By Madison Bledsoe
madscb@uga.edu
In 1935, Frank Hartley Anderson founded the Southern Printmakers Society, the only major graphic arts society in the South at the time. For 10 years, the group circulated dozens of print exhibitions throughout the South, a region with few venues for viewing art, but its work was cut short by World War II. In celebration of the society, the Georgia Museum of Art will present the exhibition Frank Hartley Anderson: Forging the Southern Printmakers Society from March 26 to June 19.
Organized by guest curator and scholar Lynn Barstis Williams Katz, librarian emeritus at Auburn University, the exhibition will display works made by a variety of artists who were members of the society.
The exhibition reveals a range of print media, styles and subjects within traditional, realistic composition, from Lynd Ward’s wood engraving “Seedling,” of a man cradling a tender young plant, to Hungarian-Canadian Nicholas Hornyansky’s colorful aquatint of a busy harborside market. It includes a number of works by women, who were active in the printmaking world, such as Alice Standish Buell, Frances Gearhart, Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer, Ella Fillmore Lillie, Elizabeth Norton and Gladys M. Wilkins.
