Museum Staff Attend Southeastern Museums Conference Annual Meeting

The annual meeting for the Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC) took place October 8–10, and the Georgia Museum of Art was well represented. This year’s conference was in Jackson, Mississippi, and offered staff members the chance to visit all of the museums and sights in the city. These included the Mississippi Museum of Art, Two Mississippi Museums, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the Old Capitol Museum.

One traveling exhibition on view at the Mississippi Museum of Art was “Central to Our Lives,” which was most recently on view here. Michael Lachowski, who attended the conference, commented, “It was fun to see [the show] in a totally different configuration.” He also enjoyed the show of contemporary art by Jeffrey Gibson, “Like a Hammer,” on view through January 27, 2019. Director William U. Eiland was also happy with the conference, stating, “I was impressed by the hospitality and generosity of our hosts—the museum community—in Jackson.”

The conference also presented many sessions for attendees over its three days. “Talking Race: The Power, Influence and Responsibility of Museum Professionals,” “IGNITE SEMC: Inspired Professionals Speak” and “Museums Rise Up with Creative Funding” were but a few of the options from which attendees could choose.

The Georgia Museum of Art left the conference with more than new information and skills. We were awarded two awards in publications design and two for exhibitions. The museum’s quarterly newsletter, Facet, designed by Athens firm The Adsmith, took home the gold in the Newsletters and Calendar of Events category. “Clinton Hill,” an exhibition catalogue that surveyed the artist’s career as a printmaker, painter and pulp-paper pioneer received gold in the Book and Catalogues category and was designed by Almanac, in St. Louis, Missouri. 

The museum also received awards for two exhibitions. “Crafting History: Textiles, Metals and Ceramics at the University of Georgia,” which included works by dozens of UGA faculty members, received a gold award. The museum received a bronze award for “Modern Living: Gio Ponti and the 20th-Century Aesthetics of Design,” an exhibition that presented more than 50 objects, representing some of Ponti’s most outstanding pieces of furniture and decorative objects.

SEMC is a nonprofit organization comprising museums, museum staff, independent professionals and corporate partners who work to provide educational and professional developmental opportunities, improve the exchange of ideas and information and encourage respect and collegiality. SEMC focuses on Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Next year’s SEMC annual meeting will take place October 21–23, 2019, in Charleston, South Carolina.

GMOA in the News

Julie Phillips, the arts and entertainment editor for the Athens Banner-Herald, wrote a great blog post about all the awards GMOA received at the Southeastern Museums Conference in Baton Rouge, La. Click here to see our blog post about the awards or here for the full news release.

GMOA Receives SEMC Awards!

Last week, the Georgia Museum of Art won nine awards at the Southeastern Museums Conference annual meeting in Baton Rouge, La. This unprecedented number of honors included an Award of Excellence for the exhibition “Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection,” as well as a number of other publications, some of which were also related to the exhibition.

GMOA received a Gold in the Books and Catalogues category for its hardcover “Lord Love You” exhibition catalogue. Golds were also awarded for the exhibition’s rack card and poster, and the opening reception invitation received an Honorable Mention.

Other publication awards included a Silver for “The South in Black and White: The Graphic Works of James E. Routh Jr., 1939–1946” and an Honorable Mention for the “Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in the North American Public Collections: The South.” An Honorable Mention was also given to the museum’s 2008-2009 Annual Report.

A full news release about the SEMC awards can be found on our website.

Another SEMC Report

Remember our recent post about the Southeastern Museums Conference annual meeting, in which Christy Sinksen told us some of what she learned while there? Well, our director, Bill Eiland, responded about his own experiences:

As a consequence of the inability of some museums to afford transportation, housing and registration for their staff to the Southeastern Museums Conference meeting in Charleston, W.Va., I had several requests to fill in as organizer, chair or "interlocutor" for various sessions. One of them was the research session, an annual event that I started at SEMC some 20 years ago; I believed then and I believe now that the state, regional and national conferences of museum professional should have a session devoted to scholarship in our museums, since we are primarily educators for our various publics, and I was particularly pleased to learn that the GMOA had won awards for content in its publications this year--the first year that such honors have been bestowed for content as well as design!

In the research session this year, we heard three papers, all of direct relevance to the Georgia Museum of Art. The first was a report on research on the drawings executed at Sloss Furnace, an industrial site in Birmingham. Our interest? The presenter, Karen Utz, the curator there, asked for our help in identifying images of steel production in the South, and we have important works of art by such artists as Howard Cook, Richard Coe and Lamar Dodd, among others, to contribute to such an exhibition. Second, we heard a talk on the production of toys by a company in Tupeolo, Mississippi, and you are right to ask of what import such a subject could be to the Georgia Museum of Art: our Fifth Henry D. Green Symposium on the Decorative Arts, scheduled for January 2009, will include a talk on toys and their relevance to the South's material culture. Finally, Dennis Harper, former curator here at GMOA, spoke on the exhibition slated to travel to his museum at Auburn as well as to ours here in Athens and the one at the University of Oklahoma. Dennis's talk, and our chance to hear it, is important for several reasons: for planning our installation; for writing and preparing the catalogue, for which we are responsible; and for raising funds collaboratively to support the project.

The research session was but one reason my attendance at this peer professional meeting was so important. The associate director and registrars who were there with me were equally gratified to receive prestigious awards for the GMOA, to attend their special-interest group meetings (I had the privilege of leading the directors in a luncheon and afternoon session), to make ourselves aware of the services and products available at the museum exposition and to do the all-important networking that allows us to obtain those products, services and programs cheaply and easily.

Especially now that the museum is closed, we need to be preparing quickly and efficiently for our re-opening in 2011. Such meetings as SEMC help us to do so, and, because we have no state funds for travel or staff education and training, I am more grateful than ever to the W. Newton Morris Foundation and its Trustees, who specifically devote some of the funds we receive from them to travel and professional development.

GMOA in the News

This weekend, in its Business Briefs section, the Athens Banner-Herald ran some brief coverage of the museum's recent publications awards from SEMC. Thanks, ABH!

SEMC and SECAC

We had a few staff members go to the Southeastern Museums Conference annual meeting recently, and Christy Sinksen responded to our query about what they learned very informatively:

I went to a session on collections database issues and much of what was said relates directly to our goals for funding and installing a new collections database. The speaker's own challenging experience as she attempted to convert data from an existing database platform to a new one has directly influenced the way we are looking at implementing our eventual database upgrade, potentially saving us very significant amounts of time and money.

This past week, Paul Manoguerra attended the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) annual conference, where the museum received yet another award for the exhibition and catalogue The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection, the certificate for which appears below. Let us reiterate how tremendously proud we are of the exhibition (mark your calendars for 2011, when you'll be able to see it at GMOA) and the publication, which put forward important research on many lesser-known artists, and we are pleased as punch to see them both being recognized by others.

GMOA in the News

Art Daily is running the news today of GMOA's three publications awards from SEMC. Hooray!

Arts Across Georgia is featuring The Art of: Music, which will take place tomorrow evening on Pulaski Street. In case you haven't noticed, we're pretty excited about that event, and don't worry about the weather. We have plans both rain and shine.

GMOA in the Blogs

Julie Phillips highlights GMOA's recent snagging of three publications awards at SEMC. This is the first year SEMC added awards for content, so we're particularly proud to have received two golds in that category. You can buy all three books in our shop by clicking here.

If you're keeping track, that's two awards so far for The American Scene on Paper (the other one being an IPPY in the fine art books category), and we wouldn't be surprised if there are more on the way.