Terra Collection-in-Residence: Georgia Museum of Art

The Georgia Museum of Art (GMOA) is both a university museum at the University of Georgia (UGA) and, since 1982, the official art museum of the state of Georgia. The museum opened in 1948 and is now located on UGA’s East Campus in the Performing and Visual Arts Complex. Collections of American art, European art, decorative arts, and works on paper are sources for instruction and for exhibitions. In 2012, the museum welcomed a donation of 100 works of art by African American artists, transforming and expanding the traditional art historical canon represented in the museum’s collection.

Quotation

“Through installation interventions that we have employed, programming, and student engagement, we have been able to consider the objects anew from year to year.”

Shawnya Harris, PhD Deputy Director of Curatorial and Academic Affairs and Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art, Georgia Museum of Art

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The Terra Foundation loans amplify existing narratives in the permanent collection, fill gaps in the museum’s collection of American art and culture, and activate individual works in the permanent collection through micro-exhibitions called “In Dialogue.”

“The longer the Terra Foundation works are in our spaces, how we’re using them has evolved. Through installation interventions that we have employed, programming, and student engagement, we have been able to consider the objects anew from year to year,” said Shawnya Harris, PhD, Deputy Director of Curatorial and Academic Affairs and Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art, Georgia Museum of Art.

In September 2022, In Dialogue: Henry Ossawa Tanner, Mentor and Muse highlighted Tanner’s impact on younger artists, including Palmer C. Hayden, William H. Johnson, William Edouard Scott, and Hale Woodruff. The small exhibition centered on Tanner’s Les Invalides, Paris, 1896, a Parisian cityscape on extended loan from the Terra Foundation.

Images

A group of people look at paintings in a gallery. Four people are seated and one person stands. — A group of people gathered in front of *Portrait of a Lady in a Blue Dress* (1763) by John Singleton Copley installed alongside objects from the permanent collection of the Georgia Museum of Art. Courtesy Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia

A group of people look at paintings in a gallery. — A group of people gathered in front of *Portrait of a Lady in a Blue Dress* (1763) by John Singleton Copley installed alongside objects from the permanent collection of the Georgia Museum of Art. Courtesy Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia

Four portrait paintings in gold frames hanging on a gallery wall. — *Portrait of a Lady in a Blue Dress* (1763) by John Singleton Copley in *We the People: Portraiture and Identity,* a new section of the permanent collection galleries at the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Photograph by Alvaro Santistevan.

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Another Terra Foundation loan, John Singleton Copley’s Portrait of a Lady in a Blue Dress, 1763, has served to amplify narratives of identity and representation by fostering conversations between Northern and Southern colonial portraiture. A recent collaboration with artist Tokie Rome-Taylor sparked conversations about erasure and absence by adding new voices into the gallery.

“The Terra Foundation’s masterpieces fill significant gaps in our collection. These works open up new ways of seeing the history of art and of undertaking crucial conversations, particularly around themes like race, indigeneity, and gender,” said Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, former Curator of American Art, Georgia Museum of Art.

A partnership with UGA’s Historic Clothing and Textile Collection at the College of Family and Consumer Sciences has also allowed the museum to exhibit clothing from different eras alongside the Terra Foundation’s paintings and works from its own collection.

Five paintings are on loan for a period of four years (June 2022–June 2026).