Museum to Feature Several Lectures During Spring Semester

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Spring semester is about to begin at the university, and the Georgia Museum of Art has a full schedule of lectures and artist talks over the course of the next few months. These events are all open to the public, and are free to attend. Some of the lecture events this semester include:

Artist Talk: Ted Kincaid

January 11, 2 p.m.

Texas-based artist Ted Kincaid will discuss his work in a talk entitled “Stranger than Non-Fiction.” Kincaid’s work is on view November 17, 2018 – January 13, 2019 in the exhibition "Ted Kincaid: If I Lose Everything."

Aralee Strange Lecture: Maisha Winn

February 28, 5:30 p.m.

Dr. Maisha Winn is the Chancellor’s Leadership Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis, and the Cofounder and Co-Director of the Transformative Justice in Education Center. In her talk, “‘I don't want us to forget the fire’: Literacy, Activism and Black Literate Lives Overview,” Winn examines the role of the Black Arts Movement in building a literacy continuum for readers, writers, speakers and activists. This program is made possible by the Aralee Strange Fund for Art and Poetry.

Emerging Scholars Symposium Keynote Lecture: Paul Barolsky

March 22, 4:30 p.m.

Paul Barolsky will deliver the keynote lecture entitled “Art, Love and Marriage in the Italian Renaissance” for the 2019 Emerging Scholars Symposium. Barolsky’s talk will deal with art historical description, interpretation, rhetoric, aesthetics, beauty, subjectivity, form, playfulness, pleasure and fun. Barolsky is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Virginia, where he taught the history of Renaissance art and literature for 47 years. He is the author of numerous books, most recently “A Brief History of the Artist from God to Picasso” (2010) and "Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso” (2014). Presented in collaboration with the Association of Graduate Art Students and sponsored by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

In Conversation: Rebecca Rutstein and Samantha Joye

March 28, 6 p.m.

Rebecca Rutstein, artist and Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding at the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, and Dr. Samantha Joye, professor of marine sciences at UGA, will speak about their deep-sea expedition to Mexico’s Guaymas Basin in the Sea of Cortez. As part of the expedition and artist residency, Rutstein set up her studio on the ship and created new works inspired by the data collected in real time. Two of Rutstein’s works, works "Out of the Darkness: Light in the Depths of the Sea of Cortez" and "Progenitor Series," are on view at the Georgia Museum of Art. Presented in collaboration with the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

Andrea Carson-Coley Lecture: Genny Beemyn
April 12, 12:30 p.m.
This year's Andrea Carson-Coley lecture will be delivered by Dr. Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Trans Policy Clearinghouse coordinator for Campus Pride. Until the last decade, what little was known about the experiences of trans college students was largely anecdotal. This talk will examine where we are today with research on trans students (including a discussion of the presenter’s own work) and where we must boldly go.

For a full list of programming at the Georgia Museum of Art, please visit our website.

Daisy Craddock to Speak at Georgia Museum of Art

One of the Daisy Craddock paintings on display at the Georgia Museum of Art

A native of Memphis, Daisy Craddock received her training in Tennessee and here at the University of Georgia, where she received a master of fine arts degree in painting. She then moved to New York City and became involved in conservation, later establishing her own practice specializing in postwar and modern art.

Her work has taken two distinct, though not unrelated, directions. One is an ongoing series of square pieces of paper drenched with color. Craddock utilizes pastel and oil stick to craft finely tuned color studies — a sort of mash-up between Josef Albers and Mark Rothko. She has recently conceived these works as a series of diptychs, with one panel representing the outside of fruits of vegetables and the other their insides, simultaneously abstract and realist. They present the world literally but so reframed through manipulating scale that the viewer is delocalized—just what are we looking at? 

A similar sense of the familiar and the unknown pervades Craddock’s landscapes, two of which are on view in the Georgia Museum of Art’s M. Smith Griffith Grand Hall and one of which (a recent gift) is upstairs, in the museum’s permanent collection galleries. Humans are absent, but the works are not lonely. Salmon-colored passages suggest winding paths, leading us into meditation with nature. The paintings are nostalgic, invoking all the sensory memories of summer days, but they are not sentimental. The landscape is also not an arcadia, but rather an intimate portrait of the artist’s favorite subject: trees.

Her seemingly impulsive brushwork provides a sense of vitality. Many of her early landscapes were painted with bits of sponge at a time when so-called “neo-expressionism” was in vogue in the marketplace and critical circles. The tools create a brushy, breezy quickness, which belies the artist’s slow and deliberate approach to creating. The oft-hectic brushwork further disguises her inherently minimalist compositions. This is the tree reduced to its most essential form.

Comparisons of her work to impressionism are easy and often made. The artist cites color-field theory and Bay Area abstraction as more prominent influences in her masses of color and pared-down forms. The foreground, midground and background merge and separate variously, creating movement and depth within the composition while invoking the proverbial debate between the forest and the trees.

Craddock’s works are on view through October 15, 2018, and the artist will speak at the museum at 3 p.m. on Friday, August 31. Her lecture is titled, “Paintings from the Early Eighties, in Context” and will touch upon her early influences as a young MFA candidate as well as her experiences living and working in New York City. You can learn more about Craddock and her work on her website.

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Joseph Litts

Former Assistant to the Director