhibition organized by Dr. Asen Kirin. Although the museum did not put together the exhibition, it has strong ties to Dodd's estate and worked alongside Dodd himself from the time of its founding by Alfred Holbrook. The exhibition is on display in Gallery 307 at the art school's new building until March 28 (regular gallery hours are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., weekdays). The New Georgia Encyclopedia has a wonderful entry on Dodd, written by our own Dr. Eiland, that may serve as a good introduction to his life and work.

Edit: Dr. Kirin reminds us, in an email, that on March 28, from 4 to 6 p.m., Mr. Morehead and Annie Laurie Dodd will be on hand to discuss the paintings on display (with coffee and pastries).

GMOA in the News



This past Sunday, William U. Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art, appeared in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning in a segment titled "The Art of Survival" that addressed the current trend of museums deaccessioning works to pay operating expenses. The video, unfortunately, has not been posted, but an article that summarizes the piece is online here. Bill was interviewed not only because of his ability to speak extemporaneously and passionately on the subject (which we're sure many of you have experienced personally), but also because of his extensive professional involvement with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and its committee on the matter. If anyone happens to have a digital version of the video, please let us know. We'd love to post it for all to see.

Albuquerque / Santa Fe / Taos

The Georgia Museum of Art took 19 collectors and 3 staff members, including yours truly, on a trip to see the museums, galleries, and sights of central and northern New Mexico.

We left last Thursday, March 12th, and returned late Monday night.

Details of the trip are over on my personal blog [here].

Some pictures:

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Don't forget

The Art of: Brew tonight at 6 p.m.! Call 706.542.4662 for more information.

Groundbreaking


Columns, UGA's in-house newsletter, has a nice article this week on the ceremonial groundbreaking that took place on March 3 at the museum for the new wing, complete with a couple of photos of literal ground being turned over, first by UGA and GMOA higher-ups (above) and then by GMOA staff (below). Visit Columns for photo IDs.

Donald Barthelme and Museums



The February 23 issue of "The New Yorker" contained an article by Louis Menand called "Saved from Drowning: Barthelme Reconsidered," which addresses the reputation of the short story writer and sometime novelist Donald Barthelme as a postmodernist and what, exactly, that means. For the purposes of this blog, the literary aspect was interesting, but what was more so was Menand's discussion of Barthelme's work as a museum director and how that relates, in some ways, to his writing. Menand writes,
In 1960, he joined the board of Houston's Contemporary Arts Association, and in 1961 became the director of its museum. Through these offices, he brought contemporary arts and letters to Houston: he arranged performances of Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and Edward Albee's "Zoo Story"; poetry readings by Kenneth Koch, W. D. Snodgrass, and Robert Bly; and art exhibitions that included paintings by Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn. One of the luminaries he attracted was the art critic Harold Rosenberg, first to the pages of Forum and later to the museum, where he lectured before an audience of modest size. Rosenberg, along with his friend Thomas Hess, the editor of Art News, was launching Location, and he invited Barthelme to come to New York City to be the magazine's managing editor. Barthelme must have felt that his taste was too advanced for Houston, and he wasted no time making a decision. The move ended his marriage, but it established his career.
Menand then goes on to discuss Barthelme's avant-garde turn and its connection to the art of Robert Rauschenberg:
Having worked at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and then in New York for two art-world figures at a magazine covering the arts, Barthelme naturally looked to what was going on in painting for a way to get back to the spirit of Joyce and Beckett without merely copying Joyce and Beckett. The method he struck on was collage, and the easiest way to understand what he was doing with it is to compare his work with the work of another Texan in New York, Robert Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg was six years older than Barthelme, and his background was completely different. His father had no schooling beyond the third grade; he was an employee of the Gulf States Utilities, in Port Arthur, and his main interests were fishing and hunting. Rauschenberg's parents didn't pay much attention to him. Though he loved to draw as a child, he didn't realize that there was such a thing as "an artist" until he visited the Huntington Art Gallery, in San Marino, California, while he was on furlough from the Navy, and saw some portrait paintings. He recognized two of the images: he had seen them on the backs of playing cards. After his discharge, and with the help of the G.I. Bill, he pursued a peripatetic arts education, at the Kansas City Art Institute; the Académie Julian, in Paris; Black Mountain College, in North Carolina; and the Art Students League, in New York City.

He had his first show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery, in New York, in 1951. No pieces were sold (though Rauschenberg gave one to the composer John Cage, who was a friend). Interest did not build quickly. Even after he began his creative relationship with Jasper Johns, in 1954, Johns was the artist whose work-he was just beginning the American-flag paintings-people were excited about. But when Barthelme arrived Rauschenberg was at the center of the New York art world; he would win the Grand Prize in painting at the Venice Biennale in 1964.

Rauschenberg had a radical approach to materials: he made art out of anything. This was, in part, a consequence of his training at Black Mountain under Josef Albers, an ex-Bauhaus disciplinarian who apparently disliked Rauschenberg when Rauschenberg was his student and later claimed not to remember him. Albers sometimes made his students work with found objects, and Rauschenberg took that part of the lesson to heart. His promiscuity when it came to materials was also the consequence of sometimes having no money for paint or canvas. But he made do with whatever was around as a way of pushing the limits of painting. He would buy paint cans whose labels had come off, so that he wouldn't know the color before he used it, in order to let the materials dictate the product.

Rauschenberg's signature early works, the combines, were begun in 1954, before he started silk-screening images onto the canvas, a technique he learned from Warhol. The best-known is the stuffed goat with an automobile tire around its middle, "Monogram," which Rauschenberg started in 1955, after finding the goat at a secondhand office-furniture store, and finished in 1959, when he figured out what to do with the tire and painted a wooden "pasture" for the piece to stand on. "Coca Cola Plan" (1958) includes two cast-metal wings and three Coke bottles; "Bed" (1955) is made from an old quilt, a sheet, and a pillow; and so on.

Duchamp used found objects to make art-the urinal, the bicycle wheel, the snow shovel. But selection is an important feature of those works: there is a certain fastidiousness at the heart of the Duchampian aesthetic. The heart of the Rauschenberg aesthetic is messiness. Combining found materials in collages was not new with Rauschenberg, either. But traditional collage arranges fragments into a form, and Rauschenberg's collages are not organized in any ordinarily legible manner. "Rebus" (1955) is a little more than ten feet long; it includes part of an election poster, a photograph of two runners, a page of newspaper comic strips, a reproduction of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," a pinup shot, a self-portrait by Dürer, another photograph of the runners, and a child's drawing of a woman. The title is a joke: you cannot read the piece in any direction. Like most of Rauschenberg's work, it has no center. Form, in the conventional sense of a hierarchical order, is one of the things that he is trying to eliminate.

"The principle of collage is one of the central principles of art in this century and it seems also to me to be one of the central principles of literature," Barthelme said at a symposium on fiction in 1975. He loved the messy-"that wonderful category," he called it in a catalogue essay for an exhibition of Rauschenberg's work in Houston, in 1985-and he was fascinated by the artistic possibilities of the ugly. He once called his own stories "slumgullions," and he tried to create a certain amount of extraneous noise in them, on the theory that the distraction helped the reader. "The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude," he explained. "As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it's being poorly done." One of his favorite accomplishments as a museum director was a show called "New American Artifacts: The Ugly Show," which he mounted in 1960, and for which he collected, from junk shops and pawnshops, a baby-blue Styrofoam chrysanthemum, a hubcap, a jukebox, an unpainted paint-by-numbers picture of lambs, three bad reproductions of Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy," a copy of Ricky Nelson Magazine, and similar detritus.

In the production of found-material art, the painter has an obvious advantage, and Barthelme was aware of the problem.

Yes I know it's shatteringly ingenuous but I wanted to be a painter. They get away with murder in my view; Mr. X. on the Times agrees with me. You don't know how I envy them. They can pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper on the street, glue it to the canvas (in the right place, of course, there's that), and lo! People crowd about and cry, "A real Baby Ruth wrapper, by God, what could be realer than that!" Fantastic metaphysical advantage. You hate them, if you're ambitious.-"See the Moon?" (1966)


The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as though they were found objects.

We rarely experience sentences this way, because we're trying to look through them to the things they represent, just as, in traditional easel painting, we look through the canvas, as though it were a window, onto the world it represents. That's the kind of looking and reading that modernism was committed to disrupting.
It's an interesting connection to make, and Menand pursues it well.


He makes one more near the article's conclusion:
"The aim of literature," says a character in "Florence Green Is 81," one of Barthelme's first published stories, "is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart." Helen Moore Barthelme says that the line was inspired by an object he saw at a Contemporary Arts Museum exhibit; Daugherty assumes it was that classic work of surrealism Meret Oppenheim's "Object" (1936)-the fur-lined teacup. Barthelme once suggested that the main weakness of his writing was a lack of emotion, but in this he was plainly wrong. His stories were too wild to be emotional mousetraps, it's true, but he was a master of the ending. There is always a little tug, in all the mess, a melody we recognize. He could catch you unexpectedly.
For more on Robert Rauschenberg, visit this PBS site. Less exists online about Meret Oppenheim, but there's always Wikipedia.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Yet another link



Our patrons are so bloggy! We just found out about Beauty Everyday, the newish blog run by Athenians Kristen Bach, Rebecca Wood and Rinne Allen. These three ladies have a lot to do with r.wood studio, which, among many other contributions to the museum, provided favors for the last Elegant Salute (which Allen co-chaired). Their blog is a great collective effort to document and spread the beauty of the South and, specifically, of Athens, Ga., and we think you should all bookmark it.

Friday, March 13, 2009

More linkage


Betty Alice Fowler, our grants writer, just alerted us to the fact that one of our wonderful patrons, Beverly Bremer, who has given much to the museum in the way of time, funds and objects and serves on the museum's Decorative Arts Advisory Committee, has a blog!

The Silver Lining, which is associated with Bremer's store, Beverly Bremer Silver Shop, in Atlanta, will focus on (what else!) silver, and Bremer already has posts up about the fluctuating value of silver as a precious metal, different kinds of asparagus servers and the fact that you can let the shop know your flatware pattern if you are missing pieces, so that they can keep an eye out.

Links!



Where do we go for fun blogging on the visual arts? Well, one unexpected place to find a lot of it is at rapper/producer/general impresario Kanye West's blog. West posts a lot about couture fashion and there are certainly plenty of scantily clad models featured, but he also has a great eye for good design and an interest in contemporary art, from conceptual to photography to painting and beyond. His interests aren't purely amateur either. West attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago, and while he doesn't write at length about much on the blog, his tastes are adventurous and worth following. You can always click on the "art" section if you're less interested in Young Jeezy's new single.



Another site we've recently come across that links to neat things artists are doing on a daily basis is BOOOOOOOM!, run by designer Jeff Hamada, who blogs about art, design, film, music and more. He recently covered embroiderer Megan Whitmarsh, whose tiny depictions of, for example, Bigfoot listening to a boombox, are adorably simple and colorful.

We'll try to keep pointing you to other places to read about art and museums online in addition to covering our own events and exhibitions, and please comment if there's anywhere you like to discover new art.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

The Art of: Brew

Click on the above to see the invitation to our first "The Art of" event, The Art of: Brew, which will be held at Terrapin Beer Company (click here for directions) on St. Patrick's Day (Tuesday, March 17) from 6 to 8 p.m. The Terrapin tours have been wildly popular ever since the brewery opened in Athens last year, and this is a great chance to see what goes on behind the scenes there. It's also a wonderful opportunity to become a Friend of the Georgia Museum of Art, as admission drops to a mere $10 per person with a new membership. Call 706.542.0830 to RSVP by Monday, March 16. There will be food as well as drink and music by the Athens A-Train Band.

GMOA North is here



After three days of moving offices, with the UGA Physical Plant making a lot of trips and helping us out tremendously, we are all pretty much situated in our temporary home for the next two years, the building that once held the art school, on Jackson Street. If you want to see a little of what went on, click here for a slideshow.

Friday, March 06, 2009

Patrons' Lecture and Family Day



Even with our office moving day scheduled for Monday, things aren't slowing down any here at the museum, and tomorrow (Saturday, March 7), we have two events scheduled, both to take place at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia.



From 10 to 11:30 a.m., the museum will be participating in the Botanical Garden's Family Festival, with an activity station at which you can create an animal to take home. Carissa DiCindio, our assistant curator of education, has been working all week on turtles, owls, and other critters, which she and volunteers will help teach you how to make out of everyday objects. Roy Hodge, of Exotic Paradise, Atlanta, will also be on hand at the event to entertain and educate family members with his menagerie of exotic forest animals. Discover amazing facts about cockatoos, exotic parrots, spectacled owls, monitor lizards, anacondas, and boa constrictors. The State Botanical Garden of Georgia is cosponsoring the event, which takes the place of one of the museum's Family Days. Please note that there is a charge of $3 per person or $10 per family; children under two are admitted free.

If you'd like to stick around after the festival, the biennial Patrons' Lecture will be held at 2 p.m., also at the Botanical Garden. Co-hosted by the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art and the Friends of the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, the 2009 lecture will be presented by Kevin Oonk, president of Fräbel Glass, and feature the glass artistry of Hans-Godo Fräbel and the Fräbel Studio. Fräbel was trained as a scientific glassblower at the prestigious Jena Glaswerke in Mainz, West Germany, then settled in Atlanta where in 1968 he founded the Fräbel Studio. The cost is $75 per patron (which includes a commemorative gift from the event), $25 for general admission, and $10 for student admission. Please call 706.542.0437 for more information.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Spotted!



A photographer from the Athens Banner-Herald documented the GMOA on the Move Kickoff Party on Tuesday, and her photos are up now on their website, here, so you can see how much fun you missed if you weren't able to attend. Everyone had a wonderful time, and despite the craziness of 6.5 inches of snow over the weekend, the event went off without a hitch. We'll have our own photos up soon on the main GMOA site, including both party pics and the photos y'all posed for with the GMOA on the Move sign to mimic our in-house photo shoot.

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Party Tonight!



Please don't think the GMOA on the Move Kickoff Party (tonight, March 3, from 7 to 9 p.m.) is canceled due to the weather. We are persevering, despite the cold, and can promise wonderful food and drink, a fun DJ and a great time to be had by all, free of charge. We hope to see you here!