from the STAFF
board of ADVISORS
As we celebrate our 75th anniversary, the museum is also going through a time of change. Several long-term staff members have retired, including our director of more than 30 years. After a months-long national search for someone to serve as our next director, David Odo, current director of academic and public programs, division head and research curator at the Harvard Art Museums, will fill those shoes. His appointment is effective as of June 26. In the meantime, Annelies Mondi, former deputy director of the museum, has been named interim director beginning April 1. The reflection on our big birthday shows that, in many ways, the museum has changed very little over its eight decades. When museum founder Alfred Heber Holbrook made his original gift of art, he stipulated that it must be used to start a museum that would be “open to the public at all times.” Holbrook had retired from a long legal career in New York and taken up art collecting with his wife. After her death, his extensive investigation of a museum location eventually brought him to UGA “because he had found more evidence of genuine art culture in Athens than any university he had visited in the South.” Holger Cahill, national director of the Federal Art Project, introduced him to Lamar Dodd, the then- new director of UGA’s art department and a great booster for UGA and Georgia. Upon meeting him, Holbrook was sold and moved into a house on Springdale Road and enrolled in art classes, where he was known for his enthusiasm and his pink smock. UGA’s students even adopted him as one of their own and even dedicated the 1947 volume of the Pandora yearbook to him. The museum has received many other notable gifts of art over the years and its space is much larger now. When it opened, it occupied two galleries in the basement of what was then the old university library on North Campus and is now the Administration Building. Over the past 75 years, the museum’s collection has grown to more than 17,000 objects and now occupies a large contemporary building with 21 gal- leries, plus a sculpture garden, on UGA’s East Campus. The museum’s commitment to free inspiration and Hol- brook’s original dedication to openness to the public has remained the same all these years. He insisted on it from the beginning and often toured paintings around the state in a car provided by the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. That original commitment to openness is fundamental to who we are as an institution and we hope to continue that tradition for at least another 75 years.
Marilyn D. McNeely Ibby Mills David Mulkey Carl. W. Mullis III* Betty R. Myrtle*
B. Heyward Allen Jr.* Rinne Allen Amalia K. Amaki** June M. Ball Linda N. Beard Karen L. Benson** Richard E. Berkowitz Jeanne L. Berry Sally Bradley
Gloria B. Norris*** Deborah L. O’Kain Randall S. Ott Sylvia Hillyard Pannell Gordhan L. Patel, immediate past chair Janet W. Patterson Christopher R. Peterson, chair-elect Kathy B. Prescott Margaret A. Rolando* Julie M. Roth Alan F. Rothschild* Jan E. Roush Bert Russo Sarah P. Sams**
Devereux C. Burch* Robert E. Burton** Debra C. Callaway** Lacy Middlebrooks Camp Shannon I. Candler* Faye S. Chambers Wes Cochran Harvey J. Coleman Sharon Cooper James Cunningham Martha Randolph Daura*** Annie Laurie Dodd***
D. Jack Sawyer Jr.* Henry C. Schwob** Margaret R. Spalding Dudley R. Stevens Carolyn Tanner** Anne Wall Thomas*** Brenda A. Thompson William E. Torres C. Noel Wadsworth* Carol V. Winthrop* Gregory Ann Woodruff
Sally Dorsey** Judith A. Ellis Todd Emily
James B. Fleece Phoebe Forio*** Freda Scott Giles John M. Greene** Helen C. Griffith** Judith F. Hernstadt Marion E. Jarrell** Jane Compton Johnson* George-Ann Knox* Shell H. Knox* Andrew Littlejohn D. Hamilton Magill David W. Matheny, chair Mark G. McConnell Marilyn M. McMullan
Ex-Officio Linda C. Chesnut S. Jack Hu Kelly Kerner Sarah Peterson Jeanette Taylor
* Lifetime member
** Emeritus member
*** Honorary member
Mission Statement: The Georgia Museum of Art shares the mission of the University of Georgia to support and to promote teaching, research and service. Specifically, as a repository and educational instrument of the visual arts, the museum exists to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret significant works of art. The W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation Fund and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art support exhibitions and programs at the Georgia Museum of Art. The Georgia Council for the Arts also provides support through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. GCA receives support from its part- ner agency, the National Endowment for the Arts. Individuals, foundations and corporations provide addi- tional museum support through their gifts to the University of Georgia Foundation. The Georgia Museum of Art is ADA compliant; the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium is equipped for deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors. The University of Georgia does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, color, national or ethnic origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information or military service in its ad- ministrations of educational policies, programs or activities; its admissions policies; scholarship and loan programs; athletic or other University-administered programs; or employment. Inquiries or complaints should be directed to the Equal Opportunity Office 119 Holmes-Hunter Academic Building, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. Telephone 706-542-7912 (V/TDD). Fax 706-542-2822. https://eoo.uga.edu/.
Front Cover: Alfred Heber Holbrook putting a painting by Ben Shahn into the trunk of his car on North Campus, likely in the early 1950s. Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Special Collections Libraries, University of Georgia.
Back Cover: Family Day in 1994 at the Georgia Museum of Art on North Campus. From Georgia Museum of Art Archives.
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