Emily Hogrefe-Ribeiro Joins the Georgia Museum of Art

Emily Hogrefe-Ribeiro

University students of every discipline are constantly looking to the future. With academic deadlines and seemingly endless lists of internships and applications to complete, it can be difficult to imagine one’s life past graduation. The latest addition to the Georgia Museum of Art, Emily Hogrefe-Ribeiro, can relate to students who take time to figure out where they are meant to be. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in art history in 2011 and now holds the position of assistant curator of education. In a brief interview, Hogrefe-Ribeiro discussed the path she took to get here, the value of her work and what she looks forward to in the future.

After finishing her undergraduate degree at Sarah Lawrence College, Hogrefe-Ribeiro says she spent a few years doing some internal searching — a possibility with which no undergraduate is unfamiliar. She then worked as an artist’s studio assistant, a gallery attendant in a museum and a marketing assistant for a historic house museum. With some time in the field under her belt, she returned to get her graduate degree from Tulane University, with a background in contemporary art of the African diaspora and a focus on education.

She then interned with the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., as part of her graduate studies and completed her graduate internship at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where she worked with local schools. Among other projects, she created art-integrated programs for 7th-graders and their teachers during multiple visits to the museum. She also worked with student and continuing education docent programs.

In her search for the next step after her graduate internship, she came across the opening at the Georgia Museum of Art. “I had friends visiting for the fourth of July,” Hogrefe-Ribeiro said, “And I was like ‘Oh my goodness, this position sounds perfect!’ So, I sent them off to continue to have fun and I pounded out my application in two days.” Luckily, Hogrefe-Ribeiro had visited Athens before and had found it very much to her liking. She saw stand-out qualities of the museum in the number of field trips regularly coming through its doors, the community and student docent programs and the size of the teaching collection.

She points out that the galleries are incredibly useful as an educational tool because they are arranged chronologically and focus on different trends in the development of American art, including a great cross-section of works by African American artists. Frequently rotating exhibitions fill gaps in the permanent collection and provide spotlights through which to examine artistic concepts in tighter focus.

Hogrefe-Ribeiro’s position allows her to guide directly the ways in which visitors to the museum learn. This accessibility to historic material and the relationship of the museum to the university and the surrounding community appeal to her drive to knock down elitist roadblocks in the field of art history. “What’s the point of learning all this stuff in graduate school if you only are speaking to one niche audience?” she asked, “I want everyone to know what I know and have access to what I’ve had access to.”

Now Hogrefe-Ribeiro is working on 5th-grade tours, a donor-funded program that allows every 5th-grade student in Athens-Clarke County to come to the museum. This year, all 5th-grade tours have been scheduled to come during the run of “Richard Hunt: Synthesis.” These tours are supplemented by tactility-centered art carts and interpretive activities to lay foundations for art appreciation. The tours are led by the community and student docent corps, which Hogrefe-Ribeiro will take over leadership of in the spring. She is excited about revisiting and adapting tour stops to put new spins on the way visitors experience the museum’s collections.

And how is she settling in? After one month, Athens already feels like home, she said. Although she’s only been at the museum a few weeks, and she looks forward to learning its intricacies and taking on more as she goes, the job so far suits her perfectly. “I’m excited by what I’m doing,” she said. “I feel very personally fulfilled coming to work each day.”

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Penske McCormack

Intern, Department of Communications

Spotlight on the Arts Festival Begins at the University of Georgia

Today marks the start of a 10-day festival at the University of Georgia celebrating the visual, literary and performing arts. In its seventh year, Spotlight on the Arts features dozens of events, exhibitions and more all across the university. Tonight’s kick-off event, “Kaleidoscope: Spotlight on the Arts Opening Celebration,” begins at 7:30 p.m. at the Performing Arts Center and will showcase performances in dance, music, theater and creative writing.

The Georgia Museum of Art is proud to participate in this festival, and there are several events scheduled at the museum from now through November 11. Some of these events include:

Family Day: Transforming Metal

Saturday, November 3, 10 a.m.–noon

Explore the impressive sculptures and linear prints by the legendary Richard Hunt, a contemporary African American artist, at this free, drop-in program that is part of the campus-wide Spotlight on the Arts Family Day. After drawing inspiration from gallery activities and the exhibition “Richard Hunt: Synthesis,” create your own metal sculpture in the Michael and Mary Erlanger Studio Classroom. 

Music of Appalachia

Sunday, November 4, 2 p.m.

The Athens Chamber Singers will present a special program of choral and instrumental pieces from Appalachia, including folksongs, spirituals, blues and coal mining songs. Stick around after the music for a special tour of "Vernacular Modernism: The Photography of Doris Ulmann" led by curator of American art Sarah Kate Gillespie. 

Lecture: Elizabeth Catte

Thursday, November 8, 5 p.m.

In her talk entitled “Seeing Appalachia,” writer and public historian Elizabeth Catte will take a critical look at representations of the region in contemporary writing, photography and reporting, underscoring how the visual archive of Appalachia often renders a diverse and complicated place into a series of problems that threaten the nation's progress. Sponsored in part by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

Student Night: Found Forest

Thursday, November 8, 6:30 p.m.

Join the Student Association of the Georgia Museum of Art to celebrate the exhibition “Richard Hunt: Synthesis.” There will be contests with prizes, button making, food, music and of course ART. Come check out the galleries and enjoy a fun-filled evening at the museum.

For a full list of museum events both during and after the Spotlight on the Arts festival, visit our website. More information on the festival, including a schedule of events, can be found at arts.uga.edu.

Annual CVB Meeting Includes a Love Letter to Athens

The winners of this year's Athens Hospitality Awards

The annual Athens Convention and Visitors Bureau meeting featured a lot of numbers, facts and figures, but what really stood out to the audience was guest speaker Lisa Love’s less quantifiable assessment of the city. Evoking the sentiments of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Love began to “count the ways” that Athens held a special place in her heart.

She began by listing the various businesses, attractions and destinations in Athens that had added to her enjoyment of the city, with Avid Bookshop, the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, Jittery Joe’s, Nuçi’s Space and the Georgia Museum of Art being but a few of the highlighted spots.

She said she loved “how you drive into downtown and you just feel different . . . that you don’t forget those who aren’t with you anymore . . . that when [Ciné] needed your help as a community, you were there for them . . . and that Athens is a place that appreciates, loves and nurtures art.”

Love, the director of the Tourism Division of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, ensured that the audience knew that she had experienced Athens as a loyal, repeat visitor, and she highlighted how the hospitality of the Athens tourism community made her time in Athens stand out. “I’ll be back,” she emphasized, “and you all did that.”

Following this love letter to the Classic City, six individuals were recognized with Athens Hospitality Awards. The winners included Richard Mikulka, Joni Robinson, Paul Martin, Mike Waldrip and Mayor Nancy Denson. One award was extra notable for the Georgia Museum of Art, as our very own Michael Lachowski was honored as the Partner of the Year. Lachowski was praised as a Renaissance man of the community, who is present for meetings across the state without fail and has been a pillar of the Athens area for many years even before working at the museum.

The numbers presented in the meeting were impressive — over $300 million in tourist spending, nearly 3,000 tourism jobs in the county and an average of $850,000 spent by visitors each day in Athens. When recognizing the work of the CVB staff and tourism industry in the city, it is hard to summarize appropriately the hard work and achievements that attraction and hospitality workers have accomplished. But one thing that the room could agree on was Lisa Love’s parting sentiment: “Athens, I really do love you.”

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Taylor Lear
Department of Communications

Museum Staff Attend Southeastern Museums Conference Annual Meeting

The annual meeting for the Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC) took place October 8–10, and the Georgia Museum of Art was well represented. This year’s conference was in Jackson, Mississippi, and offered staff members the chance to visit all of the museums and sights in the city. These included the Mississippi Museum of Art, Two Mississippi Museums, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the Old Capitol Museum.

One traveling exhibition on view at the Mississippi Museum of Art was “Central to Our Lives,” which was most recently on view here. Michael Lachowski, who attended the conference, commented, “It was fun to see [the show] in a totally different configuration.” He also enjoyed the show of contemporary art by Jeffrey Gibson, “Like a Hammer,” on view through January 27, 2019. Director William U. Eiland was also happy with the conference, stating, “I was impressed by the hospitality and generosity of our hosts—the museum community—in Jackson.”

The conference also presented many sessions for attendees over its three days. “Talking Race: The Power, Influence and Responsibility of Museum Professionals,” “IGNITE SEMC: Inspired Professionals Speak” and “Museums Rise Up with Creative Funding” were but a few of the options from which attendees could choose.

The Georgia Museum of Art left the conference with more than new information and skills. We were awarded two awards in publications design and two for exhibitions. The museum’s quarterly newsletter, Facet, designed by Athens firm The Adsmith, took home the gold in the Newsletters and Calendar of Events category. “Clinton Hill,” an exhibition catalogue that surveyed the artist’s career as a printmaker, painter and pulp-paper pioneer received gold in the Book and Catalogues category and was designed by Almanac, in St. Louis, Missouri. 

The museum also received awards for two exhibitions. “Crafting History: Textiles, Metals and Ceramics at the University of Georgia,” which included works by dozens of UGA faculty members, received a gold award. The museum received a bronze award for “Modern Living: Gio Ponti and the 20th-Century Aesthetics of Design,” an exhibition that presented more than 50 objects, representing some of Ponti’s most outstanding pieces of furniture and decorative objects.

SEMC is a nonprofit organization comprising museums, museum staff, independent professionals and corporate partners who work to provide educational and professional developmental opportunities, improve the exchange of ideas and information and encourage respect and collegiality. SEMC focuses on Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Next year’s SEMC annual meeting will take place October 21–23, 2019, in Charleston, South Carolina.