By Sarah Dotson
sdotson@uga.edu
In collaboration with The Georgia Review, the Georgia Museum of Art is presenting the exhibition Storytelling: The Georgia Review’s 70th Anniversary Art Retrospective through Jan. 29.
Founded at UGA in 1947, The Georgia Review is a quarterly journal of arts and letters that publishes short stories, general-interest essays, poems, reviews and visual art. A celebration of the wide-ranging roster of visual artists whose work has been reproduced by The Review, the works in this retrospective reflect the powerful storytelling ability of visual art.
Storytelling includes 25 works by 12 artists whose work The Review has published. Photographers such as Tamas Dezso, Kael Alford and Carl Bower, all committed to documenting social and political realities in countries like Romania, Iraq and Colombia, have works displayed next to sculptors Patti Warashina and Vanessa German. Other artists include Benny Andrews, Celeste Rapone, Bianca Stone, Kara Walker and Masao Yamamoto.
While the exhibition includes artists who work all over the world, artists Nina Barnes and Margaret Morrison are both residents of Athens. True to The Review‘s mission to facilitate partnerships in the community, their inclusion represents local art. Morrison is a tenured professor of drawing and painting at UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, and Barnes relocated to Athens in 2002 from Norway.
Jenny Gropp, managing editor at The Review and co-curator of this exhibition, has a background in creative writing and English literature. Her work can be found in Best New Poets, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, among others.
Gropp said she is “thrilled to be presenting this particular gathering of artists.”
Annette Hatton, former managing editor of The Review, is Gropp’s co-curator, and Sarah Kate Gillespie, the museum’s curator of American art, served as in-house curator.
A closing reception will be held Jan. 19 from 7-9 p.m. featuring a reading by poet Jericho Brown. Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the reading is open free to the public.
