Ronnie Goodman (American, 1960 – 2020), "Night Time Jazz," 2012. Linocut on paper, 12 × 18 inches (image). Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Byrnece Purcell Knox Swanson Acquisitions Fund. GMOA 2013.67.
Throughout the semester, Dr. Young’s students toured and explored the museum’s collection through different channels. Through both self-guided visits and guided tours of the permanent collection led by Callan Steinmann and Sage Kincaid (curator and associate curator of education), they meditated on their personal experience of art and museums while exploring and challenging the ways in which art and educational institutions can foster or hinder societal awareness and social equity. With the help of the museum’s education interns, students mined the museum’s online database of roughly 13,000 objects and selected individual works to view in person in the Shannon and Peter Candler Collection Study Room. With an intimate and multifaceted understanding of our collection, students began to conceive of the ways in which they might help to connect Common Good Atlanta’s students and the museum through scholarship. Each class took collective responsibility for the production of art kits containing a student-selected collection of 140 works from the museum’s permanent collection. Picking for an audience whose access to “beauty” is restricted, students sought to represent the artistic breadth of the collection while contextualizing contemporary issues and highlighting artists historically excluded from the mainstream art historical narrative. Each work of art is accompanied by student writing about the work, its artist and historical context, as well as suggestions for engagement activities, prompting questions and personal reflections or interpretations. Speaking of John Biggers’ “Star Gazers,” Emma Jones, rising 4th year majoring in psychology an spanish, reflects, “Biggers’s art is like a visual ‘deep talk,’ suggesting the transcendent truths beyond appearances. Do you think that visual ‘deep talk’ is valued less than written ‘deep talk’ in society? If so, why do you think we place more value on words than images?” UGA’s service learning students ended the semester by writing letters to their incarcerated peers. Meditating on their own learning experience, inquiring and anticipating the ongoing exchange, students shared their reflections, hopes and insights. Travis Garrick, who recently
graduated UGA with his degree in psychology, addresses a theme raised this semester: the uncomfortable and imposing formality sometimes experienced in museums. Offering a perspective that resonated with him, he urges his future reader “to not let others define your personal experience with art. . . . Your insight, your feelings, beliefs, interpretations [and] anything you encounter when viewing this artwork is valuable.” Beginning this fall, Common Good Atlanta’s Clemente professors will integrate these kits into their course curriculum and their students will respond in a manner appropriate for their field of study. By the time Don Chambers begins teaching his art history course at Common Good Atlanta in the spring of 2022, his students will have interdisciplinary scholarship from their peers with which to respond. Synthesizing and drawing on the writing of both UGA and Common Good Atlanta’s students, Chambers’ class will collaborate with the museum on an exhibition, hopefully in the fall of 2022. Chambers says, “There is so much hope and possibility in the idea of finding ways to cross pollinate culture between our communal ‘bubbles.’ We are becoming more and more isolated from each other and art is a powerful, deep way of sharing our hidden commonalities.” In many ways, this project is an extension of our re-examination of the museum experience as a strictly in-person one in the last year. The museum aims to serve everyone, and through creative and collaborative service learning, our student community brings us closer to this goal. Dr. Young expresses her hopes for this interinstitutional project as an exercise in cultivating community despite divisions of “space, time and resources to foster a deeper self and social awareness” for participants and the public. In seeing each other, one’s humanity becomes bound to the humanity of others. Through community, collective care and liberation becomes possible and necessary.
Katie Landers Education Intern
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