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Columns::January 20, 2004
UGA Guide Ongoing Art exhibitions. Enchanting Modern: Ilonka Karasz, 1896-1981. Through Feb. 8. Georgia Museum of Art. Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Wednesday; and 1-5 p.m. Sunday. 542-4662. Ilonka Karasz’s modern designs ranged from handmade batiks made in Greenwich Village in the 1910s to ceramic dinnerware designed for the Pennsylvania Railroad and made by Buffalo Pottery in the 1930s to fanciful wallpapers printed by Katzenbach and Warren in the 1950s. Throughout her lengthy career, Karasz promoted modern design in all aspects of American life. Her work included textiles, furniture, silver, ceramics, interiors, book jackets and magazine covers. She is best known for the 186 covers she designed for the New Yorker between 1925 and 1973. This will be the first museum exhibition to focus on her remarkable career. This is a retrospective exhibition of the prints of the American artist Armin Landeck, with related drawings, paintings and illustrated books. Born in Wisconsin, Landeck (1905-84) studied at the University of Michigan and Columbia University. During his student days in New York, he took classes at the Arts Students League and explored the city’s museums and galleries. During this time he began experimenting with printmaking, producing his first print, The Armenian. Thus began a lengthy artistic career. Nearly 100 prints covering the span of his career are included in this exhibition. Best known for his haunting views of Manhattan and his architectural interiors, Landeck also recorded still-life arrangements and Connecticut landscapes. In the 1930s Landeck joined forces with Martin Lewis to open the School of Printmakers in George Miller’s 14th Street Studio in New York. Together the artists offered classes on lithography, etching, drypoint, mezzotint, and wood engraving. The Depression forced them to close the school after only a year, but Landeck emerged as a towering force in New York artistic circles as he experimented with different media, such as copper engraving. A member of the Society of American Etchers (known today as the Society of American Graphic Artists), he was also elected to the prestigious National Academy of Design, the Institute of the American Academy, and the Institute of Arts and Letters. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he also won several other acclaimed awards. At a time when Manhattan’s skyline was transformed dramatically in the first few decades of the 20th century, Landeck’s prints revealed the dense majesty of the cityscape, dotted with architectural masterpieces like the Woolworth and Chrysler buildings. His prints reveal a preoccupation with shadows, an element that featured heavily in early black-and-white cinema, particularly in film noir. The unusual angles, lonely streets and nocturnal settings in his images are related to the poignant loneliness of urban life depicted by his contemporaries like Edward Hopper, John Sloan and Martin Lewis. Francis A. Ruzicka (1924-2003), professor emeritus of art at UGA, was widely respected for his work as a teacher, administrator and advocate for the arts. He served as president of Parsons School of Design in New York and associate dean of the College of the Arts at Ohio State University before chairing the School of Art at UGA from 1976 until 1989. A leader in arts education, Ruzicka was also a gifted artist. The Gift of Sight presents eight paintings by Ruzicka from the outset of his career and marks the first solo showing of his work at the Georgia Museum of Art. In a chapbook prepared last year, Ruzicka expressed gratitude to his mentors and described the significance of this “family of eight,” the complete body of paintings remaining in his possession. “As my earliest paintings, they were efforts from which I sought to learn about the building-blocks of art,” he wrote. “During the same period, there were many helpful faculty who opened my eyes, and I began to see.” Life drawing was vital to Ruzicka’s education in art, and it was a key element in his own teaching. A small selection of his figure studies complements the paintings in this exhibition. The exhibition includes the work of ceramicist Annette Gates and metalsmith Rob Jackson. Gates’s delicate cups juxtapose precious gemstones with bits of broken glass embedded in porcelain, blurring the boundaries between the functional and decorative. Jackson’s jewelry employs a similar reversal of traditional roles when high-karat gold is used as the hardware or joinery to hold richly eroded iron scraps. This exhibition presents a fusion of materials chosen to challenge ideas of form, use and value. Jackson is a professor of art in jewelry and metalwork at the University of Georgia. Athens artist Annette Gates has taught in the Cortona program for UGA, at the Atlanta College of Art and at numerous other colleges and art centers. She makes both functional hand-built pottery and sculpture that she exhibits internationally. Part of the Smithsonian Institute’s American Garden Legacy series, this exhibition explores the aesthetic and functional evolution of some of the country’s stately and historic estate gardens. The five gardens represented in this exhibit are Thornewood in Tacoma, Wash,; Beacon Hill in Newport, R.I., Grosse Pointe War Memorial in Michigan; Shirley Plantation on the James River in Virginia; and Weld in Brookline, Mass. The images in the exhibit draw heavily from the Smithsonian’s collections, primarily the Archives of American Gardens and the libraries. Reproductions of hand-colored glass lantern slides are complemented by reproduced design plans, period photographs, correspondence, publications and seed catalog images. The exhibit displays work by undergraduate and graduate students in the landscape architecture program and graduate students in the historic preservation program. What happens when you combine visual arts, science and educational research? That’s what Jamie Calkin, a doctoral candidate in science education, has been studying for the past year. As part of his dissertation project, Calkin has been exploring how visual arts could be used to teach science through the partnership between UGA and Clarke County schools. Gaines Elementary School teacher Annette Santana and her fifth-grade students welcomed Calkin into their classroom in August 2003. A Georgia Systemic Teacher Education Partnership grant allowed them to buy high-quality science and art materials. Santana joined in deciding how to best integrate the materials and the researcher’s expertise into her science instruction. The collaboration grew into co-planning and co-teaching, often with Calkin working with small groups of students. The two teacher-researchers taught two three-week art-based science units--ocean animals and geology--this past fall. As a culminating event of their work, the students were asked to select one of the many art pieces they created and write about the science learned from that art work. This writing, along with a brief biography, accompanies each piece at an An Exhibit of Art and Science, to be displayed on the second floor of Aderhold Hall through April 30. Calkin, who has worked as a local artist for the past three years, will also exhibit his research-based art, which reflects his exploration of how to plan and teach science using the visual arts. He credits his adviser Deborah Tippins, a professor of science education, with helping him to merge his work as a science education researcher with his art. In his exhibition, samples illustrate some of the numerous ways Calkin has used drawing and painting to explore and represent his research, including murals, field sketches of students and classrooms, illustrated stories, and portraits, including self-portraits. He expects to complete his dissertation in the fall of 2004. Through the partnership, students’ work from grades pre-K through fifth grade is also hanging in Aderhold. Selected by art teachers Margot Dorn and Krista Dean from Gaines and Chase Street elementary schools, the work is hung outside the elevators on the second floor. Pekar, author of the autobiographical comic book series “American Splendor,” has been writing since 1976. He began his career as a music and book critic and later began to work on the popular comic that depicts his everyday downtrodden life. The comic has had numerous guest animators and has traveled overseas to England. In 1987, Pekar won the American Book Award for the series. Pekar, until recently, maintained his job as a file clerk in a Cleveland Veterans Administration hospital. The movie ‘American Splendor,’ based on Pekar’s life, was released in 2003. Not long ago, a fragment of a Roman sarcophagus lid that for decades was believed lost turned up in the antiquities collection of the New York University classics department. Based on this missing piece of information, archaeologists are now able to construct an image of what the entire monument would have looked like and, especially, to piece together clues about the life of the person--a mime--for whom it was fashioned. Whitehead, whose ongoing field experience with Etruscan, Old Syrian, Roman, and Middle Bronze Age archaeology spans more than two decades, is editor-in-chief of Etruscan News, the newsletter of the U.S. section of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici. Her lecture and presentation offer a new twist on how, indeed, an actor’s life can become “Lost in New York”! The public is invited to attend this lecture, which is sponsored by the Athens Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, UGA and offered free of admission. The program for the annual two-day student symposium will feature graduate student presentations, undergraduate posters and a keynote address by UGA alum Peter Groffman. The symposium is free and open to the public. Student presentations will feature research and service projects conducted locally, nationally and internationally by ecology doctoral and master’s degree students in all phases of graduate training. An ecology undergraduate poster session will coincide with a reception at the conclusion of the symposium on Saturday. Groffman, a scientist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., will give the keynote address on Jan. 24 at 4:15 p.m. Groffman’s topic is “Snow Is Good, Worms Are Not.” The 24-inch telescope is open for public viewing once a month. If the night is clear, those attending will be able to look through the telescope at the stars. If it’s cloudy, there will be a brief talk on an area of astronomy that is of current interest. Groffman is a scientist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. He completed postdoctoral study at Michigan State University after receiving his doctorate in ecology from UGA in 1984. He served as an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island from 1987 to 1991, before accepting his current position. His research interests include riparian buffer zones, carbon and nitrogen cycling in urban watersheds and ecosystems, and the effects of exotic earthworm invasion on soil nitrogen and carbon cycling. |
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