Photo: A pin designed by Annette Hatton is from the Metal/Links exhibition on display at the Georgia Museum of Art through March 23.

The Georgia Museum of Art is currently hosting the exhibitions Martha Odum: Watercolors and Metal/Links in the Martha and Eugene Odum Gallery of Decorative Arts.

Martha Odum: Watercolors is a retrospective collection of 40 watercolors by the late Martha Odum, who influenced the cultural life of Athens for more than 50 years with her own artistic talents and her support of the talents of others. The related exhibition Metal/Links features metalworks by eight Georgia artists: Nisa Blackmon, Annette Hatton, Rob Jackson, Cary Jordon, Ken Kase, Barbara Mann, Charles Pickney and Martha Odum, many of whom were Odum's friends.

Odum, a native of Chicago, began drawing and painting at an early age and earned a bachelor's degree in commercial art from the University of Illinois, where she met her future husband, Eugene Odum, now director emeritus of UGA's Institute of Ecology.

After their wedding, they spent a year in upstate New York and moved to Athens, where he had accepted a teaching position and she took painting classes with the late Lamar Dodd, founder of UGA's art school.

She became very involved with the thriving art community in Athens, supporting and promoting the arts and serving for two years as president of the Athens Art Association.

Most of her paintings were accomplished on her trips with her ecologist husband. Images of active water derive from coastal Georgia, California, Oregon, Maine, Portugal and France; desert and mountain scenes portray Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Several views of Athens in the 1940s are included in the exhibition.

Her paintings combine precise natural details rendered with painterly skill with an obvious affection for the subject matter. She used color skillfully to create boundaries, depths, movements and moods, catching a flicker of time in ever-changing nature.

The works in the second exhibition, Metal/Links, bridge the separation between jewelry and sculpture. The scale of many of the works suggests jewelry; the content of others suggests sculpture. Some of the objects are designed to be worn; others are freestanding.

All exhibit a high degree of craftsmanship and demonstrate the extensive community of artists working in metal in northeastern Georgia.

The Georgia Museum of Art is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Fridays and 1-5 p.m. Sundays. The exhibitions will be on display through March 23.

--Wendy Cooper