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.

Wanderer Symposium to Highlight Captured Slaves' Histories

In 1858, around the time the U.S. Congress outlawed the transatlantic slave trade, the Wanderer, a New York pleasure ship, illegally carried a group of 488 Congolese from Africa to the coast of Jekyll Island, Ga.

The yacht, originally intended as one of the most beautiful and luxurious crafts ever built, was bought by southern planters, loaded with zinc tanks and retrofitted with new decks so that nearly 500 enslaved people could be “tight packed” into a craft meant to hold no more than 140.

The stories of these people and their subsequent lives on southern plantations will be highlighted in “‘Where I Come From . . .’: The Wanderer Enslaved and Their Descendants,” an all-day symposium organized by Valerie Babb, director of the Institute for African American Studies and professor of English and of African American studies. The symposium will take place on May 15 at the Georgia Museum of Art and is free and open to the public. The event will conclude with a tour of the exhibition “Face Jugs: Art and Ritual in 19th-Century South Carolina” led by Dale Couch, curator of decorative arts, and a reception. For more information, please contact the Institute for African American Studies at 706.542.5197.

“A lot of people know about the history of the yacht and how it was part of the New York Yacht Club, how it was built, how it was commissioned,” Babb says. “Not so many know about the people that yacht brought over here. So I’m hoping that history becomes highlighted.”

When photographer, graphic designer and researcher April Hynes discovered a face jug that her grandfather had unearthed in Philadelphia in 1950, she contacted archaeologist Mark Newell, who discovered more of the jugs and linked them to the Congolese who came on the Wanderer.

“It’s kind of just serendipity, in a way, that she happened to contact him and he happened to tell her, ‘oh no, they’re created by Congolese slaves, who had been brought here and their descendants just kept on doing this,’” Babb says.

The jugs were meant to keep away evil and were sometimes used as funeral grave markers.

Babb says, “They became items that were treasured by families. Luckily, the Georgia Museum of Art decided to have this exhibition, and it dovetailed very nicely with the symposium.”

Besides illuminating the story of the Wanderer, Babb hopes the symposium will begin a series of collaborations among the Institute for African American Studies, the larger University of Georgia and Jekyll Island, which currently has a memorial where the ship landed that it aims to expand.             Babb would also like to collaborate with Brunswick public schools so that students can be involved in expanding the archive for the ship, and a member of the Jekyll Island authority hopes to produce an annual Heritage Day festival on the island inspired by the story.

“I think it is a really good balance of audiences,” Babb says. “It’s a nice blend between the academic, the artistic and actual life.”

Trecento Conference Set

If you've been wondering what's up with the museum's biennial Trecento conference, here's some news:

Conference on Trecento Art in memory of Andrew Ladis
November 11-13, 2010

The Georgia Museum of Art and the University of Georgia have sponsored symposia on Italian art for almost two decades. In 2010, to honor the memory of Andrew Ladis (d. 2007), we are returning to our original concept: art of the 14th century. The 14th century we have in mind is a long one, from roughly 1260 through 1453. Rather than focusing on a single city, style, medium or artist, the conference will be open to any topic related to art produced in the Mediterranean basin that in some way reveals the impact of, exchange among or presumed hegemony of Italian art. The conference will meet in Athens, Ga., on the campus of the University of Georgia. Opening events are scheduled for Thursday, November 11, 2010, and papers will be presented on Friday and Saturday, November 12 and 13.

The conference is free and open to the public. All are welcome.

Proposal abstracts are to be submitted by May 8, 2010.
To send proposals or for further information, contact:
Shelley E. Zuraw or Asen Kirin
Lamar Dodd School of Art
270 River Road
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
email: szuraw@arches.uga.edu or aekirin@uga.edu

The conference is a major gathering for the field, and its proceedings have been published regularly, including, most recently, in "The Historian's Eye: Essays on Italian Art in Honor of Andrew Ladis," which is available for purchase from our online shop.

Publications

Here's a sneak peek at the cover of our next publication, the proofs for which are on their way right now. The Historian's Eye: Essays on Italian Art in Honor of Andrew Ladis is the culmination of the symposium on early Italian art that was held at the museum in early September of 2006. It collects many of the papers that were presented there and serves as a record of the conference in other ways, such as documenting the touching tributes to Dr. Ladis given by his past and current students. The book will retail for $40. Keep checking here to find out when it will be available for purchase.