WUGA--The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship

WUGA-TV used to be WNEG and now is affiliated with PBS and based on the University of Georgia campus. They recently approached us about partnering on creating some content, and above is our first effort. We're working on doing something longer at some point, but for the moment, we're putting together one-minute features on an exhibition each month that will run regularly on the station. This month's focuses on "American Letterpress: The Art of Hatch Show Print" and features chief preparator and in-house curator of the exhibition Todd Rivers.

Here's a list of channels, depending on your location and cable package. Unfortunately, WUGA isn't available on all satellite providers yet, but the station is working on it.

So look out for us on your TV and let us know if you see the promo.

Travel

Todd Rivers, head prep, just went on a trip on museum business and he wrote us up a little something about his journeys. The slideshow above is a selection of the photos he took.

Last week, I accompanied our director, Bill Eiland, on a trip to several cities in Virginia and both North and South Carolina to visit Jay Robinson (an artist whose work is represented in our collection), museum donors and the newly constructed additions to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Meeting Jay Robinson was an experience. He has an air of confidence and the work schedule of someone in his late teens or early 20s. He told us some days he sleeps until 1 p.m. and paints into the wee hours of the morning. He described his recent watercolors as abstractions of elements and particles on a molecular level. They have fluid movement and intense color. He treated us to a wonderful dinner, during which he told us stories about his experiences at Cranbrook, his trips to Africa and the Belgian Congo in the 1950s, his work for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C., and the tragedy of a studio fire that clamed the bulk of his early work. The evening was capped by a tour of his sketchbooks chronicling the indigenous people of Africa and Asia.

The tour of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts started with lunch in the museum’s café and a brief visit to a storage facility to see works in Morton Traylor’s “Miner Series.” The museum’s grand hall resembles old railroad terminals and boasts the two largest invisibly supported panes of glass in the United States. We discussed some of the challenges their new building poses and how taxing the additional load has been for its staff members.

Next, we traveled to Charlottesville, Va., and had a quick visit and dinner with author and art historian Paul Barolsky. Early the next morning, we drove to nearby Gordonsville to pick up a chest from the Daura family.

After loading the chest, we traveled to Raleigh, N.C., to the North Carolina Museum of Art. If you have not seen its new permanent collection addition, please make arrangements to do so. This addition, which is separate from the existing museum, sits on the rolling hills like a glass warehouse. The state-of-the-art facility is completely run by computers that automatically lower and raise the shades of the exterior window walls as the sun travels across the museum. Natural light floods the galleries through glass that triple filters for UV and minimizes lumens. We finished the day by having dinner with Anne Thomas.

On the final day, we picked up some prints by Howard Thomas and drove to Rock Hill, S.C., to view the exhibition “Edmund Lewandowski: Precisionism and Beyond” at Winthrop University Galleries so we could get a feel for the show, which will open at GMOA September 10, 2011.

Trip to Texas

Todd Rivers, head preparator, just got back from a trip to Texas with director Bill Eiland to work on an exhibition, and they hit up a ton of museums while there. Todd had this to say about what they say, and his slideshow of photographs follows:

On Wednesday, we visited with Charles Jones of LaNana Creek Press and viewed books that have been produced and books in progress. Overall, it is a nice collection, and it was nice as well to see the progression throughout the body of publications produced thus far.

That evening we visited with a private collector to see works of art from the Taller de Gráfica Popular. These were great works and contain very powerful and allegorical subject matter. This collector also has a phenomenal collection of hand-crafted rare books, including works by Leonard Baskin and the Gehenna Press, Michael Kuch and the Double Elephant Press, and many more fine presses and artists.

On Thursday we traveled to Fort Worth to visit some museums and see some art. We visited the Amon Carter Museum, which was designed by Philip Johnson, and viewed a wonderful collection of works by artists including William Harnett, William Hogarth, Stuart Davis, and Thomas Moran. We also viewed the exhibition “Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s–50s.” Next was the Kimble Art Museum, designed by Louis Kahn, which houses a collection of European masterworks by Jacques-Louis David, Diego Velázquez, El Greco, and Michelangelo. The Museum of Modern Art of Fort Worth, designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, is an exquisite collection of modern art and has on view works by Richard Serra, Anselm Kiefer, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Martin Puryear, Felix Gonzales Torres, Donald Judd, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

On Friday we went into downtown Dallas to visit more museums. We visited the Dallas Museum of Art and viewed works by René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti, El Lissitzky, Odilon Redon, Franz von Stuck, Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Fredric Church, William Harnett, and Dale Chihuly. We also saw the exhibitions “José Guadalupe Posada: The Birth of Mexican Modernism” and “Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea.” Next was the Nasher, designed by Renzo Piano, which houses a great sculpture collection including works by Serra, Pablo Picasso, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and Giacometti and had an exhibition of Rachel Whiteread drawings. After lunch at the Nasher we headed to the Crow Collection, and saw a nice little collection of Asian art including crystal balls, jade statues, and wooden pagodas and pergolas. We also viewed the exhibitions “New Vision: Ballpoint Drawings by Il Lee” and “Modern Twist: Bamboo Works from the Clark Center and the Art of Motoko Maio.”

Public Art?

Head prep Todd Rivers snapped this photo while in Atlanta. Sure, the stick man doing a little dance with the wheelchaired figure could be a coincidence, put there by nature, but we like to think of it as guerrilla public art, carefully placed by a passerby for maximum aesthetic impact.