Art Around Georgia

Our friend the photographer Jerry Siegel sent along a press release from the Columbus Museum regarding the exhibition "Now and Then: Snapshots of the South." The exhibition juxtaposes historic and contemporary images addressing a variety of enduring aspects of everyday life in the South, including images that speak to Southerners' longstanding connections with the land and its history, religion, and the celebration of the eccentric, and evokes a unique sense of place as projected through the lens of cameras both past and present. A diverse selection of historic images will originate from the collections of the Eufaula Athenaeum, an impressive private archive of materials assembled by Eufaula native A.S. Williams. One of the largest and most important such collections in the South, the Athenaeum's holdings include thousands of items documenting a broad spectrum of people, places and events in Southern history. Contemporary images will be provided by professional photographer Jerry Siegel. An Alabama native, Siegel is currently one of the Southeast's leading photographers. He has produced several series of fine art photography that reflect his interest in the rural South's culture and landscape. While many of the images in this exhibition are especially influenced by his upbringing in central Alabama's Black Belt region, Siegel shot images for this project during his travels throughout the South. "Now and Then" opened Aug. 1 and will run through Jan. 31, 2010.

This Thursday, Aug. 13, at 6 p.m., the Columbus Museum will feature a symposium that addresses various perspectives on southern life and culture as represented through the art of photography. The guest speakers will include photographer Jerry Siegel; Dr. James C. Cobb, Spaulding Distinguished Scholar from the University of Georgia; and Stephen Rowe, from the Eufaula Athenaeum. The symposium is free and open to the public and should make for an interesting evening. We know that both Jerry and Jim Cobb have tons of great stories.

The American Scene on Paper: Opening Reception in Columbus

Most of us couldn't be at the opening reception for The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection, which opened in Columbus, Ga., this past weekend, but our grants writer, Betty Alice Fowler, was able to go and took some pictures for us, including a couple of Jason Schoen, whose wonderful collection has made this exhibition possible.

GMOA Exhibitions on the Move

GMOA has three traveling exhibitions opening this weekend and Monday, so please, if you're in the following areas of the state or country, stop by and check them out.



The Pensacola Museum of Art, in Fla., is opening Passport to Paris: 19th-Century French Prints today and will run it through Sept. 12. The 46 prints in this exhibition, drawn from the collection of the Georgia Museum of Art, offer visitors a voyage through the printmaking phenomenon that took place in 19th-century France. Europe in the 19th century experienced a new appreciation for printmaking, one in which its artistic merit became widely regarded as equal to painting and other art forms, and France became the center of this printmaking revival. During this period, there was a great deal of activity by artists interested in etching, lithography, and woodcut. Spurred by the democratic impulses that continued after the French Revolution, artists began to depict a much greater variety of subjects, finding material to ignite their imaginations in the diverse nature of city streets, countryside, and foreign lands. Printmaking in 19th-century France is often characterized by the portrayal of modern life. This exhibition presents examples of that theme, as well as many of the techniques and styles representative of that era. Included in the 46 prints on display are works by such venerated artists as Eugene Delacroix, Mary Cassatt, Honore Daumier, Paul Cezanne, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. In addition, it may well be your last chance to see this popular touring exhibition before it is retired, as GMOA will be revamping all its regularly available traveling exhibitions.



As we've mentioned numerous times, the Columbus Museum, in Columbus, Ga., is opening The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection to the public on Sunday, July 19, and keeping it up through Sept. 27. To read a press release about the exhibition, click here or go here to find images for use by the press.



Finally, The South in Black and White: The Works of James E. Routh Jr., 1939-1946 will open Monday, July 20, at the Robert C. Williams Paper Museum at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and run through Oct. 2, with a reception for the artist on Sept. 17. James Routh was born in New Orleans in 1918 but grew up in Atlanta. Routh graduated from Oglethorpe College, now Oglethorpe University, and then studied at the Art Students League in New York. Routh then applied for a Rosenwald fellowship to fund his proposed travel through the South. He planned to gather information for a series of prints, stating that he wanted to "paint a number of pictures concerned simply with scenes of everyday life in the South." This exhibition contains the images that resulted from Routh's travel in 1940 and 1941 as a result of the fellowship. Routh sketched as he traveled through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana during the hard years of the Depression, then later created prints and paintings from those drawings. In 1940, the rural Georgia that Routh observed was dominated by the cotton industry. Even as early as the mid-19th century, Georgia's soil revealed signs of the damage cotton cultivation and its associated agricultural practices had created, and Routh's images document this damage as well as the impoverished state of the South during the Depression. Routh's prints also capture agricultural scenes that have been lost in the urbanization of Atlanta and its suburbs. Many of the landscapes in his rural images are now buried in the heart of the city. After fighting in World War II with the U.S. Army and following a career in advertising, Routh retired in 1983 to Waynesville, N.C., where he lives today. An exhibition catalogue just went to the printer and should be available next month for $20.

Please let us know if you visit any of these exhibitions. We'd love to hear about your experiences.

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).

The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection

The Columbus Museum, in Columbus, Ga., will open the exhibition The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection on July 19, but the evening before includes a reception and a presentation by our director, Bill Eiland, the invitation to which Columbus was kind enough to let us reproduce above. So mark your calendars.