the art of giving 2023 BLACK ART AND CULTURE AWARDS CELEBRATION
(left to right): Larry and Brenda Thompson, Stefanie Jackson, Shawnya Harris and Annelies Mondi.
On April 14, the museum honored two artists at the annual Black Art and Culture Awards, one of our most anticipated events each year.
This year, we honored painter Stefanie Jackson with the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Award and Annie Lucille Greene, known for her yarn paintings, with the Lillian C. Lynch Citation. Event chair and longtime event supporter Sige Burden wel- comed guests to the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium and thanked the award selection committee and event sponsors. Without them, he said, the awards wouldn’t be possible because they “are critical to the support of this fantastic facility.” Burden then introduced university president Jere W. Morehead, another longtime supporter of the event, whose own remarks praised Larry and Brenda Thompson for the love, joy and generosity they have exhibited for African American art and artists. Their contributions, he noted, have elevated and made many artists and their works much more widely known. Known nationally for their advocacy, the Thompsons endowed a curatorial posi- tion at the museum and have donated works aimed at support- ing the museum’s mission to further diversity and inclusion in American art. One of the museum’s annual Black Art and Culture Awards is thus named in their honor. Freda Scott Giles, a past event chair, led everyone in singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and Alicia Battle, president of the Athens Chapter of the Links, Inc., presented the Lynch Cita- tion to Annie Lucille Greene, a yarn painter and educator from LaGrange, Georgia. Lynch was a charter member of the Athens chapter of the Links, Inc., who cared deeply about the arts and cultural education. Greene’s paintings in yarn reflect culturally and socially relevant images of her life as an African American in the rural South, from the 1940s to the present. She has had two museum exhibitions of her yarn paintings and has written two autobiographical books based on those paintings. Humbled to receive the award, especially after learning more about its namesake and past recipients, Greene told the au- dience that first encountered yarn paintings in the pages of a magazine when she was a teacher and made the art form into an assignment for her students. Upon seeing their work
(left to right): Jeffrey Goodwin, Sarah Peterson, Sige Burden, Shanell McGoy, Monica W. Parker, Lacy Middlebrooks Camp and Bree Hayes.
in the medium, she was inspired to make her own works and capture moments in time, including the world of her parents. Her father, a preacher, and her mother, who had a passion and talent for playing piano, supported her as an artist from her early years, giving her pencil and paper to draw with, perhaps because they had a recognition for her knack or passion for creative endeavors. Shawnya Harris, Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art, then presented the Thompson Award to Stefanie Jackson, preceded by a short video on Jackson’s career that she created with UGA student and cura- torial intern Sophie Mason Johnson. Jackson recently retired as a professor of art from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the Uni- versity of Georgia. A native of Detroit, she received her bachelor of fine arts degree from Parsons, The New School for Design, and her master of fine arts degree from Cornell University. Her paintings blend the artistic influences of surrealism with con - tent derived from African American music and literature tradi- tions, current events and personal history. They often deal with themes of tragedy and survival, systemic poverty and violence, the effects of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, racial injustice and the ongoing legacy of slavery and colonialism. Mentorship, said Jackson, has been invaluable to her career. Were it not for artists such as Benny Andrews and previous Thompson Award winner Emma Amos, she might well not be where she is today as an artist in her own right. Amos, the first
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