Last month, the Georgia Museum of Art reinstalled its Marilyn Overstreet Nalley South Gallery as part of a project that began in February 2020 to refresh all the permanent collection galleries while keeping the majority of them open to the public. The galleries are always a work in progress as new acquisitions enter the collection and delicate works on paper need to be rotated on and off display, but reinstalling a full gallery at once is an opportunity to rewrite wall text and reconsider objects in relation to one another.
The new Nalley South recontextualizes early American modernism, conversations between European and American art of the period (including the rise of abstraction and the importation of surrealism to the US), intersections across media and the relationship between urban and rural environments in modern art.
The works featured are early-20th-century representations of European and American history, particularly the rapid progress and instability of the modern age. As artists moved away from traditional subjects and styles and toward an art rooted in the “real life” of their time, they went beyond the typical confines of cities and machine-age aesthetics. The physical and technological divide between the urban and rural U.S. was dissolving, and artists continued to journey farther afield. They built new artistic networks and embraced the plain forms, bold colors and simplified geometry of vernacular art.
Nalley South is the first gallery to feature a new collaboration with the Historic Clothing and Textile Collection(opens in new tab), part of the fashion studies program in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences and housed at the Special Collections Libraries at UGA. (Monica Sklar, a professor who also directs the HCTC, and graduate student Sara Idacavage were directly involved in this collaborative effort.) The first rotation features a beaded, glittering flapper dress in conversation with images of early-20th-century New York City. Later rotations will highlight how urban fashions filtered into rural communities and adopted patterns and cuts associated with rural styles, thus building on the intersections of city and country in American culture in the first decades of the 1900s.
The gallery also offered the first opportunity for the museum to highlight paintings from the Terra Foundation for American Art as part of its new Collections-in-Residence program(opens in new tab). We are part of the inaugural cohort of museum partners in this project and will continue to interpret these paintings from their collection through dynamic installations and public programs over the next four years.
Authored by:
Giselle Brannam
