American Gothic XXL

Chicago, a city well know for its prolific public art scene, has just added a new sculpture to the mix. Unlike the famous domineering Picasso in the business sector, not far from the Art Institute of Chicago, the new 25-foot-tall sculpture inspired by iconic painting Grant Wood’s "American Gothic", stands as an ironic homage to the cliché of Midwestern lifestyle. "God Bless America", by J. Seward Johnson, is on loan from The Sculpture Foundation, an organization famous for promoting public art. Although the sculpture has been criticized as a knockoff, and a bit trite, people seem to love it! "It speaks to Midwesterners, especially the farmer aspect of it," said Melissa Farrell, an executive assistant at Zeller and the liaison to Johnson's The Sculpture Foundation, which owns the work. Indeed, since being put up in Pioneer Plaza for display last December, God Bless America has become, by most estimates, one of the top public-art attractions in a city that believes, even with a tight budget, in buying and displaying art and boasts several superstars of the genre. These include the Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza, Calder's Flamingo in Federal Plaza and, surpassing everything in popularity these days, Cloud Gate, commonly known as The Bean, in Millennium Park.

Not only that, but the Chicago-Herald Tribune also says that this exhibition is encouraging people to go to the Art Institute of Chicago, and see the painting on which the sculpture is based. Unlike "Cloud Gate" or the Picasso, which appeal to the cognoscenti and passersby, this photo-op, tongue-in-cheek sculpture has really only garnered a lot of attention from passersby. In fact, Johnson gets mediocre reviews from art critics."It's very successful," Kelley said. "I really like it. It is incredibly well crafted. It's high craftsmanship as a public art piece. It doesn't inspire me as a work of art the way Cloud Gate or the Picasso does. As an art historian, it's not my favorite genre where one artist appropriates another artist's imagery. But to everybody his own right."

Perhaps critics shun this piece, but it’s friendly to the masses, and perhaps encourages aspiring art lovers. So why not?

Construction updates on GMOA

Side view, standing with my back to the Lamar Dodd main entrance

View from the street!

check out more pictures of GMOA's construction advancements on our flickr site

Corpus

We mentioned the "Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South" in passing a couple of weeks ago. This project, with entries by Perri Lee Roberts, was conceived by Bruce Cole and Andrew Ladis back in 1993 and has been in process ever since. We get several phone calls a year from wholesalers asking if the books are in stock yet, and we've had to say no every time. But the printer in Asia just sent this image to make sure its staff is assembling the three volumes correctly in the slipcase, and it's confident the books will be ready to start their journey across the ocean in early November. Three volumes, a smidge over 800 pages, and right around 400 paintings catalogued, with provenance, bibliography and notes on each of them will be for sale for $200 a set. This undertaking has been massive, and it is extremely exciting to see it nearing conclusion.

Follow-up

Here's an interesting follow-up to the Van Meegeren story our intern John blogged about this summer: a painting formerly identified as a Van Meegeren forgery has now been reattributed as a genuine 17th-century work. It'll be interesting to see what Errol Morris weighs in with.

Art Around Athens

The Lamar Dodd School of Art is hosting the second of its Visiting Artist Lectures (the first having been Jim Fiscus) at 5:30 p.m. tonight in Room S151 (one of the auditoriums).

Pipo Nguyen-duy, born in Hue, Vietnam in 1962, received a master's degree of fine arts in photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1998. The artist lives in Ashland, Oregon, and teaches in Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, where he is associate professor of photography. His work has been shown internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Light Work Gallery in New York, The Faaborg Museum in Denmark, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.

You can see a wide selection of Nguyen-duy's work on his Web site.The image above is from his series "AnOther Western," which he describes as follows:

AnOther Western began after the consideration for the immediate geographical, historical and cultural significance of the site to be an integral part of my the visual research. Although AnOther Western, which also deals with race and gender within the context of cultural assimilation, the project’s focus shifts from European High Culture to the American West. In this site-specific work, 19th century photographic syntax is utilized to reinterpret and to simulate tintype portraits made in the West during late 1800's. In these new self-portraits, the Asian immigrant take on new roles as gunslingers, musicians and gentlemen. By consciously assuming culturally powerful icons, and not the assumed stereotypical representations of Asian as the submissive other (i.e. opium addicts, domestic servants) AnOther Western intends to humorously and ironically question and challenge the legitimacy and authority of the western myth.

Mark your calendar now for Michael Fried on Oct. 20.

Construction Updates from Holder

Here's Holder's construction update from the week of Sept. 25. Amazingly, despite the torrential rains last week, we have only lost one day due to rain.

Current week - Activities/Issues:
New Gallery / Connector
• Poured the signage wall.
• Poured the elevated gallery slab.
• Started the 1st floor below grade plumbing.
• Removed the existing brick walls at the connector.
• Started to install the brick relief outriggers.

Existing Building Renovations
• Started the ceiling/overhead demo in the Kennedy/Alston gallery.
• Completed as-built surveys of the existing security/alarm systems.
• Set-up the trending and testing equipment to monitor the existing systems.

Storage Bar
• Started to install the final below grade CW configuration.
• Completed the domestic water relocation.

Next week - Activities/Issues:
New Gallery / Connector
• Start to frame the exterior gallery walls.
• Continue to form and pour the site retaining walls.
• Start the erection of the connector structural steel.
• Finish the gallery outriggers, tube steel and brick relief angle.

Existing Building Renovations
• Continue to demo the existing building systems.

Storage Bar
• Start footing excavation.
• Form foundations.

Signage wall complete

Gallery elevated slab poured

1st-floor plumbing rough-in

Terry Rowlett at Ciné

Terry Rowlett’s latest vivid portrayals of Renaissance and Baroque settings surrounding a contemporary image, are on view at Ciné from now until October 19. The exhibition, Moments and Times, is a "a historical look at the human occupation of the planet as seen in the paintings of Terry Rowlett, a late era artist (circa 21st century)," according to the Ciné Web site.

Terry Rowlett is a native of rural Arkansas, who was stationed as a patrol guard in West Germany and came to Athens after edifying trips to Europe and a religiously inspired expedition to Israel. He a cool world view equipped with remnants of bygone religious convictions and pessimistic outlooks on a sinful modern world. His earlier paintings depict “Christian characters inserted into decidedly American landscapes littered with the detritus of modern existence," says local arts writer Melissa Link on the artist's web site. His more recent paintings, however, have changed in theme but not in style. They are now infused with “a newfound joie de [vivre] which the artist has renounced his guilty past and celebrates life for all its song, dance, and debauchery. Such images still borrow upon the familiar themes and compositions of the Old Masters, but the paintings now serve as allegories of playful reality rather than sermons on God’s word.The work offers the artist’s ultimate statement on the true teachings of love and understanding that exist in the Christianity which he once embraced and the heartbreak that has ensued as the violence, hypocrisy, and heresy of American imperialism prevail to open up countless oozing wounds around the world.”

For an interview with Terry Rowlett about one of his pieces that ended up on local musician Elf Power's album cover, click here

Here is a glimpse at the Rowlett exhibition at Ciné on Flickr

Art Around Athens

Local artist Matt Blanks (that's one of his paintings above) has been promoting the Athens Artists Clearance Sale this Saturday, Sept. 26, from noon to 7 p.m. at the Chase Street Warehouses, in which Young, Foxy & Free magazine (put together by Michael Lachowski) and local artists team up to sell their wares. Seems like a good chance to pick up some local art on the cheap.


On Sunday, Sept. 27, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia is a free opening reception for Intimacy, an exhibition featuring the work of photographer Don Byram.

A Case for Extensive Wall Labels

In the September 14 issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane writes about the photographer Robert Frank's The Americans, now on view again at the Met, as this New York Times article covers. It's a wonderful article in its own right. Despite the fact that Lane is primarily a film critic, he's easily able to venture outside that narrow field to write about literature, art and more, and he delves deep into the ways different groups have viewed Frank's work as well as his own take it (documentary, not polemical or explicitly political), but in the course of doing so, he explains why wall labels should cover more ground rather than less:

What pulls me into the picture is the fuzz of its focus and the murk of its grain; Frank was using Kodak Tri-X, a famously tolerant film, which only proves how low the light was on the assembly line. Sometimes, to judge by the contacts, he switched to Plus-X, a slower emulsion, but nobody in the catalogue can tell us whether this was a deliberate choice, or a simple matter of loading what came to hand. Again, what lens did he fit to his Leica for the River Rouge shot? Much of “The Americans,” I would guess, was shot on 50-mm. or wider, but the way in which the Ford workers are stacked up tight suggests a short telephoto lens; if museumgoers are informed, by a small plaque, that a painting was executed in egg tempera, or oil on poplar, why should lovers of photographs be left in the dark? These things matter, whenever battle is joined over art. It matters, for instance, that Jasper Johns’s “Flag,” on which he labored from 1954 to 1955, was painted in oil and encaustic, a wax-based medium: first, because it allowed him to embed barely visible scraps of newsprint beneath the pigment, like messages from the journalistic beyond, and, second, because the rough stickiness of the surface—so uncomfortable a contrast to the dry nap of an actual Stars and Stripes—added to people’s genuine unease about whether he was paying due homage or making insubordinate sport.

Media are especially easy to overlook in a book, where, no matter how good a photograph and scan are, texture tends to blur, but they are indeed a crucial aspect of any work of art and well worth examining.

Addition to R.A. Miller Online Gallery

We received six new images today to add to our R.A. Miller online gallery. The images were submitted by Patrick Allen, who works at the UGA Press, and his pictures were taken at Miller's property when he visited the artist back in November of 1990. Allen shared a very moving story with me from that visit where Miller told him of a tornado that hit his home when he was child. He recalled how his mother, who was widowed at the time, sent the children out to pick up the pieces of the home that had been scattered about after the tornado hit. From those pieces, the family rebuilt their home in Rabbittown, Ga., where Miller lived till he died in 2006. You can view all of Allen's pictures in our Flickr gallery .

Family Day: Whirligigs

This past Saturday, September 19, the Georgia Museum of Art and the Lyndon House Arts Center hosted a Family Day event in conjunction with Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection in one of the craft rooms at the Lyndon House, where the exhibition is also located. Families began arriving a bit before 10 a.m. and were directed upstairs to where Lord Love You is displayed for a gallery activity. After receiving inspiration from R.A. Miller’s whirligigs, the families came back downstairs to make whirligigs of their own. Check out our flickr gallery for more images from Family Day.

Ceci n'est pas criticism

LentSpace, the Canal Street space acting as a temporary public art and sculpture park about which intern Aurelie Frolet wrote earlier this week, has been vandalized, according to Curbed. Spraypainting "this is not art" on something that's clearly a piece of art is a fairly arty gesture in and of itself, though, isn't it?

Art Around Athens

Today over at the Lamar Dodd School of Art are two art history lectures as part of the Visual Culture Colloquium series. At 5 p.m., in room 150, Jenny Gunn, who used to work at the museum and recently moved away to Durham (we miss her!), is speaking on "Les Celibataires Memes: Spectatorship and Identity in Marcel Duchamp's 'Etant Donnés,'" Duchamp's final work of art, an installation piece at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Following Gunn's talk (or so we assume, judging from the order in which they're listed on the Dodd's Web site) is a lecture by Nathanael Roesch, "Out of Bounds: Paul Pfeiffer's 'Caryatid' and the Borders of Representation" on Pfeiffer's video art that erases the ball from soccer matches and its connections to Johan Huizinga's "Homo Ludens."

Polizzotti's Art of Communicating

I think I can safely assume that most of us have read through a museum catalogue only to be discouraged after the first couple of pages by esoteric and idiosyncratic “art talk”. In what seems like an admission that breaks the unspoken understanding between theorists, critics and art intellectuals, Mark Polizzotti, the director of publications and intellectual property at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, admits that we are not crazy and that museum catalogues have had a history of being inaccessible to ordinary art appreciators. Polizzotti comments on the nature of esoteric museum catalogues:

The scholarly content had been geared not only to win the approbation of the author’s peers but also to edify, enlighten, and even—dare I say it?—entertain the non-specialist. Such considerations might sound patently vulgar to some. But our warehouse was stacked with old titles, some of them having sat there for decades after returning unwanted from specialty bookstores—assuming they’d even gotten that far. What good were they doing gathering dust, while incurring storage charges for the privilege? And (at the risk of sounding churlish toward my predecessors) why had they been made to appear so awfully dry and forbidding?

In order to break away from this pattern, which leads to refused book deals and stunted sales, the general audience’s view of art appreciation and amateur scholarly pursuit must be remedied. Polizzotti suggests moving away from the focus on the “the finer points being made” to instead

imparting some measure of the excitement that led the author to study a given artist or period in the first place, rather than engage in one-upmanship with a handful of colleagues; in short, to recognize that the accessibility of a critical text is just as crucial as its acumen.

Essentially, Polizzotti proposes to intertwine intellectual significance and rigor with popular appeal. The MFA, he comments, has dealt with this problem by publishing books rather than catalogues. Unlike catalogues, which Polizzotti sees as a stand-in for an exhibition and too focused on particularities, books offer a holistic story that incorporates all aspects of a movement or a style, expanding on theories and multidimensional understanding of an exhibition or a piece. “[A book] can discuss art as not just a gathering of objects, but as a tale of the people and historical forces that created, inspired, or otherwise shaped them,” he says.
In the end, it is all about the art of communication. Polizzotti ends his article by asking, “For what use is scholarly excellence if few people ever benefit from it?”

Polizzotti’s ideal of course, is a perfect marriage of intellectual rigor and general accessibility, but he seems more concerned with public opinion than specialized and abstruse material. Catalogues, have an important place in the art world. They can draw attention to lesser-known artists about whom not enough might be known to fill a book. As catalogues tend to be image-focused and can include many different essays featuring a variety of scholars, the focus is less reader-friendly and in some ways leaves less room for narrative. Books tend to have a story and a thesis, which may not always be advantageous for a variety of voices. Ultimately we must keep in mind that while art books and art catalogues differ, both media serve important but different purposes.

Friends Slideshow

We've got some pictures from the board meeting of the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art this past week. Lots of lovely colors people are wearing.

An Update on the Rose Museum

The advisory committee formed at Brandeis University to make recommendations on the future of the Rose Museum has issued its report, and here's the Boston Globe's summary of it. As everyone notes, the report recommends that the university keep the Rose open but takes no stand on whether or not it is acceptable to sell any of the museum's collection, which, of course, is the central issue here.

Recycled-Material Art

Drawn, the illustration and cartooning blog, isn't really as narrowly focused as its self-penned description might suggest. Witness these marvelous hubcap sculptures by an artist named Ptolemy Elrington highlighted today. They remind us of nothing so much as our own Doug Makemson, who similarly incorporates found metal industrial objects into large-scale animal sculptures that nonetheless highlight their origins with a visible logo here and a gear there. Elrington's Web site, with a larger gallery, is here.

4 More R.A. Millers

Our online collection of R.A. Millers has expanded! Steve Moorman sent us four images from his personal R.A. Miller collection, and they have been added to our flickr gallery. We are still on the lookout for more images, so send in yours to gmoapr at yahoo.com.

New Media and Museums

We've just started poking around the Web site of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), a project funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation that assesses museum practices in new media, specifically that accessed on mobile devices, and makes recommendation for its further development in the field. The assessment section discusses the proliferation of podcasts (cheap, easy to produce with little technical knowledge) but brings some other ideas to light as well:

The San Jose Museum of Art was among the first American museums to build an iPhone/iPod Touch tour that featured browseable gallery guides to augment the exhibitions’ objects. These digital exhibitions offer short videos, including discussions with curators and artists. Selections from the museum’s permanent collection offer images and videos. The Brooklyn Museum of Art released their collections database API for public use which resulted in a company developing an iPhone application for the museum that gives users free access to their collections in and outside their galleries. Relying on a rich tagging schema, Brooklyn’s application gives visitors the opportunity to search for art by tag or artist name. And for those who do not know what to look for, they may choose to randomize the collection. This randomization brings one to a painting by Thomas Birch followed by a shot glass designed by Tiffany Studios. Antenna Audio recently launched Pentimento, a system for creating iPhone application templates, with its first application called Love Art. Love Art provides access to select art collections and curator-narrated videos on the lives and art of masters from the National Gallery, London, including Rembrandt, da Vinci, and Van Gogh. Visitors may also scroll through different “insights” or themed tags, such as betrayal, faith, or light, to find videos on specific pieces. Opening collections and exhibitions for a mobile-friendly website or an iPhone or Touch application allows anyone to browse through art and related curated information in or outside of the gallery. While increasing access to museum collections, these applications limit the audience by platform, thus limiting the total audience able to enjoy such access.

The CHNM has also created three different prototypes that put its recommendations into action. We haven't had a lot of time yet to play around with these or with the site, but it's a work in progress, with a bibliography to which visitors can contribute, and it's a good idea, at very least, to have a gathering place for this kind of information that is specific to museums.

Construction Updates from Holder

Here's this week's construction update from Holder:

Sept. 18, 2009

Current week - Activities/Issues:

New Gallery / Connector
• Completed the skylight structural steel support.
• Poured balance of concrete columns.
• Poured 1st half of the signage wall.
• Started below grade waterproofing.
• Started the 1st floor masonry walls.
• Prepared for elevated slab pours.

Existing Building Renovations
• Complete the emergency power relocates.

Storage Bar
• Started to mass excavate under new structure.
• Relocated the existing domestic water.

Next week - Activities/Issues:

New Gallery / Connector
• Pour the 2nd half of the signage wall.
• Pour the West end of the elevated gallery slab.
• Pour the East end of the elevated gallery slab.
• Start removing the existing brick façade at the connector.

Existing Building Renovations
• Finish the balance of the interior demolition.

Storage Bar
• Complete mass excavation.
• Start digging footings.

Structure view from Carlton Street

1st half of signage wall poured

1st-floor masonry

Staying Afloat as an Artist Today

LentSpace is a new project going on in New York which developing companies are lending their unfinished project sites to artists and public arts foundations. The artists benefit from the public exposure, and the lenders can make a little bit of money from the renting an otherwise developmentally stagnant space. Eric Konigsberg of the New York Times writes:

The lot is on loan for about three years from developers who had hoped to build there by now — the project will be called LentSpace… the real estate market undoubtedly contributed to “the generous length of time” of the loan

It seems as if many artists and curators have been taking initiatives to help revitalize the arts while contributing to economic betterment. By helping themselves to cheaper venues, not only do they perpetuate the public art culture in New York, but they also help businesses make a little bit of money while their production is on hiatus due to low funds. Similar symbiotic relationships are developing around the world, assuaging the economic pains with smart lending. Earlier  this month, I wrote about a similar New York Times’ article reporting on recuperating businesses lending out spaces to artists and curators while waiting for a buying offer to come along. The artists benefits from commercial exposure and cheap rent, while the company lending space benefit from attention, which might lead to a purchase.

Art Around Athens

This weekend, PAM (Perpetual Art Machine), a traveling installation of video art, opened at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, in Gallery 101. Featuring more than 1,000 videos and 600 artists from 60 countries, it also includes an online database of video art and a community for video artists, curators, theorists and educators. PAM moves on to St. Petersburg, Russia, next (it closes here on Oct. 20), so it's kind of a big deal.



Also newly open is ATHICA's exhibition Free Press in Free Fall, which addresses the changing role of the media in today's environment. Here's how ATHICA puts it:

Almost daily we hear about another round of newspaper layoffs, another venerated publication on the brink of bankruptcy or another small town paper ceasing production altogether. In the digital age, while newspapers are incapable of competing with the web's low cost and efficiency, fears of the death of print run rampant--despite boomers' clinging nostalgia for their morning paper over cereal.

Obviously the internet has drastically changed the way that media outlets disseminate information, as well as the way we as a public access that information and how we respond to it. On the surface, the ability for people to engage actively in a dialogue with the media appears to be the pinnacle of what it to means a “public”—or belong to a democracy where citizens can make their voices heard, inspire action and change and hold leaders--and the media--accountable. So why is it that in a media-saturated world, many feel that we’re privy to less information, less 'news?'

The artwork in Free Press in Free Fall asks how we--as citizens of the digital age-- engage responsibly in a dialogue with our press? How do we encourage correct, expansive, or less biased coverage? And when the media fails us, how do we bridge the gap? When faced with an economic crisis, major media outlets are faced with tough choices: Give the public what it needs, or what it wants?

Participating artists include: Wayne Bellamy, Gary Duehr, Melinda Eckley, John English, M. Ho, Franklynn Peterson, Marie Porterfield, Phil Ralston, Kathryn Refi, Hannah Lamar Simmons, Jordan Tate, Michael Thomas Vassallo and our very own Ed Tant, who works as a security guard at the museum and has contributed some of his photographs to the exhibition. Ed is also a noted local political columnist for the Banner-Herald, and his travels have taken him to presidential inaugurations and elsewhere, which he's documented in these photos. ATHICA has many events associated with the exhibition, including a talk by curator Allie Goolrick and artists Kathyrn Refi and John English on Oct. 1 (free), a symposium on rock reporting in the digital age (Oct. 17, $3-6), an evening of songs about the news (Oct. 17, $9-13), a night of news-themed stories and poems (TBA), and several events planned for the closing day, Nov. 8. Check ATHICA's Web site for more details on any of these events and to learn more about Free Press in Free Fall.

Greene County Senior Outreach

More great images from our Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection Senior Outreach Series. This time the images are from the Greene County Senior Center.

Family Day being held in conjunction with LHAC's Gypsy Artist Market

As you are heading over to the Lyndon House Arts Center for GMOA's whirligig Family Day, don't forget that there is so much to do there this Saturday! Below is a note from our friends a the Lyndon House Arts Center on the exciting day of events.

Hi everyone - it is really shaping up for Saturday!

Note: See the lists of artists who will be here at the bottom of this email

There is a huge event at Lyndon House this Saturday, Sept.19th from 10 am - 4 pm known as the Gypsy Artist Market with over 20 artist booths. After you have enjoyed shopping for new works to add to your collection, check out the over 30 artist demonstrators in the various studios inside LHAC for the Art Expo. Don't forget to bring your kids to join the Georgia Museum of Art as they host Family Day: Whirligigs from 10 a.m. to noon. Then stick around for the "Build a Scarecrow" art activity in the afternoon in LHAC Children's Studio.

There are also three exhibitions in the LHAC galleries - RA Miller, Lamar Dodd,
Bermudez and Solis. The Ware-Lyndon historic house museum will also be open.

Come for awhile or come all day - see below for details! And please help
spread the word about it....

List of Artist Booths for Gypsy Artist Market
Peter Loose - folk art
David Stroud - woodworking
Kathleen A McDowell - local floral art
Mary Rugg - vintage tea cups and bird feeders
Erin Meredith - recycled crafts
Kenneth Kase - jewelry
Nicole Bechill - paintings/crafts
Amanda Swennes - jewelry
Susan Herda - handmade handbags & totes
Penny Chandler - metal garden art
Daniel Smith - painting
Julie Wells - jewelry & painting
Brooke Easler - painting
Elizabeth Bishop Martin - fiber arts
Katie Palani - glass, felt animals & paper beads
Emily Pitts - stuffed toys, art prints, clothing
Jen Berry - beaded earrings
Normaltown Woodworks - woodworking
Maggie Mize - metal/paint
Chris & Melanie Warren - birdhouses & jewelry
Jessica Magnarella - paintings
Alison & Dana - hoops


List of Demonstrators for Lyndon House Art Expo
Margaret Agner - printmaking & painting
Mike Spronk - painting
Elizabeth Bishop-Martin - mixed media
Bill Pierson - painting & drawing
Bal Joshi - painting
Julie Villella - mixed media
Bonnie Gatrell - china painting
Bonnie Montgomery - floor loom weaving
April Montgomery - stitchery
Susan Gilmurray - card loom weaving
Caroline Ingle - bobbin lace
Sandi Brogdon - bobbin lace
Franklin Myrick - photo techniques & camera types
Jim Strawser - photo techniques & camera types
Barry Dudley - photo techniques & camera types
Elizabeth McDaniel - photo techniques & camera types
Tony Amdur - photo techniques & camera types
Celia McQuaid Brown - floral design
Kathryn Gruetter - floral design
Charlotte Waters - floral design
Ginny Denson - floral design
Judy Caputi - quilting
Terri Jarrett - quilting
Mary Grider - quilting
Madeline Darnell - printmaking
Fran Korda - printmaking
Juana Gnecco - pottery & clay
Beatriz Ramirez - pottery & clay
Karina Lopez - pottery

Whirligigs

Mostly with the aim of pushing Holland Cotter's ghostly head down the blog page, I would like to quickly remind you of tomorrow's Family Day, organized by our education department, at the Lyndon House in the morning.

Images of a few of the whirligigs in the Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection exhibition:

Opinion Piece: Cotter Doesn't Coddle!

Holland Cotter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff art critic for the New York Times, writes about which exhibitions pique his interest in the coming year, which artists to watch, and how museums will pull themselves out of the muck. His article adopts a serious, castigatory tone, but maybe he’s right.
Yes, he may sound ornery, but Cotter’s impertinence is necessary in a time when the Rose Museum scandal is not an uncommon occurrence. He irately refers to another similar incident at UCLA that has perpetuated the sucking-your-university-museum/library-dry-to-stay-afloat trend. Granted, we are working against an inexorable economic tempest forcing museums, one of the first recession targets, to economize in a number of ways. Sometimes, drastic measures must be taken, but if museums in dire straits meditate on his suggestions, they may not have to perform artistic seppuku.
Cotter implores and pleads with museums to reconsider shutting down or selling heirloom pieces and to instead consider downsizing flashy, costly “supersizer” exhibitions, playing up their permanent collections, and even looking to university museums (of which the Georgia Museum of Art is one) for ideas. As university museums have always had to manage small budgets, bigger enterprises can learn how to be effective with little money. He adds that university museums are interesting management models because they are typically staffed with a young, enterprising and creative direction, an especially valuable treasure when the fiscal climate is changing quickly.
Cotter also mentions a fairly new trend, which places artists in the role of the curator. Why could that possibly be helpful? He says that “what we need is someone detached from the old buddy system of curators and critics who can give the moribund biennial concept life”. Perhaps we just need to weigh drastically different options rather than admitting defeat.

Hey hey!!

My name is Sarah Beavers and I am currently interning with GMOA. I am a senior at Clarke Central High School and have lived in and around Athens all my life. I’m always listening to music and going to shows around town. I love art and literature and I am aspiring to be a high school English teacher after college. I wanted an internship here because I had a really good English teacher in the eighth grade that made a huge impact on me. She was some how able to incorporate visual arts into her English class in a way that made the English easier to understand while teaching us to appreciate the art, and I would love to be able to do that for other students. I feel like this internship will give me some background of what people in the art field do, besides actually creating the art. I am very much looking forward to what I will learn with this internship! 

Athens-Clarke County Senior Outreach

The Lord Love You-themed Senior Outreach Program continued yesterday, at the Athens Community Council on Aging, where public relations coordinator Jenny Williams assisted with the program and took these wonderful photos of R.A. Miller-inspired work created by seniors. Click above to check out the slideshow.

Link

If you never visit the blog If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats for any other reason, you at least might want to add the "Art of Pop" section to your reader. Tom Sutpen and co.'s selection of lovely images (from films, of the famous or semi-famous, the "Cool Hall of Fame," etc.) is fascinating and well-curated, but this particular tag, which collects the most jewel-like vintage LP covers, is full of almost too much pretty.

Art Around Athens

Tonight at Ciné at 8 p.m. is an interesting art project, Goldenfiction, by Goldensection, a.k.a., Casey Scott. Goldenfiction is apparently "a projected mixture of images and text set to an original musical score." Scott has a Facebook page with a little more information, including a couple of tracks you can listen to if you click on the "My Band" tab. It's very sound-collagey, but it certainly sounds worthy of a Wednesday evening, especially as it's only $5.

Construction Updates from Holder

Here's the construction update from September 11, 2009:

Current week - Activities/Issues:
New Gallery / Connector
• Finished roof joists.
• Finished roof decking.
• Installed skylight structural steel support.
• Poured concrete columns at the parking area.
• Finished the retaining wall footings.
• Completed the Limestone mock-up.
• Formed the signage wall.

Existing Building Renovations
• Started to relocate emergency power through building.

Storage Bar
• Continued to address and relocate existing site utilities including:
o Emergency Power
o Domestic Water

Next week - Activities/Issues:

New Gallery / Connector
• Pour the balance of the concrete columns.
• Form and pour the signage wall.
• Start below grade waterproofing.
• Start below grade masonry walls.

Existing Building Renovations
• Complete the relocation of emergency power.
• Complete the existing utility investigation.

Storage Bar
• Continue to relocate existing utilities.
• Finish mass excavation.
• Dig footings.

Skylight support framing

Signage wall formwork/resteel

Elevated slab with Nelson studs, wire mesh, and rebar

"Growing Athens thru the Arts" panel tonight

This is just a quick post to let you all know about an important panel discussion taking place this evening, in which I will be participating: "Growing Athens thru the Arts." The discussion will center on the arts in Athens and local economic development, and is organized by the Federation of Neighborhoods. Representatives from Athfest, Athens Area Arts Council, Athens Convention and Visitors' bureau, and UGA's Performing Arts Center will also be participating. It will take place from 7:30-9:00 p.m. at the Old Fire Hall No. 2 (Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation headquarters), 489 Prince Ave. (at the corner of Hill St.), and is free and open to the public. I hope to see you there!

James E. Routh at the Paper Museum in Atlanta

The James E. Routh Jr. reception is coming up! Mark your calendars for Thursday, September 17, 2009. The exhibition will take place in Atlanta at the Robert C. Williams Paper Museum with Routh and his family. The Atlanta Journal Constitution published a piece about the upcoming reception and added more exciting information from an recent interview with Routh. Routh elaborates on his feelings towards the long gone print-making days and addresses his present situation.

Who’s Routh? Click here to be redirected to one of our posts about the artist himself.

GMOA in the News

The Textile Blog highlighted Mariska Karasz on Thursday. Karasz was the subject of an exhibition and a wonderful exhibition catalogue in 2007 at the Georgia Museum of Art, which you can purchase in the Museum Shop here. Her work really seems to touch something in people, as it's one of the exhibitions we continue to hear about, even more than two years later, and the book is getting close to being out of print, it's been so popular.

Photo Round-up

We have photos from several events over the past week that we'd like to share with you...

The Greene County Senior Center's visit to Lord Love You as part of Senior Outreach.



This week's Thursday Tour at 2 of Lord Love You, given by Paul Manoguerra.



And some photos from the most recent Collectors' event, also yesterday.



Keep checking our Flickr page. We put new images up regularly, and we've been trying to make sure everything's tagged and organized.

Art Around Athens

Tonight (Friday, Sept. 11) from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center is a free opening reception for the exhibition Reflections on Water, Earth & Sky, featuring photography by Lucinda Bunnen. The exhibition will run through Oct. 31. Bunnen has been a photographer since 1970 and her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pushkin Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the High Museum.

Also tonight, from 5 to 7 p.m., in the Circle Gallery of the UGA College of Environmental Design is an opening reception for the exhibition Across the Spectrum, which showcases the award-winning work of students and alumni.



Tomorrow (Saturday, Sept. 12) is the first UGA home football game of the season, but there's also a jewelry show and sale of pieces by Kenneth Kase at White Tiger Gourmet Food & Chocolates from 6 to 9 p.m. Kenneth is one of our occasional preparators when we need help and has worked in the Museum Shop as well. His jewelry consists of hand-hammered antiqued brass with vintage uncirculated Czech glass beads.



Remember to mark your calendars for Thursdays artist's reception in Atlanta at the Papermaking Museum for The South in Black in White!

iPhone loves GMOA

Todd Rivers, our head preparator, mentioned that, if you search "Athens, GA" on the iPhone, the first thing that comes up is the museum's calendar page of events, complete with the R.A. Miller Thursday tour at 2. Here's the evidence.

The Dodd's Visual Culture Colloquium

The Lamar Dodd School of Art, located on UGA’s East Campus, brings us lectures on all things art history. The Visual Culture Colloquium was conceived in the fall of 2008 under the patronage of A.G.A.S. (Association of Graduate Art History Students) and will feature lectures by graduate students and scholars from UGA and around the country. “The program is meant to provide a forum for scholarly exchange among interested parties”, according to the Dodd web site. Presentations will cover a wide range of subject matters in the art history realm featuring celebrated artists like 16th-century painter Giuliano Bugiardini and surrealist Marcel Duchamp.
Tonight’s lecture, by Phd candidate Sandy McCain, covers Benjamin West (Raphael’s American successor in both Roman and London art circles) and the similarities between his work and that of Raphael’s. This lecture will examine the legitimacy of Benjamin West’s claim to his artistic identity as the “American Raphael” through an analysis of his potrait of his wife and son, in which West appropriated the Madonna della Sedia (1514), one of the most celebrated of Raphael’s works during the 18th-century. The presentations will take place at 5:00 pm in LDSOA Rm. S 150.

The Lamar Dodd website on the Visual Culture Colloquium


Upcoming VCC lectures include:

September 24, 2009
Jenny Beene, M.A.
“Les Celibataires Memes: Spectatorship and Identity in Marcel Duchamp's ‘Etant Donnes’”

Nathanael Roesch, M.A.
“Out of Bounds: Paul Pfeiffer's ‘Caryatid’ and the Borders of Representation”

October 1, 2009
Shannon Pritchard, Ph.D. candidate.
“Caravaggio's ‘Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and a Page’: An image of the exemplary Christian knight”

Mike Kemling, Ph.D. candidate.
“Il scultore fiorentino: Giuliano Bugiardini's portrait of Michelangelo”

October 20, 2009
Dr. Michael Fried

December 3, 2009,
Dr. Isabelle Wallace
N-O-W-H-E-R-E

January 28, 2010, 5:00 pm
Dr. John Decker

College Night at the High Museum of Art

Join your fellow college students in Atlanta this Saturday (September 12) from 7 to 11:59 p.m. for the first-ever college night held in the fall at the High Museum of Art. General admission is $18, students with valid I.D. pay $7, groups of 10 or more pay $5 per person and members get in free. Activities include: figure drawing in the contemporary galleries, craft workshops and a special, collaborative project called “Fundred” headed by Mel Chin. DJ Tabone, Tealights and Jimi Cravity will perform live, and there will be two screenings of the film “The City of Louvre.” If you haven’t seen the current installment of the Louvre-Atlanta exhibition, make sure you mark your calendar because this will be the last chance to see it before it leaves! For more details and parking information, visit http://bit.ly/mKjeL.

The Collectors Visit

The Collectors is a higher Friends membership level that includes benefits such as invitations to events related to collecting art, educational articles about collecting and special travel opportunities. For more information about becoming a Collector or Friend of the Georgia Museum of Art, visit http://bit.ly/zYg17.

This evening, Thursday, September 10, the Collectors will visit a local private collection of photography. The cost is $40 per person, and the event lasts from 6 to 8 p.m. For more information concerning the event, please call 706.542.0437 or to RSVP call 706.542.0830.

Attribution

Is it or isn't it? An article in the New York Times this morning discusses the Metropolitan Museum of Art's decision that the painting pictured above really is by the hand of Diego Velázquez, but blogger CultureGrrl, who we read every day, has her own strong opinions about the seesaw back and forth. So what do you think?

Edit: Ah-ha. It's another attribution issue she questions. We just didn't follow the link to this page on a hypothetical Michelangelo. Still, as we're currently wrapping up the long, long project that is the three-volume "Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South," attribution is on our minds. Many of the entries deal with the differing opinions of scholars about just who painted a given image, as with the Lowe Art Museum's "The Savior," currently attributed to Benedetto Diana but previously to an artist of the Venetian school (ca. 1500) and to Girolamo Mocetto.

Construction Updates from Holder

Here's the construction update from the week of September 4, 2009.

Current week - Activities/Issues:
New Gallery / Connector
• Installed roof joists.
• Installed roof decking.
• Installed skylight structural steel support.
• Poured concrete columns at the parking area.
• Poured retaining wall footings.
• Poured the R.5 Line Concrete Wall

Existing Building Renovations
• Investigating the existing MEP systems.
• Developing MEP demolition and reconfiguration plan

Storage Bar
• Continued to address and relocate existing site utilities including:
o Emergency Power
o Domestic Water

Next week - Activities/Issues:
New Gallery / Connector
• Build the limestone mock-up.
• Finish roof joists.
• Continue roof decking.
• Pour the balance of the concrete columns.
• Continue to pour retaining wall footings.
• Form and pour the signage wall.

Existing Building Renovations
• Continue to investigate and plan the reconfiguration of the existing MEP systems.

Storage Bar
• Continue to relocate existing utilities.
• Finish mass excavation.
• Dig footings.

Retaining wall footings/steps.

Parking area columns.

Gallery joist/decking/skylight framing.