At the Southeastern Museums Conference annual meeting, the Georgia Museum of Art at UGA received two awards from its peers in the field.
Tristan Perich: “Machine Wall Drawings” received the award for exhibitions with a budget of less than $25,000. The exhibition was on view March 20 through Nov. 18, 2014, on the museum’s Patsy Dudley Pate Balcony.
Perich, a contemporary artist based in New York City, wrote code that instructed the direction of a pen suspended from two wires, resulting in three large-scale abstract drawings on the surface of the wall. The results were not preprogrammed; instead, Perich’s code set up restrictions but made room for randomness within them.
Over the six months of the drawings’ creation, museum visitors watched the pen move across the wall, sometimes rapidly, and tried to predict where it would go next. After exhibiting the final works for two more months, the museum painted the wall back to its original white, as the artist intended, but worked with Athens filmmaker Russell Oliver to create a short film recording the drawings’ process.
The museum also received a silver award in the exhibition catalog category of the Publications Design Competition, for El Taller de Grafica Popular: Vida y Arte. Designed by Roy Brooks of Fold Four, the book both documented and expanded on the works in the exhibition of the same name, on view at the museum June 13 through Sept. 13. Brooks chose an uncoated paper to mimic that of the ephemeral fliers and posters in the exhibition and created a debossed rectangular title treatment to evoke the impression created by a linocut.
The Southeastern Museums Conference is a networking organization that serves to foster professionalism, mutual support and communication in the field and region. A nonprofit membership association, SEMC strives to increase educational and professional development opportunities and improve the interchange of ideas, information and cooperation. SEMC focuses on Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.