Upcoming

If you haven't noticed our press releases flying thick and furious, here are some recent ones that have come out.

First, we have a panel discussion of artists whose work is featured in our current exhibition "Tradition Redefined," coming up on March 24.

Georgia Museum of Art hosts artists' panel discussion

Writer: Jennifer Nelson, jennifernelson115@gmail.com
Contact: Jenny Williams, 706/542-4662, collardj@uga.edu
Mar 9, 2011, 09:59

Athens, Ga. – The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia will host a panel discussion featuring 11 artists from the museum’s current exhibition of works by African-American artists, “Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African-American Art,” on March 24. Artists will arrive in the galleries at 4:30 p.m. to meet visitors and talk about their work, and the panel discussion will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium.

Carl Christian is primarily an abstract painter who earned an M.A. in music education from Georgia State University and attended the Art Institute of Atlanta. His work has been displayed in institutions such as the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Ala., Morehouse College and Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Kevin Cole currently serves as the chairman of fine arts at West Lake High School in Atlanta and as a consultant for the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. He has been involved in numerous public art commissions, including the 1996 Coca-Cola Centennial Olympic Mural in Atlanta.

Stephanie Jackson envisions the African-American experience through figurative painting. She is currently a professor of art at UGA and has received awards including the 2002 Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award in recognition of 20 years of sustained art making and dedication to the arts.

Larry Walker combines photos and other reproduced images with paint. He graduated from the renowned High School of Music and Art in New York City. He retired as professor emeritus from Georgia State University’s Ernst G. Welch School of Art and Design.

Larry Lebby specializes in lithography, watercolor and paintings in oil and acrylic. His work has been displayed throughout the United States and featured in the White House, the Smithsonian Institution, the United Nations and in the Vatican.

Richard Mayhew is primarily a landscape painter who considers himself an improvisationalist. He studied art in the 1950s at the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Art School, the Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. His works have been exhibited widely in solo and group shows and are in the collections of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Valerie Maynard is an expressionist artist who draws her inspiration from spiritual and political sources, putting African-American culture and the political struggle of blacks into visual form. Her work has been displayed in international venues such as the Reichhold Center for the Arts, University of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, and the Riksutallnlgar National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden.

Maria-Lana Queen is a former runway model who began painting to transform the sorrow of her brother’s death into a celebration of his life. Her abstract paintings serve as a visual diary of her feelings. Queen received a B.A. from the University of the District of Columbia.

Preston Sampson studied under David C. Driskell at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since graduating in 1984, he has been awarded numerous grants and honors, including the Absolut Expressions ad campaign for Absolut Vodka in 1997.

Joyce Wellman is an abstract painter and printmaker from New York who is known for her interest in the relationship among mathematics, physics and art. She also specializes in creating artist’s books and public art projects.

Abstract artist William T. Williams earned a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute and an M.F.A. from Yale University. He was the first African American to be included in H.W. Janson’s textbook History of Art. His work has been displayed all over the world in museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Studio Museum of Harlem.

“Tradition Redefined” features 72 works by 67 African-American artists who typically have not been recognized in the traditional narratives of African-American art. This exhibition, which contains works created from the 1890s to 2007, is organized by the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Adrienne L. Childs, curator in residence of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, will moderate the discussion. The center celebrates the legacy of Driskell—distinguished university professor emeritus of art, artist, art historian, collector and curator—by preserving the rich heritage of African-American visual art and culture. Established in 2001, the center provides an intellectual home for artists, museum professionals, art administrators and scholars of color, broadening the field of African Diaspora studies. The Driskell Center is committed to preserving, documenting and presenting African-American art, as well as replenishing and expanding the field of African-American art.

This release was picked up by Art Daily, among others. Second, releases on our next set of temporary exhibitions are starting to go out, including this one on "The Art of Disegno""

The Art of Disegno to be on view at the Georgia Museum of Art, May 14 to Aug. 7

Contact: Jenny Williams, 706/542-9078, collardj@uga.edu
Mar 11, 2011, 09:54

Athens, Ga. – The Art of Disegno: Italian Prints and Drawings from the Georgia Museum of Art will be on view at the Georgia Museum of Art from May 14 to Aug. 7. The exhibition features 53 works on paper produced in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

Guest curators Babette Bohn, professor of art history at Texas Christian University, and Robert Randolph Coleman, associate professor of art history at the University of Notre Dame, chose these prints and drawings from the collections of GMOA and Giuliano Ceseri because they provide rare insight into the training, working habits and creative process of artists. For Italian artists of this era, the art of drawing was regarded as an intellectual as well as a practical activity, and the images found in this exhibition, according to Bohn and Coleman, represent examples of the most fertile and inspired artistic creations found on paper during this period.

“Beginning in the 14th century and increasing in the following centuries, as paper became more widely available, drawings became critical tools of the design process for artists,” said Bohn.

Drawings also enjoyed a close relationship with prints during this period. For example, Coleman’s entry on Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prints in the accompanying exhibition catalogue discusses how they reveal a fantastical and visionary imagination. Piranesi’s works create an aura of mystery, not only because of the dramatic chiaroscuro, but also because of disappearing staircases, leaning ladders to nowhere and architectural elements that appear to have no real function.

“Prints enabled artists to replicate the designs created in drawings through a technology that provided the possibility of creating multiple works of art and facilitated the spread of the artists’ reputation around the world,” said Bohn.

The exhibition includes prints by Italian printmakers such as Parmigianino and Marcantonio Raimondi, and examples by figures such as Pietro Testa and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.

The in-house curator for this exhibition is Lynn Boland, GMOA’s Pierre Daura Curator of European Art.

This exhibition was last on view at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame from January to May 2009 and will travel to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Calif., in November of this year. It is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue produced by GMOA that features full-page color illustrations of each work and retails for $38.

And this one on an exhibition of American watercolors from the permanent collection:

Georgia Museum of Art to exhibit American watercolors from the permanent collection

Writer: Samantha Meyer, sam610@uga.edu
Contact: Jenny Williams, 706/542-4662, collardj@uga.edu
Mar 14, 2011, 07:20

Athens, Ga. – The Georgia Museum of Art will exhibit a selection of American watercolors from its permanent collection from May 14 to Aug. 7, in an exhibition organized by Paul A. Manoguerra, chief curator and curator of American art. Due to the fragile nature of these works, most of which were executed on paper, they are not often displayed in the museum.

“The permanent collection at the Georgia Museum of Art includes several stellar examples of watercolors by American artists. This special display presents our patrons with the opportunity to enjoy works by some American masters of the medium,” said Manoguerra.

While some of these images were exhibited occasionally before the expansion of the museum, this collection features two brand-new acquisitions. Acquired in 2010, Howard Thomas’ “Third Ward” (1943) and Raymond Peers Freemantle’s untitled watercolor (“Horse and Cart in Town Scene,” ca. 1930s or 1940s) have never been displayed in the museum.

Three of the watercolors were part of the original collection of 100 works donated by Alfred Heber Holbrook in 1945 to establish the museum. Holbrook was the founder and first director of the museum and a driving force behind its success. The works are Frederic Remington’s “Ashtrakhan Cossacks” (ca. 1894), John Marin’s “Mountain and Meadow, Hoosic Mountains, Massachusetts” (1918) and William Zorach’s “Maine Lake at Dawn” (1926).

Many of the other works have not been exhibited since the museum’s reopening in January, although five are featured in the its recently published book One Hundred American Paintings, by Manoguerra, which coincided with the reopening. One of these paintings, Robert Bechtle’s “Palm Spring Chairs” (1975), will be displayed for the first time since its loan to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its exhibition “Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective” in 2005.

Some of the painters used these watercolors as drawings or compositional studies. Other works, including “Palm Spring Chairs,” are the intended finished products.

This exhibition is sponsored by Kathy Prescott and Grady Thrasher, YellowBook USA, the W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art and will be on view in the Lamar Dodd Gallery of the Georgia Museum of Art.