ITALIAN ART WITHOUT AIRFARE
Didn’t make it to Europe this summer to soak in the art and culture? A visit to the Georgia Museum of Art’s reinstallation of its Samuel H. Kress Gallery is sure to transport you through time and place.
Unveiled at the beginning of the fall semester, the reinstallation resulted from the diligence of staff and one summer intern. Many of the works in the refreshed space came to the museum’s collection as gifts of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1961. Its founder was an American retail magnate with a passion for both art and education. Born in 1863 in eastern Pennsylvania, he was a schoolteacher for several years before opening his first store in 1887. His empire of five-and-ten-cent general goods stores thrived in the early 20th century, including in Athens, where the store’s distinctive architecture can still be seen downtown at 153 Clayton Street. In 1929, he established the Samuel H. Kress Foun- dation to donate works by European artists from his considerable collection to American public museums, including paintings, sculptures and furniture. His aim was to share these powerful and historic works of art with everyday Americans, a goal shared by the Georgia Museum of Art. Katherine Rabogliatti, a doctoral student at the Uni - versity of Maryland who studies early modern Italian art with a focus on gender and identity, worked behind the scenes at the Georgia Museum of Art this summer as a Daura Center Graduate Intern. Rabog- liatti said she was looking for something that would enable her to exercise her academic knowledge in a practical environment, and she spent much of the summer working on the reinstallation of the Kress Collection under the direction of Nelda Damiano, the museum’s Pierre Daura Curator of European Art. Deeply committed to sharing her love of early mod- ern art with a broad audience, Rabogliatti said her experience writing the labels and wall text helped her refine her ability to speak to a variety of viewers about Italian Renaissance art and society. She also discovered the collaborative nature of curatorial work and staging an exhibition. She hopes that the new gallery “captures viewers’ attention and gives them a meaningful experience with the past.”
The new Samuel H. Kress Gallery
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