Pardon the Mess: Reinstallation of the Permanent Collection

Five years ago, the Georgia Museum of Art opened a wing dedicated to its permanent collection as part of a large expansion and renovation project that also added the Jane and Harry Willson Sculpture Garden, enlarged the museum’s public spaces and expanded storage. On stark white walls, the museum laid out highlights from its American and European collections, including many old favorites. It was clean. It was fresh. It was something new for us.

But 5 years is a long time. Since January 2011, we have welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors into those galleries, our curatorial staff has changed and expanded, and our collection has grown by about 25 percent. We have new priorities and new visions. It’s time for us to shed our old skin in favor of a new one. This August, after a two-month closure of the eight galleries on the south side of what the staff still call the “new wing,” we will reveal a reimagined look at our permanent collection. The white walls will get some colored paint, and removable walls will create defined spaces within the galleries. We’re doing away with the hard line between American and European artists, partially because it feels somewhat arbitrary (where would you put Mary Cassatt?) and partially because incorporating them all into the same art historical timeline just makes sense.

One thing we’ve realized in the past 5 years is that many of our visitors are first-timers not only to our museum but to any museum, which means that we need to do a better job of explaining why particular works of art are grouped together. If you have an art history degree, it’s not hard to recognize a wall of American impressionist paintings, but if you don’t, you may not understand why our Paul Revere spoons are next to 18th-century portraits. New wall text will make these connections clear, and new labels should be easier to read for everyone.

Inclusivity is a buzzword in the museum community these days, but in our position as the official state museum of art, we feel very strongly about its value to what we do. If you feel unwelcome somewhere, it is unlikely you will come back. To develop and diversify the next generation of museum lovers, we need to meet them where they are, not where we wish they would be.

Are you worried that your favorite painting is going into storage? You probably don’t need to be. Although works will be shifted around among galleries, the most well- known ones will still be on view. More works by African American artists, especially those from the collection given by Brenda and Larry Thompson in 2012, will join the story, creating a richer narrative of art history. The museum also has an especially strong collection of works on paper, and more prints, watercolors and photography will be on display. Though these fragile, light-sensitive objects cannot stay on view for as long as hardier oil paintings or works of decorative art, the upside of having a regular rotation is that the look of the galleries will change frequently, rewarding return visitors with new discoveries.

Check in with us through our Tumblr and other social media for updates on our progress, and we hope you’ll enjoy the results.

Hillary Brown
Director of Communications

GMOA in the News

Another thing we're working on is catching up on clips. The Athens Banner-Herald ran a lovely interview with our newest curator, Dale Couch, just before Christmas, that you might well have missed if you were out of town for the holidays. Please take a look. We think it really encompasses Dale's populist philosophy when it comes to decorative arts.

GMOA in the News

The press release through UGA News Service about Dale Couch's appointment as curator of decorative arts is starting to get picked up. We see on Twitter that both ArtForum and the Red and Black have it up, and we're sure more will follow. This post will be updated as necessary.

Follow-up

Here's an interesting follow-up to the Van Meegeren story our intern John blogged about this summer: a painting formerly identified as a Van Meegeren forgery has now been reattributed as a genuine 17th-century work. It'll be interesting to see what Errol Morris weighs in with.

GMOA in the News

Today's issue of Flagpole, the alternative newsweekly in Athens, features some familiar-looking devils...

GMOA in the News

The students are back! And that means the Red & Black is publishing every day again. Today they've got an article on the grant GMOA received from the National Endowment for the Arts to hire a curator of decorative arts, which is more than just running the press release and has great quotes from Jenny and Bill. One point that's important and that we're not sure everyone is aware of is that this curatorial position really helps further historical research within the state through the Henry D. Green Center for the Study of the Decorative Arts, one of the most successful initiatives of the museum. It's more than helpful to our mission--it's mission-centric.

GMOA in the News

The Banner-Herald has a very nice article today about Lord Love You, by correspondent Chris Starrs. Good quotes from Jenny, Paul and Carl! We hope this article gets locals excited about the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 24 at the Lyndon House.

Don't forget about the opening reception tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m.!

GMOA in the News

Kristen Morales has a great story about the opening of Lord Love You in the Gainesville Times that features quotes from both Paul Manoguerra (our curator of American art and of this show) and Carl Mullis (the collector).

And R.E.M., which contributed some funds toward the show and catalogue, has also been kind enough to plug it on their Web site. Thanks!

Former MFAs

Lanora Pierce, one of our preparators, recently sent along two different articles about former MFA students who had their exit shows at the museums.



Justin Rabideau, who was in the 2006 MFA exhibition (from whence the above image comes), has work in Native Offerings III, an exhibition at the Pine Jog Environmental Education Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., that features four South Florida artists' interpretations of the environment as a medium or muse. Organized by Talya Lerman, the exhibition includes artists Isabel Gouveia, Brigid Howard, Justin Rabideau and Carolyn Sickles.



Chris Fennell, who showed in 2002, just moved his huge sculpture of baseball bats to a new location at the Sloss Furnaces. Its permanent home will be in Atlanta, near several baseball fields.

GMOA in the News

We would be remiss if we failed to mention the fact that, in a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "How to Sell a Museum Masterpiece," our director, William U. Eiland, was quoted. The article, by Daniel Grant, focuses on the criticism directed at the Orange County Museum of Art's recent sale of 18 California Impressionist paintings to a private collector in Laguna Beach, not, in this case, because of their being deaccessioned at all (procedures were followed there), but because of the way in which they were sold. The guidelines set forth by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), for which Eiland chairs the professional issues committee, do not require sale at public auction, and every situation is different, but, as Eiland put it, "At auction, there is no gerrymandering the price, no hocus pocus." We recommend you read the article, which is useful in the way it explains one of the many thorny issues of museum ethics, and we extend a high five to our fearless leader.

In the News

After a weekend full of fun, music and extreme heat, the Athens Banner-Herald has posted a gallery of AthFest Images. We came across one photo of GMOA’s table at KidsFest, and soon we’ll post our own slideshow of Family Day: Silly Sun Visors.

Not only were the visors fun to decorate, but they also kept the radiating sun out of the kids’ eyes -- keep checking back for the slideshow, and hopefully you can find someone you know modeling a custom-designed visor!

In the News

Over the weekend, in the Athens across the Atlantic, a new museum opened at the foot of the Parthenon. The New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece was inaugurated Saturday. This new museum replaces an older, much smaller Acropolis museum with a huge and stunning structure designed by the New York architect Bernard Tschumi.


The museum intends to protect, preserve and display the great art of classical Greek civilization, and its completion comes at a pivotal time for many of these pieces of art. After enduring a century of political instability and urbanization (many of these sculptures suffered damage from acid rain and other pollutants), this art now will have a safe, permanent home within the walls of the museum. However, one piece that is missing from the museum is generating quite an international controversy, explored in a wonderful article by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair.


In the early 19th century, the British removed almost half of the frieze that decorates the Parthenon. Currently ensconced in the British Museum, this piece has long been a contentious issue between Britain and Greece. The Greeks claim that the work should be restored to its full form (at this time, there is a cast replica of the missing portion displayed in the New Acropolis Museum), to which the British counter that doing so would set a disastrous precedent in the art world, as museums the world over contain pieces obtained by not wholly legitimate means. The Greek government is hopeful that the opening of the museum will bring renewed interest to the controversy and place more pressure on the British government to allow the repatriation of the segments.

In the News

With the Venice Biennale in full swing, the New York Times has an extensive gallery of images and audio commentary on the best exhibitions of the festival. The United States performed admirably in this year’s festival – the artist Bruce Nauman represented the US and won the prestigious Golden Lion for Best National Participation with his exhibition entitled Topographical Gardens.

Another interesting artist to check out is Ragnar Kjartansson. In his performance piece for the Icelandic exhibition, Kjartansson is painting a portrait each day for the next six months (until the Biennale closes in November) of his friend Pall Bjornsson wearing a Speedo, smoking a cigarette, and drinking a beer. The focus of the piece, entitled “The End,” will not be the paintings that Kjartansson creates, but the detritus that arises from the act of creation – the empty beer bottles, the cigarette butts, the hundreds of empty and filled canvases. An article in the New York Times from earlier this month contains a conversation with Kjartansson and his model, both who feel a bit daunted by the enormity of their endeavor.

GMOA in the News

We've gotten a good amount of press over the past few days.

The Athens Banner-Herald ran a nice profile of new curator Lynn Boland on Sunday, which contains some details his fellow staff members probably didn't know, such as the fact that he owns a piece by Daniel Johnston.

Anyway, that profile was picked up by a good number of folks on Twitter, as was the release we sent out about the publication of The Historian's Eye: Essays on Italian Art in Honor of Andrew Ladis, which the Lamar Dodd School of Art publicized on their website (Ladis taught there for many years, and co-editor Shelley E. Zuraw continues to). The books arrive in Athens today after a long journey across the ocean and will be available to purchase within a day or two from our shop.

Art museum bits

Double posted with Classic Ground...

* The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott with an article: "After an Age of Rage, Museums Have Mastered the Display of Commotional Restraint." A section:

Over the past decade, small controversies occasionally unsettled the museum world, but they went away quickly, and few gained enough traction to become national issues. After almost a half a century of polarizing and contentious debate -- dating back at least 40 years to a show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art called "Harlem on My Mind," which ignited the modern era of museum conflict -- a strange quiet has settled over the museum world.

Nothing in Washington has risen to the level of angst felt by the Corcoran Gallery in 1989, when it canceled an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. And old wounds seemed have healed: The Enola Gay, the center of a bitter 1995 controversy about the atomic bomb, went on display permanently at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center in 2003 with very little protest. Even the National Endowment for the Arts, which had its budget slashed during the late 1990s, slowly began to reconstitute itself and stayed out the limelight of controversy.

* Lee Rosenbaum in The Wall Street Journal on the new wing at the Art Institute of Chicago: "A Modern Wing Takes Flight." A segment:

In the midst of the overcrowded free-admission festivities on opening day, I couldn't help but notice the dazed, glum looks on the faces of those who dutifully filed through the galleries, barely pausing to look at the art -- a sharp contrast to the joy radiated by Millennium Park denizens.

* The San Francisco Chronicle on the SFMOMA version of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum's traveling exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities:

The irony is that Adams emerges from the two-person survey looking like the greater artist, the one who understood his tools and opportunities more profoundly.

In the News

Another blog you should bookmark, especially if you're interested in all kinds of art and culture, not just visual arts, is the New York Times' ArtsBeat, which updates multiple times a day on art, film, gossip, music and much more. About a month ago, they asked how the poor economy was affecting artists and got hundreds of responses in the comments, which produced some surprising overall trends, summarized in this article. Freed from the constraints that come with fiscal arrangements, art is flowering in some places, and many of the responses were optimistic. The Times also put together a slideshow of some of the respondents with excerpts from their statements.

We also enjoyed this article a few days ago about how acquisitions work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during its Collectors Committee weekend. Curators lobby for works, and then patrons vote on what to buy with their pooled funds. It's hard to say whether this is more democratic or oligarchic, but it's an interestingly open way to go about accessions.

An update

Due to the horrifying events that took place there this weekend, the Georgia Museum of Art's event at Athens Community Theater with Town & Gown Players, The Art of: Scenic Design, may be postponed or canceled. We are leaving the decision entirely up to Town & Gown, and we completely understand if it is too soon. Again, our thoughts are with all of them and with the entire community that has been affected.

Elsewhere in the news

While we mostly focus on the downside of the economic downturn (e.g., the Miami Art Museum's budget cuts, which, admittedly, seem to have been done extremely well, with no real loss in programming), there are occasionally benefits as well, such as Saatchi Gallery's newly announced "Art for All" campaign. Saatchi Online is selling art without taking the usual 50% dealer's commission, which, as the slogan makes clear, certainly makes art collecting more accessible to everyone. Here's the sale room, if you'd like to browse around.

In other news, the New York Times has a story about Crow House, the former home of the artist Henry Varnum Poor, which the surrounding community bought in order to transform it into a museum (rather than letting the property be developed). This noble aim is, however, being undermined and challenged by the artist's son, Peter Poor, who still owns the contents of the house and has been selling them and donating them to museums. It's an interesting example of the complications that can arise once reality comes into play with the founding of a museum, and, as you would expect, there's also a marvelous slideshow of interior shots of the building.

GMOA in the News

Thank you so much to Melissa Link, who wrote a great article that ran in the Athens Banner-Herald today, telling people that, although the Carlton Street building of the Georgia Museum of Art is closed, we're still doing tons of programming. Carissa DiCindio, our associate curator of education, gave some wonderful quotes, and we hope that the article, which focuses on Toni Carlucci's drawing workshop at the Botanical Garden as an example of outreach programming, really will establish in locals' minds that we're still here and doing more than ever.

More museum news

Our director just passed along a couple more articles addressing the financial difficulties museums are facing at the moment, one of which is a small bright spot and the other of which is a new challenge.

The former consists of the news that the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis will stay open for the moment, while the trustees of the university debate its fate.

The latter is the news that Florida State University is facing huge budget cuts from that state's legislature and is considering closing the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, which FSU took over in 2000. The closure discussed so far would be temporary, but the idea behind it is disturbing:

The FSU Board of Trustees wrote in a letter announcing the cuts that they need to look at programs that do not directly serve students, including Ringling.

As with the situation at Brandeis, this is an incorrect impression. Any university that has research as part of its mission, as FSU does, serves students directly through its museum of art by facilitating that research, as well as by helping provide them with a well-rounded education. We sincerely hope the Ringling is able to stay open.