Our own March Madness competition

March Madness is upon us. The 2023 NCAA basketball tournament is set to begin March 14, with fans anxiously awaiting to fill out their brackets and try their luck at predicting this year’s winner. According to 2022 statistics, nearly 37 million people planned on filling out a bracket last year. Statistically speaking, it usually doesn’t take long for many fans’ predictions to come up short and end up with a busted bracket. If you end up with the “bracket blues” at some point in the competition this year or basketball just isn’t your cup of tea, we’ve got good news for you: we have our own competition that you can participate in this year! As our press release on the competition announced earlier this week:

With the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament set to kick off in just a few days, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia is getting in on the action with its own single-elimination tournament. Organized as part of the museum’s 75th anniversary celebrations, the art competition pits 64 works from its collection against one another to see which will emerge as the people’s favorite.

Voting starts March 13 and will run every weekday on the museum’s Instagram stories (@georgiamuseum), with an image of each work and a poll posted for 24 hours. The winner will be announced the following day in the same place. Match-ups will continue on Instagram through early July, until an Elite Eight is determined. Voting then moves to the museum, where visitors can select their favorite after walking through the galleries. The overall champion will be announced at the Friends Appreciation Month Kick-Off event, on August 26, an annual celebration that includes prizes, a photo booth, activities for the entire family, refreshments and much more.

While UGA may not have a spot in this year’s basketball tournament, museums across the country often use the March Madness tournament as a means to highlight their collections of art and participating in the tournament is one way to show your support for the Georgia Museum of Art and UGA.

“Allowing the public to choose their favorite work from our collection through this open, democratic process is very much in the spirit of our museum’s beginnings, so it feels like an appropriate and fun way to celebrate this big birthday,” said museum director of communications Hillary Brown.

For our competition, staff curated a selection of 64 works from our collection that will vie for the title and are seeded from 1 to 16 and divided into four different divisions. There’s a wide range of art included in the tournament competitors including paintings, sculpture, works on paper and even decorative arts such as basketry, pottery, furniture, glass and silver.  There are Renaissance paintings and works as new as Rebecca Rutstein’s “Shimmer,” an interactive wall sculpture inspired by microscopic marine life and created in 2018. Old favorites like Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau’s “La Confidence” have a great chance to win, but there are potential Cinderella stories in the mix as well.

We invite you to take part in our competition and help us choose the ultimate fan favorite work among our collection. To participate, be sure to follow us on Instagram and vote for your favorite work in our stories each week. Here's our bracket for the competition. We are excited to see which work comes out on top!

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