Online Art for the Masses

If you're feeling creative, nostalgic and patient, Hasbro has a new online Lite-Brite you can play around with.

R.A. Miller Photo Gallery

Hey, remember how we asked you to send in pictures of your R.A. Miller works so we could upload them to Flickr and create a big virtual gallery? Well, we're starting to get some submissions, first from Daniel Peiken, a local real estate agent and man about town. He writes:

I've got some great pieces of R.A. Miller's work. I think I have some pieces that are unlike anyone else's. I'd spend hours at his house talking with him and his son.

My two "devil" pieces are about 2.5 feet tall and 2 feel wide--very cool.

I also have a huge wooden dinosaur cut out that he and I found behind his washer and dryer (it still has lint on it).

This was one of his very old pieces before he started to cut out of metal.

Check out the photo gallery here and send us pictures of your R.A.'s at gmoapr at yahoo.com.

GMOA in the News

Art Daily has an announcement up today of the opening of The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection at the Columbus Museum. The exhibition was organized by the Georgia Museum of Art and was previously on view at the Gibbes, in Charleston, S.C. While the Gibbes showed around 50 works from the exhibition, the Columbus Museum is showing around 100, and when the exhibition opens at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2011, once renovations and expansion are complete, it will include the full 153 works that are illustrated and discussed in the catalogue, an IPPY silver medal winner for fine art. You can purchase the catalogue at the Columbus Museum's gift shop or from our web shop, and we strongly encourage you to go see the exhibition while it's up (until Sept. 27).

ACUMG Petition

The Association of College and University Museums and Galleries has a statement of support for which it is seeking signatories. We encourage you to go and add your name:

A Message Concerning University and College Museums

We the undersigned believe that:

Great colleges and universities look both forward and back; they shape our shared future by being stewards of our shared past.

They perform this service not merely through the commitment of countless faculty and other resources to the cause of teaching, learning and scholarship, but also by building, preserving, providing access to, and interpreting tangible objects, ranging from manuscripts and rare books to works of art and biological and natural-history specimens and artifacts.

Our college and university collections, found in our great academic archives, libraries and museums, are deep repositories of past and present human creativity, in all its diversity and richness.

These collections present students, teachers and local communities with unique opportunities to experience, to learn, and to grow. They speak to the youngest child and to the lifelong learner. They advance teaching and learning across the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences, while also inspiring new and exciting forms of interdisciplinary scholarship.

They engage entire communities in the perpetuation and dissemination of knowledge, in their understanding of society and culture, in the value of cultural and scientific literacy to our democracy and, thus, in the practice of developing good and educated citizens.

Archivists, librarians and museum professionals--and the array of services they provide--play an essential role in the educational enterprise by facilitating access to, as well as the appreciation and interpretation of, our college and university collections.

At the heart of many of our great colleges and universities stand museums of art, science, archaeology, anthropology, and history, as well as arboreta and other collections of living specimens. Along with our libraries and archives, these academic museums advance learning through teaching and research. They are the nation's keepers of its history, culture and knowledge. They are essential to the academic experience and to the entire educational enterprise.

Founded, like universities, to serve humankind, museums are no more disposable assets than are libraries and archives.

Great Universities have Great Museums.

Those who have signed are listed here.

Thanks, City of Winterville!

Doug Makemson's sculptures will be up in Winterville through August 1.

Public Art and the Media

We were checking out Flavorpill today, and it prompted some thoughts about public art. One of the daily links was to "Play Me I'm Yours," a project by Luke Jerram that involves the set up of numerous pianos around a city, in various states of repair, for the public to play. As the statement on the website says, "Who plays them and how long they remain is up to each community. The pianos act as sculptural, musical, blank canvases that become a reflection of the communities they are embedded into. Many pianos are personalised and decorated." It's a neat work of art and the kind of thing everyone wants in his or her own town, right?

Flavorpill also linked to Heather Tweed's page, actually to show off her fuzzy Anubis sculptures, but poking around there, we found her "Lost not Found: Abscission," which doesn't give a lot of details but appears to be a similar use of public space for an interactive art project: "The artist will be secreting small artworks at various locations across Edinburgh City centre, finders are requested to follow the attached instructions to participate in the project and keep the artwork. Please visit again over the course of the project for updates, participants and final outcome."

So why do our buttons get so happily pushed by this kind of interactive, public art? If you're a member of the media, including bloggers, pieces of this sort are certainly easier to write about. There's more to do than just stand there and contemplate. And there's no entrance fee. But should they take precedence over more traditional gallery installations? Should we stop pointing to the efforts of artists to shake up everyday life and create consciousness about art as a living, evolving thing?

Former MFAs

Lanora Pierce, one of our preparators, recently sent along two different articles about former MFA students who had their exit shows at the museums.



Justin Rabideau, who was in the 2006 MFA exhibition (from whence the above image comes), has work in Native Offerings III, an exhibition at the Pine Jog Environmental Education Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., that features four South Florida artists' interpretations of the environment as a medium or muse. Organized by Talya Lerman, the exhibition includes artists Isabel Gouveia, Brigid Howard, Justin Rabideau and Carolyn Sickles.



Chris Fennell, who showed in 2002, just moved his huge sculpture of baseball bats to a new location at the Sloss Furnaces. Its permanent home will be in Atlanta, near several baseball fields.

Deja Vu

When we started reading about Jasper Joffe's latest project, "The Sale of a Lifetime," in Art Daily, it rang a bell. Joffe plans to sell "all his possessions, including his collections of paintings, drawings, teddy bears, and rare books. He will only keep the clothes he is wearing. The number 33 will be a recurrent theme throughout the exhibition, which will be installed in 33 different lots, all for sale for £ 3,333, as Biblical reference to death and rebirth."



John Freyer went about this same kind of project in a slightly different way, putting all his possessions up on eBay, including, eventually, the domain name at which he catalogued his sales. And then there's Luke 12:33, which does encourage you to sell all your stuff but doesn't, in any translations listed at that link, say anything about making an art project out of the experience.

Lord Love You opening reception invitations

These went out in the mail Friday, and you should be getting yours any day now, but in case you didn't, or you're more of a blog reader than a USPS person, here's the invitation to the opening reception for Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection, which opens at the Lyndon House Arts Center in August (click on either of the images to enlarge). The exhibition actually opens on August 8, but the reception will be August 15 from 6 to 8 p.m. and is free and open to the public. We also just sent corrected proofs for the book back to the printer, so that should be delivered (cross your fingers) by August 8. The book, which is hardback, will retail for $25 and is, we believe, the first devoted entirely to Miller's work.

Summer Film Series, Part Four: Bergman

Again, GMOA’s summer film series drew a large crowd last Wednesday for the screening of the last film of Ingmar Bergman’s “trilogy.” However, the series is not over yet, as there will be a screening this Wednesday of Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” Easily his most renowned film, “The Seventh Seal” follows a game of chess between a knight returning home from the Crusades and death. This film, released in 1957, predates Bergman’s “trilogy” and anticipates the director’s later explorations of faith and spirituality.

One of the inspirations for Bergman’s film was a church painting by the medieval Swedish painter Albertus Pictor. This painting, pictured below, shows death playing chess – an image that Bergman borrows and transforms into the driving metaphor of “The Seventh Seal.”



Check out the trailer, and definitely come out to Lamar Dodd on Wednesday, July 15, at 7:00 p.m. for the final film in GMOA’s summer film series.

"elles@centrepompidou" exhibition

I had hoped to blog regularly during my research trip to Europe, but have run into technical difficulties [update since writing this and case in point: I’ve spent the last two hours trying to make this work…subsequent posts may have to wait for my return]. Network and computer problems have plagued me—plus a non-stop schedule—but my trusty phone lets me post on Twitter almost constantly, so you can look for me there (leboland). I started the day with the major Kandinsky exhibition at the Pompidou, giving a tweet-by-tweet of thoughts that have been much on my mind lately anyway. Since it would be a ridiculously long blog entry to describe the whole day, much less all of the last two weeks at once, I’ll still present my thoughts in installments. I’ll return to the start of the trip later, I promise, giving at least a highlights reel. For now, however, I have to write about the show that actually got me the most excited (which is really saying something, because I saw some ridiculously good exhibitions today).

"Elles@centrepompidou” is truly spectacular. All women artists from their permanent collection, and perhaps the most powerful exhibition I’ve ever seen. Period. No gender qualification necessary. In the past I’ve been hesitant about such affirmative action type shows. I felt it probably better to simply show a fair representation of work by artists of both genders. However, my wife, who until recently worked as gallery director for a not-for-profit gallery in Austin that shows only contemporary, Texas women artists—Women & their Work—showed me the statistics and the need for some sort of corrective became clear to me. This has also been a hot topic of late on NYC critic, Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page (and many other blogs re-posting and commenting on it) with regard to MOMA’s fourth and fifth floors, as I’m sure many of you are aware.

At any rate, “elles” stands firmly on its own two feet, with some of the strongest, smartest work I’ve seen. It was also really well organized thematically. I’ll admit with some shame that I was only familiar with about half of the artists before seeing the show, but I bought the catalogue (something I never do when traveling) to make sure I don’t forget those I learned of today. Some I did know. Louise Bourgeois seemed over represented to me, but the Rachel Whiteread--a perennial favorite of mine--made up for that in pure spatial volume and mass, if nothing else. Entering the exhibition, I was confronted with Agnès Thurnauer (who I didn’t know), Six Portrait Grandeur Nature, 2007-09, which is witty, direct, and completely brilliant. It’s the one picture (well, two from different angles) I got before my camera died, so you can see it for yourself above. Here’s the artist's statement that accompanied it:

The idea for this sort of work came to me when people found it impossible to grasp the question I asked them: why is the history of art and ideas almost exclusively about men? In the absence of any representation of this question, I thought the simplest thing would be to find a visual form for it. . . . So I decided to create a form opposed to the existing form, to invent a complementary art history, reversing the gender of all the best known artists from male to female, and much more rarely, from female to male. There thus appeared a new artistic population, which in being just as monolithic as the history from which it was derived, succeeded in raising the question I was asking.

–Notes d’atelier, 2009.

Not all of the work was specifically concerned with gender issues, but artists like Barbara Kruger, the Guerilla Girls, and Orlan were well-represented (Orlan still scares me). They have the best Dorthea Tanning I’ve ever seen. To the Pompidou’s further credit, it was nice to remember that Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots was in the permanent collection exhibition the last time I was there too. Those were some of the familiar faces to me. Irma Boom was a new discovery for me and her video, By Design, 2006, was another personal favorite (and something I’d love to show). I’m always a sucker for art historical references. She reduced famous works of art to simple bands of colors--Damien Hirst, Edward Hopper, Egon Schiele, Jenny Holzer, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Frieda Kahlo, and others--resembling the test patterns that used to come on TV when the station went off the air, except that they morphed from one design to another. Other personal discoveries included Mieko Shiomi, Tara Donovan, Wendy Jacob, Delphine Reist . . . I could go on and on.

The question, I suppose, is how many of these artists will still be on view in the permanent galleries when “elles” comes down. Isn’t that where we should be heading, towards a fair representation of important work, not just famous work? I noticed that the more permanent, permanent collection a floor above featured Sonya Delaunay front and center, but then fell back into the usual story of male-dominant modernism. However, I also noticed that the galleries up there were far less populated than the newer, more challenging work in “elles,” despite rooms full of Picasso, Duchamp, and Léger. The interest in “elles” has got to be apparent to the Pompidou too.

Andy Freeberg's Photography

With so many art links on the Internet, we tend to get especially hyped about meta-museum art, like Andy Freeberg's photographs of security guards at Russian museums and of receptionists at Chelsea galleries. The former consist mostly of elderly ladies dressed in bright colors, while the latter are identifiable only by a slice of scalp that shows above the ubiquitous big white desk. Freeberg's statement about the guard series reads as follows:

In the art museums of Russia, women sit in the galleries and guard the collections. When you look at the paintings and sculptures, the presence of the women becomes an inherent part of viewing the artwork itself. I found the guards as intriguing to observe as the pieces they watch over. In conversation they told me how much they like being among Russia’s great art. A woman in Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery Museum said she often returns there on her day off to sit in front of a painting that reminds her of her childhood home. Another guard travels three hours each way to work, since at home she would just sit on her porch and complain about her illnesses, “as old women do.” She would rather be at the museum enjoying the people watching, surrounded by the history of her country.

(via PICDIT)

Young Dawgs: Alexis Richardson

Our Young Dawgs intern, Alexis, has completed her internship at GMOA. We enjoyed having her and look forward to hearing her presentation on her time here next week at the Young Dawgs reception. Here is her final post to the GMOA blog:

It is so unreal that these five weeks with GMOA is officially going to be over on Monday. I have enjoyed my internship here with my wonderful supervisors and the other interns. This was a different internship compared to my internship last year, because I didn’t do office work. Instead I got to do a lot of hands -on work. I have really enjoyed writing blog posts to express what I have been doing every week. I have learned so many different things that will help not only in school but also in a career. I have learned the importance of time management, to be more independent, to not sit around and wait for my supervisor to tell me what needs to be done, to do something without being told. Along with having my own personal space, which some of the other Young Dawgs don’t have, this makes it feel like a real job. I really have enjoyed the setup in this workplace because it is way different from a regular office. I like how everybody was out in a group instead of in an office. The desks and tables are not separated by walls or cubicles, which I think is very neat. There is a big balcony where you can see all through town and works by LDSOA ceramics students below. I am so glad that the publications and pr departments took the time to have me as an intern this summer. I have really enjoyed and learned so much from my time here.

Art Around Athens

Athens-Clarke County's division of Leisure Services, which does a fantastic job community-wide at planning all kinds of events, is holding a photography contest this summer for digital photos of the season, due by July 30, for an upcoming exhibition. The winner will be announced July 31. Athens has many talented photographers, including our own former intern Victoria Slaboda, who took the GMOA on the Move photos.

Tonight (Thursday, July 9) from 5 to 7 p.m. at Jittery Joe's Coffee in Five Points) Elaine Oye is having an opening reception for an exhibition of her paintings, at which she will be present and answer questions.

Tomorrow (Friday, July 10), the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center is having a free opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. for "The Reclamation of Memory," an exhibition organized by renowned Atlanta mixed-media artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier in conjunction with the 2009 National Black Arts Festival. The exhibition features works by some of the most prolific and influential artists of this century as well as emerging artists and will run through Aug. 29.

Correspondence from Cortona

Our deputy director, Annelies Mondi, is currently abroad in Italy, and while we didn't get her set up blogging before she left, she did send us the following email about the 40th anniversary celebration of the program held there:

The internet at the hotel is down and so I am using a student's computer here at the school. The celebration went well. Rick Johnson and President Michael Adams presented Mrs. Willson with a beautiful ceramic hand-painted plaque honoring her for her contribution to the Cortona program. It will hang in the Kehoe center. The mayor of Cortona was there, the consul general of Florence and representatives of the major banks who have provided funding. Mrs. Willson also got to meet the recipient of the Willson scholarship. She is a student of ceramics, Krisha (sp?). We then went down the hill and had a lovely dinner (many, many courses) at Tonino's and sat on the porch overlooking the valley. The dinner was hosted by President Adams and the Kehoes. Frances Mayes and her husband were there. Sandra Menendez was at my table and we had a very nice visit.

The weather has been much cooler here and I am glad to escape the heat (and crowds) in Milan and Venice. Today we go to Gubbio, tommorow Orvieto and then I hope we can see Beverly Pepper in Todi. Then we will be off to Rome.

Ciao!

In the News

At Art Daily there is an article about an unusual Rembrandt exhibition at the Berlage Exhibition Center in Amsterdam. What makes this exhibition unique is the fact that it contains the entire body of Rembrandt’s work, totaling 317 paintings and 269 etchings. Yet, there is a catch – the entire exhibition is made up of digital reproductions of the works. As the article explains:

Never before has the complete body of works by an artist of Rembrandt’s stature been exhibited together. Nor have reproductions been taken so seriously. The importance of this collection of Rembrandt’s entire oeuvre in reproduction form lies in the fact that each of his works is a significantly unique creation. In the case of Rembrandt, therefore, there can be no such thing as a representative selection.

This is an interesting event to ponder, especially in light of a previous post on this blog about digital printing. Will exhibitions of the future, at museums like GMOA, feature pieces from a museum’s collection alongside a substantial number of digital reproductions? Will there come a time when digital reproduction is so widely accepted that museums no longer feel the need to risk displaying the actual works in their collections? These questions bring to mind Walter Benjamin and his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin writes:

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. . . . the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.

Issues of art and reproduction have been discussed for almost the entirety of the 20th century. Benjamin was one of the first theorists to point out the huge perceptual shift caused by the rise of reproducible art. Benjamin termed the unique nature of an original piece of art in time and space its “aura.” Though Benjamin primarily discusses mechanical reproduction in terms of film, it is also an important philosophical question in terms of printmaking, a medium (which makes up a large part of the GMOA collection) based upon the idea and mechanics of reproducibility. As digital reproduction reaches a point of sophistication that allows for an entire exhibition of Rembrandt reproductions, it is essential that we as a museum again consider the role and the value of the “aura” of an original painting or sculpture, as so much of our identity is founded upon our physical collection.

Updates from Ronnie

As we promised, here is your weekly update from Ronnie. Yesterday he informed us of four major points.

First, the earth they scooped out last week is now leveled off into terraces, which will form the terraced sculpture garden. We took a picture from the inside of the museum looking out onto the terraces, but the not-so-photogenic, monochromatic earth doesn’t quite do the terraces justice.

Second, they’re about to start breaking up some of the asphalt in the current staff parking lot just above the terraces.

Third, they’ve put the bulldozers to work and have excavated eight massive boulders from the area where they’re setting the forms for concrete, which brings us to the fourth major point.

The wooden forms are set in place and they will begin pouring the concrete next week – you know what that means – establishing the base and most important part of the new expansion (besides the art inside of course).

Next week we’ll have update number three, and soon we’ll include aerial photos of the museum thanks to Holder Construction!

Digital Books

This article by Lee Shearer in the Athens Banner-Herald on UGA Press's move toward some digital printing (specifically on-demand printing of books less in demand) reminded us of a couple of related links, neither of which at first would seem to be connected. Art Daily published an article today about the British Library's digitization of the Codex Sinaiticus, the world's oldest surviving Christian bible, which dates from the 4th century. Its physical pages are scattered in the British Library, the Leipzig University Library, the Monastery of St Catherine (Mount Sinai, Egypt) and the National Library of Russia (St Petersburg), so the website the library has created is the only way to see all of them at once, let alone flip through the book. Similarly, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore posted three high-resolution digitized Korans on Issuu (a two-page spread from one appears above).

Both these projects and the efforts of UGA Press allow us to think about the spread of works of art and books in the digital age. It's true, there's nothing like holding a physical book in your hand, but there are other ways in which digital versions are an improvement, such as the fact that they're vastly easier to search. We don't plan on relying on digital printing or digital distribution any time in the near future (color reproduction isn't there yet for the former, and the latter often doesn't have color at all, as in the case of the Kindle), but we are working on digitizing our entire collection of brochures and smaller booklets, to cut down on the storage space needed and to promote scholarship. Currently, if someone's writing a book on, for example, Earl McCutcheon, and sees that we had an exhibition of his work with a large brochure, it's difficult to go find that brochure, expensive to mail it and hard to find the space to store it. When we're finished, we should be able just to burn a CD or, better still, send a link, plus these publications will be searchable. Hooray for the future!

Truly Public Art

(image from Getty)

Amy Miller, our shop manager, passed along this great article from NPR about "One and Other," a public art project that makes use of an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. A total of 18,000 people applied and 2,400 were chosen randomly to do whatever they like for an hour each, night and day, for the next 100 days. Results are being streamed live (and not very choppily) at this link, and photos are being uploaded here, including a guy dressed as a panda and taking cell phone calls. Can we get a plinth?

GMOA in the News

We would be remiss if we failed to mention the fact that, in a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "How to Sell a Museum Masterpiece," our director, William U. Eiland, was quoted. The article, by Daniel Grant, focuses on the criticism directed at the Orange County Museum of Art's recent sale of 18 California Impressionist paintings to a private collector in Laguna Beach, not, in this case, because of their being deaccessioned at all (procedures were followed there), but because of the way in which they were sold. The guidelines set forth by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), for which Eiland chairs the professional issues committee, do not require sale at public auction, and every situation is different, but, as Eiland put it, "At auction, there is no gerrymandering the price, no hocus pocus." We recommend you read the article, which is useful in the way it explains one of the many thorny issues of museum ethics, and we extend a high five to our fearless leader.