The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia will showcase a collection of exceptional works connected by their use of the elements color, form and light. This exhibition will be on display from June 22 through October 13 and will feature many important abstract works from the permanent collection or on long-term loan.  

Inspired by the simple forms and vivid colors of minimalism, works on view include ones from the 1960s to the present. DeWain Valentine’s sculpture “Red Concave Circle” will occupy one gallery, and the other will hold works by artists such as Joseph Havel, Valerie Jaudon, Jules Olitski and Charles Hinman. The exhibition also features kinetic art and an interactive station that invites visitors to experiment with color, form and light to create their own composition. Throughout the exhibition, viewers are encouraged to consider themselves in relation to the works of art.

“I am really excited to showcase these works from our permanent collection and bring them together into this one exhibition,” said Callan Steinmann, the museum’s curator of education, who served as co-curator of the exhibition. “There’s a range of artists and styles represented in the show and it’s fascinating to have these beautiful examples from earlier artists like DeWain Valentine, and to see the continued influence of minimalism and how artists have continued to explore color, form and light in different ways.” 

The exhibition will also inspire this year’s Art Adventures, the museum’s free two-hour summer program for day camps, community centers and day cares. Art Adventures groups will explore how artists use color, form and light with interactive tours of the exhibition and an artmaking activity. More info.

Also on view is Women of the WPA, through Sept. 8, 2019. The Works Progress Administration (renamed the Works Projects Administration in 1939) was an American New Deal agency created to provide jobs for the unemployed, to build infrastructure, to document American history and to create new works of art. This exhibition complements “Celebrating Heroes: American Mural Studies of the 1930s and 1940s from the Steven and Susan Hirsch Collection,” organized by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and focuses specifically on the contributions of women to WPA art, including works by Lucienne Bloch, Marie Bleck, Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh, Helen Lundeberg, Minnetta Good, Jennie Lewis, Ann Nooney, Elizabeth Olds and others. Thanks to Lamar Dodd and museum founder Alfred Heber Holbrook, the Georgia Museum of Art’s collection has been historically strong in WPA-era artists, and we continue actively to collect both works of this time period and works by woman artists.