Every year, the Georgia Museum of Art organizes tours for every 5th-grade class in the Clarke County School District (CCSD), with generous private donors funding bus transportation and other costs. In 2019, 2,274 CCSD students from all 14 elementary schools toured the exhibition “Mary Lee Bendolph: Quilted Memories.”
Normally, the Georgia Museum of Art participates in the Blue Star Museums, a program organized by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) that offers free admission and special discounts to military personnel and their families from Armed Forces Day through Labor Day.
At a towering 89 inches tall, “The Archibald Bulloch Family” stands tall in the gallery of the Georgia Museum of Art. Painted by renowned portraitist Henry Benbridge ca. 1775, the portrait is unique to the museum for another reason: it is the first Benbridge painting in the museum, and it both raises and clarifies questions about the South’s elite planter class, the primary subject of Benbridge’s portraits.
“Women of the WPA,” “Larger Than Life: Mural Studies” and “Celebrating Heroes: American Mural Studies of the 1930s and 1940s from the Steven and Susan Hirsch Collection” are three companion exhibitions centered on American art created during the New Deal era. The three are all on view together and flow through five galleries. The first two exhibitions will be on display until September 8, and “Celebrating Heroes” continues through September 15.
The Georgia Museum of Art recently acquired two pieces of 16th-century Italian Renaissance maiolica with funds provided by the Virginia Y. Trotter Decorative Arts Endowment and the William Underwood Eiland Endowment for Acquisitions. The museum has a long history of studying Italian Renais¬sance art and already owned two other pieces of maiolica, purchased in 2011 with funds provided by the Trotter endowment and on display in the Samuel H. Kress Gallery.
We hold that Georgia visual culture includes all Georgians, past and present, and that its preservation and understanding is a valuable resource for the future. One of the rarest examples of early visual culture is an early-19th-century basket crafted by a Cherokee woman under detention by the U.S. Army in compliance with laws passed to remove Cherokee people from their ancestral lands.
When asked to describe the Georgia Museum of Art’s newest exhibition, “The Reluctant Autocrat: Tsar Nicholas II,” head preparator Todd Rivers said that it stands out to him in two distinct ways.
Kincaid uses digital media both to create manufactured “photographs” and to deconstruct and radically reorder segments of photograph into pure color and form.
UGA master of fine arts degree candidate Deepanjan Mukhopadhyay calls Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, home. Mukhopadhyay received his undergraduate degree in photography at Louisiana Tech. He continues to create art in the visual realm but has expanded beyond a single medium.
On a typical Tuesday at the Georgia Museum of Art, Todd Rivers, Elizabeth Howe and their new intern Sara Katherine package up pieces from one exhibition to prepare for the next. The tacky snap of tape on cardboard creates a rhythm of productivity. As the sound echoes off the walls of the gallery, the building itself almost hums along to the tune. This activity is normal for the museum, as exhibitions rotate through these galleries about every three months.
