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Museum Staff
June 10, 2022
Detail of Shanequa Gay's "I am my own temple," 2021. Oil, flashe, collage and gold leaf on panel, 40 × 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Courtney Bombeck, CO-OP ART Atl., LLC.
Museum and Lyndon House Organize Traveling Exhibition of Narrative Painting
In an era when everyone is paying attention to NFTs, is there still room for painting? Curator Didi Dunphy thinks so. As the third in a series of triennial traveling exhibitions organized by the Lyndon House Arts Center and the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, “Picture This” selects the work of 11 Georgia-based painters who focus on narrative for an exhibition that shows painting is as alive as ever.
The “Highlighting Contemporary Art in Georgia” series began in 2016, with “Pushing the Press: Printmaking in the South” and continued in 2019 with “Cut and Paste: Works of Paper.” Each exhibition is made available at minimal cost to interested venues in metropolitan areas big and small across the state, in keeping with the University of Georgia’s statewide public outreach mission. Dunphy, who is the program supervisor at the Lyndon House, assembled both exhibitions, with assistance from museum staff.
An accomplished artist, Dunphy received a master of fine arts degree from San Francisco Art Institute in the contemporary arts and has had exhibitions in major venues. She is a former visiting scholar and professor in the contemporary and digital media arts at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, UGA; has served as a guest curator at numerous museums and galleries; and received a Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities in 2022. She is a member of Americans for the Arts, the American Alliance of Museums and the College Art Association and has served on a number of advisory panels for Georgia Council for the Arts.
Dunphy said, “Starting with the basics — printmaking, paper and this year painting — this program is designed to share the amazing talent of artists living and working in Georgia. The third in the series features a diverse group of artists experimenting in narrative painting. Each of their own stylistic interpretations, conceptual investigations, cultural messaging and beauty are represented in this show.”
Artists with work in “Picture This” include: Bo Bartlett and Orion Wertz, of Columbus, Georgia; Holly Coulis, Cheryl Goldsleger and Margaret Morrison, of Athens; Shanequa Gay, Fahamu Pecou, Dianna Settles and Tori Tinsley, of Atlanta; Melissa Huang, of Statesboro; and Cedric Smith, of Macon.
From Pecou’s large-scale portraits to Huang’s glitch-inspired paintings that draw inspiration from social media, Morrison’s fantastically detailed still-lifes, Gay’s collage-inspired focus on ritual and personal memory and Wertz’s apocalyptic video-game scenes, “Picture This” presents a varied look at contemporary painting in Georgia.
The exhibition opens at the Lyndon House, in Athens, where it runs June 18 – September 3, 2022, with an opening reception on June 23 from 6 to 8 p.m. It then continues to the Illges Gallery at Columbus State University, Columbus, Georgia; the Albany Museum of Art, Albany, Georgia; the LaGrange Art Museum, LaGrange, Georgia; the Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, Georgia; and the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia.