Art in the Stacks: "One Hundred American Paintings" Now at Georgia Public Libraries

"One Hundred American Paintings," Georgia
Museum of Art, 2011.

A project in the works for many years, "One Hundred American Paintings" by our former curator of American Art, Paul Manoguerra, is a full-color catalogue of a selection of 100 important works of art from the Georgia Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Published to coincide with the museum’s grand reopening in January 2011 after a 30,000-square-foot expansion, the publication is both a tribute to Alfred Heber Holbrook, the museum’s founder, and a record of his legacy, which began in 1945 when he gave 100 works of American art to the people of Georgia through its flagship university. His gift formed the foundation of the museum’s current collection of more than 10,000 art objects.

As the official state museum of art, outreach programs are an important part of the Georgia Museum of Art. The state of Georgia is made up of 159 counties, some of which are considered to be rural and geographically isolated. Due to our location in North Georgia, some state residents would have to drive more than 250 miles to visit the museum in person. As part of our mission to support and promote teaching, research and service, we developed a program to distribute copies of “One Hundred American Paintings” at no charge to every public library system in Georgia and also surveyed librarians for future planning. So far, this program has helped us reach more residents statewide without requiring them to come to us and we hope that this program will aid public libraries and their patrons in enjoying and learning more about the visual arts. 

“One Hundred American Paintings” was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and its distribution was funded by the Georgia Council for the Arts and the President’s Venture Fund through the generous gifts of the University of Georgia Partners. Purchase your own copy, with the option of cloth-bound or softcover, by phone at 706.542.0450 or online at http://georgiamuseum.org/learn/publications/one-hundred-american-paintings.

To learn more about our educational and outreach programs or inquire on how you can bring our programs to your local community in Georgia, click here.

Stella Tran
Editor, Department of Communications

Awards

We are pleased as can be to announce that the Georgia Museum of Art's exhibition catalogue "The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection" has won the Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing in the Academic Press category for 2010. To see the full list of Hoffer Award winners, click here. To purchase a copy of the book, which retails for $55, click here to visit our online shop.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new Reading Room

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has created a new site, called the Reading Room, to give the public access to rare and out-of-print art publications, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.

Ten rare art catalogues are currently available on the site, such as "Six More," the catalog for LACMA’s 1963 exhibition on L.A. pop; "Billy Al Bengston," a rare 1968 monograph; and the surveys "Late Fifties at the Ferus" (1968). LACMA plans to reprint more of its publications online as well as produce books exclusively for online publication.

In addition to reading the publications, visitors to this new Web site will be able to perform text searches and download the PDF versions of the volumes, but the content is still limited to noncommercial personal or educational uses.

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 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.

GMOA in the News

The Textile Blog highlighted Mariska Karasz on Thursday. Karasz was the subject of an exhibition and a wonderful exhibition catalogue in 2007 at the Georgia Museum of Art, which you can purchase in the Museum Shop here. Her work really seems to touch something in people, as it's one of the exhibitions we continue to hear about, even more than two years later, and the book is getting close to being out of print, it's been so popular.

Congratulations

We like to keep track of people we've worked with here at the museum, and Art Daily had an article today on Steve Grafe, who wrote an essay for the exhibition catalogue "Real Western Wear: Beaded Gauntlets from the William P. Healey Collection," one of our most popular recent publications and an extremely successful traveling exhibition. We still have a few copies for sale in our online shop, but it's getting close to being sold out. At any rate, we enjoyed working with Steve very much, and we extend him our heartiest congratulations on his hiring as curator of art at Maryhill Museum of Art, in Goldendale, Wash.

More Photos

Brent keeps taking photos inside and outside the building, and we've updated our construction photos from GMOA security accordingly.



He also took a few during the installation of Lord Love You.

And speaking of that exhibition, the rest of the books arrived at UGA Central Receiving this morning, meaning you can feel free to start ordering your copies from our Web shop.

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).

Exhibition Catalogues

Here's the cover design for this upcoming publication, which will accompany the exhibition. The designer, Gina Binkley, chose a simple, text-based look, which will be embossed on thick, uncoated paper so that the text is raised, to complement the title of the show and the work of Jim Routh. The embossing suggests the process of printmaking, the tall and thin letters mirror Routh's frequent skinny verticals, the absence of a color palette reflects Routh's black-and-white work and the overall extreme simplicity matches nicely with the look of the artist's images and the aesthetic sensibility of his era. We love it when a look is so carefully thought out, and we look forward to the rest of the book, which we'll update you on as it gets closer to reality.

Sneak Peek

This is the first draft of the cover for the exhibition catalogue that will accompany Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection. The inside is just as lovely, but you'll have to wait to see that until the books are printed, delivered and retailed.

IPPY

The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection is a semifinalist for an Independent Publisher Book Award, or IPPY, in the category of "Fine Art." The winners in each category should be announced this week, but even an honorable mention is a worthy achievement. The IPPYs were conceived as a broad-based, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of the independent publishing industry, and are open to authors and publishers worldwide who produce books written in English and intended for the North American market.

Designed as a parallel exhibition to Coming Home: American Paintings, 1930-1950, from the Schoen Collection, which the Georgia Museum of Art organized with the Mobile Museum of Art in 2003, The American Scene on Paper: Prints and Drawings from the Schoen Collection contains works by many of the same artists as its predecessor and addresses much of the same subject matter, from portrayals of the plight of the American farm worker to the development of industry and the growth of the urban environment. This exhibition catalogue includes 153 prints and drawings, all illustrated full page, in color, and each discussed in a brief essay on the facing page. Historian Harry Katz provides an introduction, and contributing authors include William U. Eiland, Paul Manoguerra, Gail Kallins, Carol Nathanson, Stephen Goldfarb and Lynn Barstis Williams. This exhibition and exhibition catalogue are of benefit not only to those who appreciate American art created between the two World Wars, but also to the average history buff, and they demonstrate the admirable diversity of Jason Schoen's collection of works on paper, which includes significant contributions from women and African American artists. The book retails for $55 and can be purchased from the online Museum Shop.

Ulysses Davis and Bruce Metcalf

These aren't usually two artists you would see mentioned together. Ulysses Davis was a Georgia folk artist known for his wood carvings who passed away in 1990, while Bruce Metcalf is a contemporary studio jeweler who has been very influential in his field. But they have at least two things in common: Both are the subject of solo exhibitions this year, and both have been featured in exhibitions and publications organized and produced by the Georgia Museum of Art.

Ulysses Davis is the subject of a major exhibition opening today at the American Folk Art Museum, The Treasure of Ulysses Davis, which features 100 of his wood sculptures. One of his reliefs, pictured below, appeared in the exhibition and publication Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection in September of 2007 at GMOA.


Bruce Metcalf, on the other hand, is the subject of an exhibition opening June 27 at the Bellevue Arts Museum, The Miniature Worlds of Bruce Metcalf, and had a ring included in The Ring Shows: Then & Now and Putting the Band Back Together in August of 2008.


Are we bragging? A little bit, but we're always interested in following artists who have had their work in exhibitions at the museum, especially because we learn so much about them in the process of organizing an exhibition, writing wall text, working on a catalogue, publicizing it all and more that it makes us want to keep on learning. It's kind of like learning a new word and then seeing it everywhere.

Edit: The New York Times has added a Davis slideshow.

Links

One of our absolute favorite blogs to visit for unique musings on art is Garth Johnson's Extreme Craft. Johnson used to reside in the Athens area but relocated to the West Coast a few years ago, where he teaches. He was kind enough to plug our exhibition catalogue Modern Threads: Fashion and Art by Mariska Karasz when it came out, but that's not why we love the site. We love it because his take on art and craft and the areas where they intersect is feisty, enthusiastic and irreverent and because he updates frequently. If you think art's not punk rock enough, we strongly encourage you to bookmark his site, which will provide many an example to the contrary.

Interview today

Today, Paul Manoguerra, our curator of American art, is going to interview Carl Mullis, folk art collector, and Durwood Pepper, one of R.A. Miller's first dealers and a folk artist himself, about R.A. Miller in preparation for the book to accompany Lord Love You: Works by R.A. Miller from the Mullis Collection, the exhibition we're organizing that will be on view at the Lyndon House Arts Center in early August of this year. We're attempting to record the interview not only for Paul's reference, but also to be able to post it on our website as a podcast. We still have some older podcasts archived on our site here, and it's definitely something we'd like to get back into. Do you listen to museum podcasts? What kinds of things would you be interested in us recording and posting?

American Scene elsewhere

Art Daily covered yesterday the opening on April 5 of Regional Dialect: American Scene Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, an exhibition at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, in Memphis, Tenn. The exhibition includes 57 works by American Scene painters, some of whom you may know if you visit the Georgia Museum of Art's exhibitions regularly. At least two of them, Joe Jones and Carl Frederick Gaertner, appear in the exhibition catalogue above, Coming Home: American Paintings, 1930-1950, from the Schoen Collection, which remains available for purchase from the museum shop ($35 softcover; $45 hardcover). The catalogue features 128 paintings from the numerous periods that make up the American Scene from 1930 to 1950, when the influences of the Depression and World War II contributed to styles of art variously known as Regionalism, Social Realism, Magic Realism, Surrealism, and Precisionism.

Folk Art!

Those of you who don't keep up with the folk art world may not realize that the spring sale at Slotin Folk Art is coming up this Saturday (March 28, 2009), with 960 items and objects of art up for auction, from face jugs to paintings to tramp art and advertisements. Slotin's catalogue is always a great deal of fun to flip through, and they've got everything listed online if you're not on their mailing list. The B.F. Perkins painting above is on the cover of the print catalogue, and it's a stunning piece, one that reminded us of his paintings that appeared in the exhibition and catalogue Amazing Grace: Self-Taught Artists from the Mullis Collection, the latter of which we still have for sale for a mere $48 through the museum shop (we also handle wholesale sales), which will be launching its web presence soon.


The museum also has a fabulous R.A. Miller show in the works, also drawn from Carl's collection, which will be up at the Lyndon House Arts Center this August. We're working on the exhibition and catalogue right now, so keep checking here for updates.