Pictures of Us: Photographs from The Do Good Fund Collection, an exhibition currently on display in six venues on the UGA campus and in the Athens community, will be the focal point for a series of public events in February.
The Do Good Fund is a Columbus, Georgia-based public charity that focuses on building a museum-quality collection of contemporary Southern photography, including works by emerging photographers, and encourages complementary, community-based programming to accompany each exhibition.
The multi-venue exhibition, part of the Global Georgia Initiative of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, brings dozens of photographs from the collection of The Do Good Fund to Athens and UGA. William R. Ferris, a widely recognized leader in Southern studies, African-American music and folklore and former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be the featured Global Georgia speaker Feb. 18 at 4 p.m. in the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium of the Georgia Museum of Art.
The exhibition venues are the Athens-Clarke County Library (curated by the Georgia Museum of Art), Cine, the Lamar Dodd School of Art, the Lyndon House Arts Center, the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries and the Willson Center (curated by the UGA College of Environment and Design). A portfolio of Do Good Fund photographs is also featured in the winter issue of The Georgia Review. Details on all six exhibitions and links to information about the events are at willson.uga.edu.
The Georgia Museum of Art has organized a free, two-part photography workshop for teens that will take place at the Athens-Clarke County Library Feb. 17 at 4:30 p.m. The workshop is part of the worldwide photography project “Inside Out.”
The Russell Libraries will host a talk by photographer Billy Weeks, a two-time winner of the Gordon Parks International Photography Award, Feb. 16 at 2:30 p.m. The Russell Libraries exhibit is devoted to images from Parks’ seminal 1956 Life magazine photo essay documenting the state of segregation in the U.S. South.
Ferris will speak on “The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists,” which is the title of his 2013 book culled from his interviews with 26 Southern luminaries including Alice Walker, William Eggleston and Eudora Welty. Ferris is the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the senior associate director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South.
