ATHENS, GA (PNAN) – Opening Saturday, February 4, 2023 will be more than 100 works of American art from the travelling collection of the Princeton University Art Museum which premieres at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia through May 14, 2023.
The exhibition “Object Lessons in American Art” asks fundamental questions about artistic significance and how meaning changes across time, place and context. The works span the 18th century to the present, featuring works of Euro-American, African American and Native American art and illustrates how fresh investigations and contemporary perspectives can inform and enrich its meaning.
This exhibit places its focus in particular on race, gender and the environment. It arranges its works of art in 30 separate groups, each intended to provoke new considerations and raise timely questions about American history and culture. These juxtapositions serve as “object lessons” that gather tangible artifacts that communicate an embodied idea or an abstract concept; thusly to anchor debates about the country’s complex social, racial and political history, thereby expanding our ideas about the history of American art.
Works by the enslaved potter David Drake, whose craft was a bold statement of resistance, and the artist Frederic Remington, who represented the “Wild West” in ways that stereotyped both white settlers and Native Americans, alongside recent works by contemporary artists such as Rande Cook, Renee Cox and Titus Kaphar emphasizes how a broad array of artists contended with the most pressing issues of their and our time.
Continuing the show includes works by One section that will feature three iconic portraits of George Washington, including one by Rembrandt Peale that lionizes the first American president as a godlike celebrity together with a photograph by Luke C. Dillon of the ruins of the slave quarters at Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, to remind us of the complexities of the man and his legacy.
Other works in the exhibition emphasize the central role of women in the history of American culture. Among them are a painting of the poet Annis Boudinot Stockton, one of the first American women to have her work published, and a finely rendered portrait of a “colonial dame” by the early American artist Sarah Perkins. Later works, including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and Grace Hartigan and several prints by the anonymous feminist collective Guerrilla Girls, stress how much remains to be done for women to be fully integrated into our understanding of American art and history.
For the complete list of associated events which are free and open to the public unless otherwise indicated as well as more exhibition detail see: http://www.georgiamuseum.org or call 706.542.4662. Note: On closing at GMA, the exhibition will travel to the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut, and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky.