Gio Ponti: Artist, Architect, Writer, Designer, and Visionary

The Georgia Museum of Art recently acquired four plates and a platter designed by Gio Ponti (1891–1979) a famous Milanese architect and designer. Ponti worked as the artistic director and designer for the Florentine firm Richard-Ginori, which manufactured ceramics, from 1923 to 1938: this served as the beginning of his long career designing other household and decorative items, such as furniture, glassware and silverware. He also designed apartment buildings, palazzos and public buildings of all types, including business towers and university buildings. He was the editor and founder of both Domus and Stile magazines, dedicated to Italian architecture and the decorative arts, and he served as professor of architecture at Politecnico di Milano University for 25 years.

Typical of Italian decorative arts in the 1920s and 1930s, Ponti appears to have been inspired by ancient classical artwork, in this case Etruscan. Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime encouraged a conscious return to Italy’s ancient roots, seeking to instill in all Italians a pride in their heritage and a belief that they were destined to rebuild the ancient Roman Empire. Although Ponti engaged with the Fascist regime and shared its appreciation for classical culture, he was essentially apolitical.

Ponti also appears to have been inspired by scenes from contemporary life, as the charming circus figures on these platters show. Later in his career, he became known for his sleek, modern designs, such as his Superleggera furniture and the Pirelli Tower. An artist and visionary of extraordinary versatility, Ponti’s life and work will be highlighted in an upcoming summer 2017 exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, which will focus on his furniture design.

For more information about Gio Ponti and his art: www.gioponti.com.

Rebecca Stapleford
Publications Intern

New Exhibition: “Before the March King: 19th-Century American Bands”

"Grandfather of the March King", Patrick Gilmore (1829 - 1892)

The Georgia Museum of Art opened a new exhibition to the public last week, “Before the March King: 19th-Century American Bands.” The exhibition focuses on American bands in the era before the “March King,” John Philip Sousa, and is open until the beginning of the year (Jan. 3, 2016).

The exhibition features many portraits of famous band directors, woodwind and brass instruments, non-military local bands and artifacts such as broadsides advertising performances by local bands and national events. Famous band directors featured in this exhibition range from cornet player Alonzo Ford to the “Grandfather of the March King,” Patrick S. Gilmore, who was an inspiration to Sousa.

Stereoscopic view of a concert hall conducted by Patrick Gilmore in Brooklyn, NY.

Instruments displayed in the exhibition include bugles, cornets, euphoniums and over-the-shoulder horns. The exhibition has a variety of photographic portraits that show the many types of bands that played in the early to late 19th century, such as military, newsboy and all-female bands. Artifacts include souvenirs from the National Peace Jubilee in 1869 and the World Peace Jubilee of 1872 (conducted by Gilmore) and sheet music covers.

An All-Female Band in the 19th-Century

All the objects in the exhibition come from the collection of UGA Performing Arts Center director George C. Foreman, who will give a gallery tour of it this Thursday (October 22). The public is invited to attend this free event, with champagne, coffee and cake at 5 p.m. and the tour at 6 p.m.

"In Time We Shall Know Ourselves": The Photographs of Raymond Smith

On Oct. 24, Raymond Smith’s iconic photographs of his 1974 summer journey through the American South will go on display here at the Georgia Museum of Art. Smith is most certainly in the tradition of James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” with his honest portraits of southerners who look us at head-on, retaining their inherent dignity, yet his corpus is considerably more diverse than Agee’s.

       

Fotomat Girl, Louisville, Kentucky 

While Agee focused on the families of three white Alabama tenant farmers during the Great Depression, Smith’s subjects include both African American and white people of all ages and professions, in locations ranging from Boston, Massachusetts, to Orlando, Florida. In a way, Smith’s photographs display the New South as it was immediately following the civil rights movement, a world where blacks and whites now co-existed in the same spaces on a more equal footing, but also a world in which more insidious forms of racial divisions and inequalities remained.

    

                                                          Bourbon Street, New Orleans 

Smith chose the title of this exhibition from words he saw on a church marquee in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, that fateful summer. Smith points out that they are particularly relevant as it took 40 years from the year in which he took the photographs until their publication and exhibition. The people of his photographs and the social conditions of the American South seem clearer to him 40 years later, and he notes that the people themselves, if still alive, will have a better understanding of themselves that comes through years of experience and maturity.

Self-Portrait, Motel Room, Williamsburg, Virginia

“In Time We Shall Know Ourselves” will be on display through Jan. 3, 2016. Visitors are encouraged to drop by and reflect on the themes of knowing, memory and reflection present in Smith’s work. A book by the same title, including both the photographs and scholarly essays, is available for purchase in the Museum Shop. On Nov 19, Smith will give a presentation on his work from 5:30-6:30 pm here at the Museum. 

  

Eleanor Nut McCain's Homespun Coverlet

Detail of the overshot coverlet

The Georgia Museum of Art recently received as a proposed gift an overshot coverlet, woven out of wool and cotton and dyed with indigo and madder. Like all overshot coverlets, it has a simple geometric pattern. The red, white and blue yarns as well as the striped pattern suggest both the American and the Confederate flags. It was woven in three separate pieces on a four-harness loom, and then the pieces were sewn together. From the style and the genealogical information provided by the donors, direct descendants of the original weaver, we can confidently say that this coverlet dates from the middle decades of the 19th century.

Eleanor Nut McCain is identified by a piece of cloth sewn onto the coverlet as its original maker. Genealogical information provided by her family tells us that she was born on May 2, 1818, in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and died on July 25, 1899, in Gadsden, Alabama. The descendants who inherited this coverlet remained in Etowah County, Alabama (the location of Gadsden), until the second half of the 20th century.

It is unknown if Eleanor’s descendants are correct about her being the weaver of this coverlet, as most coverlets were made by professional male weavers who traveled from town to town, taking commissions from individual families. It could be that Eleanor merely commissioned the coverlet, and her descendants, upon inheriting “Grandma Eleanor’s handwoven coverlet,” assumed that she was the one who wove it. Several factors, however, speak strongly in the favor of Eleanor being the weaver. The simple geometric style of the coverlet tells us that it was woven on a four-harness loom, without the fashionable Jacquard attachment that was invented in 1820, as opposed to the kind of loom owned by a professional weaver. We also know that many southern women took up spinning and weaving during the days of the Civil War, as the blockades limited the amount of new fabric that could be imported. Homespun became a patriotic statement.

It would make sense if Eleanor McCain wove this coverlet at that time, as she would have likely been unable to purchase a new coverlet in the bellum atmosphere of scarcity. The colors of the coverlet are also the colors of the Confederate flag, which raises the possibility of the coverlet being made as an explicitly patriotic gesture. Dale Couch, the museum’s curator of decorative arts, points out that it could have expressed either Confederate sympathies or covert Union sympathies. Support for the Confederate cause was not universal, and some counties, Couch says, tried to secede from Alabama (as Jones County attempted in Mississippi).

It would only be natural for her children and grandchildren to treasure, pass down, and publicly exhibit this coverlet, which in their time was unfashionable, if their grandmother made it as a gesture of self-sufficiency and patriotism.

Artist Spotlight: Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Still Life With Apples (1890)

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), an African American artist, was known internationally for his paintings that focus on spirituality and imagination. The son of a minister, Tanner often depicted biblical scenes, utilizing both his academic training and what he saw on his visits to the Middle East and Africa.

Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before the American Civil War. He enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1879, where he studied under Thomas Eakins. After Tanner made his debut in New York and opened an art studio in Philadelphia, he moved to Atlanta in 1889, initially to open a photography studio. His business was unsuccessful, but he later taught a course in drawing at Clark College (Clark Atlanta University). He would move to Paris the next year, due to racial discrimination in the United States. Tanner enrolled in the Academie Julian in Paris in 1891, studying under Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens. He developed a looser, more poetic painting style in 1900, with which he rendered his travels around the world (Egypt, Algiers, Morocco, Jerusalem, etc.). Tanner made these journeys so that he could portray biblical figures and settings accurately.

The artist’s involvement in World War I and his wife’s death, in 1925, led him toward depression and altered his perspective on art in his later years. He would create less work that focused on biblical themes and more paintings of the war and portraits of African Americans such as Booker T. Washington; these later paintings stayed in his private collection. Tanner’s influence on other artists, especially African Americans, was notable, and he received many awards over the course of his life.

The Georgia Museum of Art owns a painting by Tanner, “Still Life with Apples” (1890), donated to its collection by Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson (along with other works of art by African Americans). Created before Tanner left the United States, it uses dark colors in the background to emphasize the light on the apples in the foreground. Other works by Tanner are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Des Moines Art Center; the Cincinnati Art Museum; PAFA and many more.

Olivia Winifred Jordan's Sampler: An Statement of Educational Accomplishment and Familial Identity

Olivia Winifred Jordan's Sampler

In around 1828, a young girl, born in 1818, made a sampler that will be a part of the upcoming exhibition "Georgia's Girlhood Embroidery: 'Crowned with Glory and Immortality,'" which will run from October 31, 2015, to February 28, 2016 at the Georgia Museum of Art. Her name was Olivia Winifred Jordan, and she lived in rural Washington County, Georgia. 

Like many young girls of the 18th and 19th centuries, she made an embroidery sampler to demonstrate her needlework skills and her literacy. It contains multiple kinds of marking alphabets, many different kinds of decorative geometric bands and a strawberry border that goes around the entire sampler, which are all utterly commonplace to schoolgirl samplers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this sense, the surviving sampler is a relic of the system of girlhood education common in a bygone era. Olivia could have been trained in these skills at any one of the many female academies in Georgia, or, most likely, at home by her own mother. 

In another sense, her sampler offers us a glimpse into her unique world. She proudly prints her whole name as "Olivia Winefred Jordan" on the bottom of her sampler. Genealogical research reveals that she was named after both her maternal grandmother, Olivia Bell, and her paternal grandmother, Winifred Jordan. Further research on the family reveals that it was large, extended and close-knit and that family members frequently moved long distances to live with their relatives, a pattern that promoted the entire family's unified migration across the South over the generations. Olivia's sampler clearly reflects this family-centered identity. It also reflects the common way in which samplers and other forms of schoolgirl embroidery were often used to communicate social, political, familial and religious messages. 

Olivia's sampler, then, represents a microcosm of the world that she inhabited, both as a member of her family and as a white middle-class schoolgirl in the antebellum southern United States. It is both a work of folk art and a statement of social identity and is therefore valuable to both those who appreciate art and those who study social history. Those interested in delving more deeply into this topic should take time to visit the museum when the exhibition will be on display. A kit that contains the chart and the material necessary to replicate Olivia's sampler will also be on sale at the Museum Shop during the duration of the exhibition. 

Lamar Dodd

No visitor to the University of Georgia, or, in fact, the state of Georgia, can avoid seeing the name Lamar Dodd plastered in all kinds of locations: The Lamar Dodd School of Art (University of Georgia), The Lamar Dodd Art Center (LaGrange College), Lamar Dodd Professional Chair (a real job title), and even "Light one for Lamar" (a real anti-smoking ban protest). With his name being such a part of Georgia vernacular, Lamar Dodd’s actual identity eludes many – wealthy benefactor? Ancient regent?

Lamar Dodd at the Georgia Museum of Art

Dodd is actually one of the South’s most important and influential artists, contributing more than just his name to buildings, schools, and strange protests. His paintings are held in the collections of the Smithsonian, the Whitney, and Metropolitan Museum of Art – and of course at the Georgia Museum of Art – as exemplary pieces of Southern art. He enjoyed commissions from the likes of NASA, and his prolific output still permeates Southern culture, and particularly the Athens community, which Dodd made his home until his death in 1996.

Dodd’s beginnings are rooted in the region. He studied architecture at Georgia Tech, and then taught for a while in Alabama, but finding his greatest interest in painting and developing his own practice, he headed to New York in the late 1920s/early 1930s. This was a wise move – his stylized scenes of Southern landscapes and daily lives charmed New York crowds. Often dark in color, and with heavy black shadows, Dodd’s paintings of the American south appear sombre, yet romantic. This combination led to his first solo show in the city in 1932, and toward a name for introducing a renaissance in Southern art. He soon won the Norman Walt Harris Prize for his painting, “Railroad Cut,” which is now on display at the Georgia Museum of Art. 

Lamar Dodd, "North of Pratt City"

Following this, Dodd was invited to become the artist-in-residence at the University of Georgia, and so gladly returned to Georgia, and the South, to make art and advocate for its inclusionary sharing. He began giving lectures and teaching painting, and was appointed head of an essentially non-existent art department at the university. He expanded its programs, introducing more classes and a variety of courses, funded scholarships, saw the opening of the Georgia Museum of Art, and founded the Cortona Study Abroad program that is still enjoyed by students today, growing the art school until it was the biggest and most influential in the South. He retired in 1967, 16 years after the original residency program that was only intended to last a year. However, Dodd's legacy doesn't just lie with the school – he never ceased painting throughout these years, and exhibitions of his work continue today. The Monehegan Museum in Maine is currently showing a series of his works in an exploration of his 'artistic history.'

Lamar Dodd is an excellent figurehead for our institution as a great leader of the concept that we still work toward today – art for everyone. His name is proudly used to reflect the values that he instilled in (what he didn't know would become) the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and that they maintain in his memory. The school was renamed after him in 1994, not long before Dodd's passing, in celebration and tribute to his contributions to Southern art and its community, and you can visit the Georgia Museum of Art to see some of the paintings from the beginning of this great movement.