Competing with Netflix: The Georgia Museum of Art's Student Night

UGA students Gabby Victorio and Kylie Anderson at Student Night

How do you catch the attention of college students on a Thursday evening when there’s Netflix to be watched, essays to be written and concerts to go to? A combination of free pizza, amusing crafts, a WUOG DJ, a Polaroid photo booth and an innovative exhibition by an African American artist will not only capture their attention but attract them in hordes. The Georgia Museum of Art StudentAssociation put on its second student night of the academic year on Thursday, November 9, highlighting the exhibition “Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs andtête-à-tête.”

Students making collages at Student Night   

The student nights are put on three nights a year by the Student Association as a way to draw students in and showcase the current exhibitions and permanent collection of the museum. Each student night includes a craft that is related to the exhibition, free food catered by a local restaurant, a DJ from the student-run college radio station (WUOG), an activity involving the exhibition and a Polaroid photo booth. The craft for this Student Night involved students making collages with Polaroids and magazine clippings as homage to Thomas’ work and the activity had students using Snapchat to complete a scavenger hunt of images from the exhibition.

Student Association president Rebecca Gross said, of choosing the Thomas exhibition for the student night, “Our whole team really felt drawn to this show. We always go and take a walk through the galleries to choose an exhibit before we start planning student night, and this one was an immediate yes. Not only were all the works visually striking, but the themes addressed really stuck out to us. The show deals with things that may be uncomfortable for some people to talk about, but I think they are exactly the things we need to talk about, especially as college students. Our hope in featuring this exhibit was that the vibrancy and visual opulence would draw students in, and from that they would be prompted to think about some of these important social issues.”

Members of the student association in front of the photo booth    

The Student Association has been active for many years now and continues to grow with each passing year. Students enjoy the opportunity to be an active member in promoting the museum and its wonderful exhibitions. 

The Student Association is planning its next student night for February 8, 2018. Join them for a night of art, music and fun. 

Stephanie Motter

Intern, Department of Communications

Fire and Ice: Student Night

            

Nothing says “college” like free food and dancing; however, despite an abundance of ice pops and beats by Athens favorite DJ Mahogany, the heart of last Thursday’s Student Night at the museum lay in exposing students to the museum’s current exhibitions and opportunities. The theme was “Fire and Ice”: a concept inspired by Ann Bonfoey Taylor’s fiery passion for fashion in the snowy world of professional skiing. Her fusion of the two interests was displayed in “Fashion Independent: The Original Style of Ann Bonfoey Taylor,” the exhibition open to students throughout the event.

            The event itself was organized and executed by the Georgia Museum of Art Student Association, a collection of individuals committed to increasing the presence of art on campus and the presence of a student voice within the museum. The Association, led by museum intern Eva Berlin, holds at least one Student Night event a semester (the next will occur November 7). The collective presence of the student group is influential in drawing students to the museum and exciting interest in art and museum functions. 

            Along with the DJ and buffet table, the event offered interactive activities like crafts and photo booths that continued the theme. Visitors tested their creativity while decorating candle-holders as either fire or ice themed—the best example of each was given a prize. Meanwhile, others participated in a scavenger hunt to explore the galleries and win prizes. As for the photo booth, the Kodak moments made with props and costumes were prize enough. (Click here to see the pictures taken!)

            If you were unfortunate enough to miss out on Thursday’s good time, don’t stress: the Student Association is currently planning November’s Student Night, which will highlight the upcoming exhibition “Exuberance of Meaning: The Art Patronage of Catherine the Great (1762-1796.”   

          

GMOA Docents

Every Wednesday at 2 p.m., one of the museum’s 24 active docents leads a tour of the permanent and temporary exhibition galleries. Volunteers range from students to retirees but share a love of art and people. Although no formal experience is required, volunteers are required to go through an application and interview process, and typically maintain a personal interest in art. They then make a minimum two-year commitment to represent the museum by giving tours, among other activities. The first year consists solely of a training program that continues throughout their relationship with the docent program. During this first year, volunteers learn tour techniques, shadow experienced docents and eventually practice their own tours. Because tours bring in a variety of visitors, this time and practice allow docents to be flexible enough to alter and adjust tours to suit the visitors’ needs.

 

Julia Sanks, a veteran docent at the museum, quickly realized that a small group of two young boys and their mother would appreciate a different approach to the typical “Tour at Two” than a larger, adult audience. Sanks smoothly set her more in-depth notes aside and engaged the young visitors by asking them to verbalize their responses and observations. After close to 11 years of affiliation with the museum, Sanks is comfortable molding herself to the needs of her audience.

“I’ve been here for around 11 years, but all docents, including myself, have to commit to training every week; there is always more to learn,” said Sanks.

Kitty Donnan utilized this same flexibility when she gave a tour of the permanent and temporary galleries to around 15 visitors from Hong Kong, China. Donnan gave an eloquent synopsis of art composition and history; because the visitors were interested in local history, she also drew attention to local artists and subjects like George Cooke’s “Tallulah Falls” and a self-portrait of Lamar Dodd. As an avid traveler, Donnan easily connected with the group not only as an art enthusiast, but also as a visitor to Hong Kong. She has traveled to places like the Louvre in Paris and the Vatican, although her favorite visit was to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Donnan looks forward to the exhibition “Exuberance of Meaning: The Art Patronage of Catherine the Great,” and its display of Russian art.

Docents don’t always wait for visitors to come to the museum. Docents participate in “suitcase tours,” an outreach program that caters to grades K-3 in the Athens-Clarke County area. These programs consist of volunteers literally packing up a suitcase of art reproductions, games and interactive activities to evoke students’ interest in art. On a more social level, some docents also choose to participate in the docent book club, which meets once a month to discuss books relating to art and art history. Both activities reflect the heart of the program, which consists of a love of art and a desire to share it.

For students interested in becoming docents, Carissa DiCindio, curator of education, will be teaching the special topics course ARED 5230/7230: Engaging Art Museum Audiences as Student Docents in the fall. The course will not only focus on the museum’s collections, but also on the complexities of art interpretation and how to facilitate interaction and dialogue within tours. The one-year commitment for students includes a semester of training within the course and a semester of participation at the museum. The special topics course will frequently be held in the galleries to encourage comfort and familiarity with the collection. 

Those interested in becoming a student or community docent should visit the GMOA website for more information: http://georgiamuseum.org/give/volunteer.  

Start the Semester With a BANG!

The Georgia Museum of Art Student Association commits itself to spreading awareness about art and encouraging the influence of a student voice at the museum. That doesn’t mean, however, that they don’t know how to kick back and have a good time.

On Thursday, Aug. 30, the GMOASA will host BANG! Back to School Student Night, which will go from 8 until 10:30 pm. The theme is “War Meets Post-War,” exemplified by the exhibitions of Francisco de Goya’s “Disasters of War” and “The New York Collection for Stockholm,” which highlight two very different time periods and war-era moods.

Not only will there be fun and free food, but the association will also have a range of activities including a photo booth with props and images based on 1960s American art and pop culture, a scavenger hunt starting at 8:30, which will involve searching through the galleries to receive cool prizes, and DIY projects based around Chakaia Booker’s works in the sculpture garden. You’ll also have the opportunity to meet members of the association, including the president, Eva Berlin, and mingle with other students who share similar interests in the arts.

The best part about this event? Besides the experience of art, meeting new people, and having a good time? How about the fact that all of this is FREE? So come start the new school year on a good foot. The museum and the Georgia Museum of Art Student Association will be waiting for you at 90 Carlton Street!

GMOA Student Night: All Shook Up

Our quarterly student night was last night and, as ever, it was tremendous fun. Students made their own stickers with stamps (to mimic Hatch Show Print's offerings), toured exhibitions, listened to music by The Darnell Boys and Grinnin' Bear, chowed down on chicken from Zaxby's, posed with Elvis in our photo both and more. Slideshow above.

GMOA in the News

Wendell Scott, UGA student and young media entrepreneur, has his own talk show, "The Wendell Show." He recently dropped by GMOA to chat with PR coordinator Jenny Williams about the new expanded Georgia Museum of Art. To learn more about "The Wendell Show," click here.

GMOA in the News/Video Redo

The Red and Black ran an article yesterday on our student docent program that we hope will encourage even more students to apply for it, especially as today is the deadline to apply for the year. Student docents, like community docents, must commit to one year of involvement with the program and 20 hours of service during the course of one semester. Click here to apply online.

We also had some small edits to make on the Family Day video that was up on the blog briefly before disappearing. Here it is again, courtesy of Larry Forte.

Manners and Snobisme

We're a bit late on Timothy Aubry's article "How to Behave in an Art Museum," which appeared online in Paper Monument, but it happened to catch our eye this morning after a discussion about ill-behaved children in museums. Aubry uses Pipilotti Rist's exhibition at MoMA as a vehicle to discuss the complex class negotiations involved in visiting a temple of high culture. Should we be intimidated or not? And where, exactly, is the line between enthusiastic participation and treating the museum too much like the mall? Is slouching acceptable? How loud should you talk? How fast should you walk?

There’s a difference, however, between the previous generation of strivers and ours. For both, trying too hard to show off your expertise is a dead giveaway that you haven’t got as much status as you’d like. But in previous decades there was still a belief that those who took advantage of inexpensive museum fares, public libraries, and so forth were elevating themselves. For my generation, say those born around or after 1968, the sign that you’re at the top of the hierarchy is a readiness to acknowledge that the high ground you’ve come to occupy isn’t actually higher than any other ground.

This is very American. Our purported populism has always made us wary of those claiming, by virtue of their position or education, to know better than everyone else. One thing that’s changed, though, is that this populism, often disguised as the heady skepticism of continental theory, has managed to sneak into the very bastion of elitism, into the places where the aspiring intellectual first learns how to be a pompous snob: academic humanities departments. The institutionalization of deconstruction, identity politics, and Marxist criticism, in other words, has replaced the pious attitudes of previous eras with a different set of now-habitual postures: distrust of the canon and the institutions that preserve it. Whatever their merits, these frameworks have created enough ambivalence to make art appreciation a vexing enterprise for a generation of well-educated museumgoers. Because if you don’t believe in high culture, then what are you doing at a museum?

The closer we get to the top, it seems, the more likely we are to believe, or pretend to believe, that the ladder we’ve been climbing leads nowhere—is meaningful only to those who stare at its innumerable rungs from below. Self-improvement, we discover, is a sham. We were better off when we were just kids, when we knew what we liked effortlessly, when our passions were not learned. And so we end up in MoMA’s romper room, doing somersaults on the carpet, hoping to return to a state of innocence.

Student night at GMOA (Reopening Remixed) was a great example of this network of issues and, for the most part, they seemed to work out correctly. Yes, there was a lot more texting in the galleries than usual, but what was marvelous to see was how the 2,053 kids who turned up didn't just treat the event as a chance to grab some free food and talk to their friends. They talked about the art with one another and interacted enthusiastically with the label copy. When asked not to photograph certain works, they were disappointed because they loved the art and wanted to document it. There is, clearly, a sweet spot where appreciation of high culture and an open, welcoming attitude can mesh, but it's not easy to hit, and it probably varies depending on the visitor.

Lamar Dodd BFA Exit Show

While we were in the process of moving, hungry for art and happy to be back next to the Lamar Dodd School of Art, we hiked over there to check out the BFA exit shows for the students graduating this semester and snapped a few pictures. The current crop, which includes printmaking (including work by our own wonderful publications intern, Margaret George), fabrics, photography, jewelry/metals and graphic design, will be on display through December 13, so if you want to take a look at it in person (which we highly recommend), you'd better hurry.

Fabulous Student!

We love to brag about our wonderful students at the Georgia Museum of Art, who include interns, volunteers and Federal Work-Studies. With a lean staff and a lot to get ready for the grand reopening at the end of January, we couldn't do it without them, and they learn a lot, too, working in every department at the museum, from curatorial to special events to PR and more. Wassim Mentouri is a Federal Work-Study in our business office, and he's being inducted today into Beta Alpha Psi, the national accounting scholastic and professional fraternity, which is why he's all dressed up. The students in BAP are the best of the best in accounting, and it's definitely an achievement for him to be recognized as such. Congrats, Wassim!

Upcoming Lamar Dodd School of Art Events

As UGA is nearing the end of the semester, Lamar Dodd students will be showcasing their work. Here are two upcoming events.

Advanced Print Show

The opening reception for the advanced printmaking class show will take place tomorrow night from 6 to 8 p.m. at Walker’s Coffee Shop & Pub. The pieces will be on view at Walker’s through November.

Drawing & Painting BFA Exhibition

The opening reception for the drawing and painting seniors will take place next Friday, November 12, from 7 to 9 p.m. in Gallery 307 of Lamar Dodd. The work will be on display through November 29.

GMOA Student Association Meeting

Would you like to...

• have fun?
• plan events?
• take on a leadership role?
• strengthen your résumé?
• build the foundation for a new student organization?
• have an influential voice at the Georgia Museum of Art?

Join the GMOA Student Association for its first meeting!

Tomorrow, September 15, 2010 at 7 p.m.

Lamar Dodd School of Art Room N104 (north building, first floor)

Parking is available in the E07 lot after 4 p.m.

Free pizza!

Surreal College Night at the High Museum

Save money, avoid long lines and coordinate transportation to the Dalí College Night on September 25 by attending with the GMOA Student Association! If you'd like to join us, please bring $5 to the meeting.

For more information, e-mail gmoastudent@gmail.com.

Louis T. Griffith Student of the Year

It's probably because our wonderful interns have been in the middle of finals and around less than usual, but we totally forgot to post about our annual Louis T. Griffith Student of the Year presentation, which was held early last week. The museum not only serves many students on campus, through its academic emphasis and resources, but we are also served by students to a large extent, and our student volunteers are a huge part of that. This year's Louis T. Griffith Student of the Year was Jennifer Mayer, from the public relations department, whose name you have no doubt seen at the bottom of many a blog post. She had to cut the cake, but all our other fabulous students got to eat it, and this event always serves as a way to express our great appreciation to all of them for the work they help us accomplish. Enjoy the slideshow above.

Athens Street Show 2010

Athens Street Show, an exhibition in downtown Athens presented by students in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, started yesterday and is on display through May 2.

The students are in Didi Dunphy’s Professional Practices Seminar, which received an Athens Arts Unleashed grant for the project. The class teamed up with local retailers to show pieces in shop windows downtown. There will also be a curator-led “Art Walk” from 6 to 7 p.m. this Sunday, April 25 (more information below).

The class been preparing for this project for a month. The students were split up into eight curatorial teams and paired artists with downtown spaces (the artists are not in the professional practices course). The Athens Street Show reflects the Arts Unleashed program and “presents art existing in challenging and surprising locations to create an art exhibition for all.”

The windows downtown are designed to tie in with both the art displayed and the retailer. Various disciplines of art are presented, and the students involved come from many different backgrounds. To view a full list of participating student curators, artists and locations, click here.

Athens Street Show’s website describes the seminar and the exhibition:

Professor Didi Dunphy's Professional Practices seminar is a course at the Lamar Dodd School of Art designed to introduce students to the wide possibilities of creative fields available for artists and creative entrepreneurial minds. Athens Street Show 2010 is a project undertaken with this in mind, to celebrate the relationship between the art by the students of Lamar Dodd, and the greater Athens community. Athens Street Show 2010 bridges the gap between art and community spaces.

The curator-led “Art Walk” (Sunday, 4/25) will begin at 6 p.m. at the Arch on Broad Street. The group will walk to each site and listen to student curators and artists as they describe the works and answer questions. The walk will end with a celebration at Farm 255. The event is free and open to the public.

Art Around Athens

There are a lot of great local art events coming up, so don’t miss out!

Thursday, April 8

—Association of Graduate Art Students (A.G.A.S.) Lecture

Lamar Dodd School of Art (LDSOA), 5 p.m.

A.G.A.S. sponsors an annual lecture series featuring prominent art history scholars. On April 8, Dr. Susan Sidlauskas will present a lecture about John Singer Sargent titled “Sargent’s Bodies and the Unmaking of History.” Check out one of our earlier blog posts for more information.

—Printmaking Lecture with Lisa Bulawsky

LDSOA room N100, 5 p.m.

Lisa Bulawsky, associate professor in the Washington University School of Visual Art will be giving a lecture prior to the presentation of a collaborative project (see April 9) during her visit to UGA.

Friday, April 9

—Collaborative Project with Lisa Bulawsky

Downtown Athens and UGA campus, noon–1 p.m.

During Bulawsky’s visit, LDSOA will be making prints on magnets to be attached to cars and driven around downtown Athens and on campus while playing Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” loud enough to attract attention and “lightheartedly disrupt” routine. The prints will then be attached to other magnetic surfaces.

—Material World–Art Meets the Runway!

Hotel Indigo, reception at 7 p.m. and show at 8 p.m.

The Athens Area Arts Council is hosting a fundraiser, “Material World—Art Meets the Runway!” for Celebrate the Arts 2010 in conjunction with blvd magazine’s Weekend Fashion Affair. The event will start with a reception at Mercury Art Works, followed by a wearable art show on the runway and then dancing in the Rialto Room. The event is free and open to the public with a cash bar and free appetizers. VIP tickets are available online.

—Opening Reception for Kind of Blue

Mercury Art Works (in Hotel Indigo), 7–11 p.m.

The reception for “Kind of Blue,” a collection of John Ahee's figurative oil paintings is in conjunction with Celebrate the Arts 2010. Also opening is an installation by Helen Farmer in the glass cube adjacent to the entry of Hotel Indigo.

—Revealing the Invisible

LDSOA, opening reception at 5 p.m.

This exhibition includes work by the undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the art education studio techniques course. These students “seek to reveal the impact of race on the ways in which both students and educators understand each other and the world around them.”

—Opening Reception for the Annual Georgia Sculptors’ Society Members Show

William J. Thompson Gallery, S. Thomas St., 6 p.m.

See the work of local sculptors and make your own relief sculpture to be poured in iron (see April 10). The reception is free and open to the public (bring $15 to create a sculpture).

Saturday, April1 0

—The Annual Georgia Sculptors’ Society Iron Pour

William J. Thompson Gallery, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.

Works created by artists and attendees of Friday’s opening reception will be poured in iron. Free and open to the public. Register here.

—The Collectors’ Hard Hat Tour

Georgia Museum of Art, 5–7 p.m.

The Collectors will enjoy a reception in the first-floor atrium of the Lamar Dodd School of Art and go on hard-hat tours of the new GMOA. $40 per person. For more information or to RSVP call 706.542.0437. Click here for more information on joining the Collectors.

Sunday, April 11

—Opening Reception for “Coast to Coast”

Lumpkin Café, 1700 S. Lumpkin St., 1–7 p.m.

“Coast to Coast” features handmade jewelry and recent paintings from artist Ann Hamlin’s travels to Florida and California. Free and open to the public. Call 706.543.3122 for more information.