Yet Another Crazy Thursday

Polly Knipp Hill in her college years

This April has been full of jam-packed Thursdays at GMOA, and this one is no exception. We have three things going on this p.m.

From 5 to 8 p.m., we encourage you to come over for Drawing in the Galleries. Bring your sketchbooks and colored pencils and really get to know the art in depth.

At 5:30 p.m., in the George-Ann and Boone Knox II Gallery, guest curator and artist Enee Abelman will speak on her exhibition "Polly Knipp Hill: Marking a Life Through Etching." Hill began working as an artist in the 1920s and garnered increased recognition in the decades that followed. Although she initially focused on European architecture, in her mature period her broad body of work grew to encompass poignant, amusing and slightly satirical genre scenes that reflected American culture. This retrospective exhibition of Hill’s life and career is organized iconographically according to the categories into which the artist herself divided her print oeuvre: Paris; America with "street and countryside scenes"; Florida; Arcadia (or reminiscences of her childhood); children’s games; and mountain culture. The groupings also reflect the chronology of her etching career. Abelman has many tales to tell of her dumpster diving and struggles to reconstruct Hill's autobiography and chronology.

Finally, at 7 p.m., we're screening "The September Issue" as our closing film in the series "Dress the Part: Fashion in Movies and Magazines," which goes along with the exhibition "Pattern and Palette in Print: Gentry Magazine and a New Generation of Trendsetters." With unprecedented access, the documentary tells the story of legendary Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and her larger-than-life team of editors creating the issue and ruling the world of fashion. Watch the trailer below:

Another Busy Thursday

Just like last Thursday, this one is full!

At 4 p.m. today, in the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium, we have the annual Willson Center/GMOA Lecture, which this year is being delivered by Sujata Iyengar. Dr. Iyengar teaches English Renaissance literature in UGA's English Department and will be speaking on "Pop Goes Shakespeare: Illustration, Adaptation, and Appropriation in the Arden Shakespeare Covers, Second Series."

During the late 1970s a group of English artists retreated from the increasingly conceptual and abstract London art world to the countryside, styling themselves (in emulation of both the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and of Samuel Palmer’s Brotherhood of Ancients) the Brotherhood of Ruralists. The Ruralists encompassed a variety of styles and approaches, but the Arden 2 Shakespeare covers designed by the Ruralists and marketed aggressively by Methuen shared what founding member Peter Blake called a “magic realism,” a deep engagement with the textual world of Shakespeare within a mythologized English landscape. The Arden Shakespeares sold well, but the mainstream British art establishment continued to accuse the Ruralists scathingly of “loud commercialism,” pretentious sentimentality, and anti-intellectual, anti-modernist nostalgia; the Oxford Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art coyly notes of the Ruralists, “some critics found [them] . . . insufferably twee and self-conscious.” This talk, however, considers the Ruralists’ book-covers as postmodern Pop Art and suggests that what seemed at the time to be narrow-minded insularity now strikes us as an ecological and concentration on the natural world; what seemed to be trendy modernizing now looks like the postmodern trait that Fredric Jameson and others identify as “pastiche,” and that what seemed merely trite or sentimental now appears as a historical resistance to the “schizophrenic” loss of affect found in late-20th-century commercial art.

At 5:30 p.m., we have a gallery talk on "Pattern and Palette in Print: Gentry Magazine and a New Generation of Trendsetters," from our own Mary Koon, editor at GMOA, and co-curator Clay McLaurin, chair of the fabric design program at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Want to learn more about the exciting project that led to this exhibition? Come ask them questions.

Then stay for the second film in our series "Dress the Part: Fashion in Movies and Magazines," when we screen "Funny Face," the 1957 musical starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire about the world of Paris fashion.

Everything is free and open to the public. Parking on campus in surface lots surrounding the museum is also free beginning at 5 p.m.

Tonight at GMOA

Thursday nights are especially busy this April at the museum. We have either two or three events going on every Thursday for the rest of the month, and it's all free.

Tonight at 7 p.m., we have the beginning of our three-film series "Dress the Part: Fashion in Movies and Magazines," with "Bill Cunningham: New York," a documentary about the wonderful New York Times Style section photographer who creates collages of what people are wearing now (like this week's, which focused on spring)

Preceding the film, at 5:30 p.m., we have two lectures on the exhibition "A Divine Light: Northern Renaissance Paintings from the Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery."

Trinita Kennedy, associate curator at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, in Nashville, Tenn., will speak on the above-pictured painting, the "Madonna of the Fireplace." Kennedy helped organize the exhibition with the BJUMG, contributing to its catalogue, but she's discovered even more about this painting since then and will present her findings. Our other speaker is John Nolan, from BJUMG, who will talk on the history of Northern Renaissance collecting at university art museums, in which his institution was a leader. Want to learn more? Read this Red & Black article on the lectures.

Remember, parking in the surface lots surrounding the museum is free after 5 p.m., even on weekdays.

"Pattern and Palette in Print" installation

We're practicing with our new camera, and the ongoing installation of "Pattern and Palette in Print: Gentry Magazine and a New Generation of Trendsetters" (opening March 17, with a reception March 23) seemed like a good subject. This exhibition is so ripe for Pinterest!