New Year, New Art, New You

Welcome to 2024! A new year often means new goals, but it’s no secret that resolutions are often abandoned after just a few weeks or months. According to experts, most people abandon resolutions because goals are too ambitious and challenging, but finding easy ways to meet goals, bit by bit, is the key to success.

This year, according to Forbe’s Health, over a third of all Americans have resolved to improve their mental health. If you’re struggling to keep to your resolutions or make progress towards your commitment to improve your mental health this year, the Georgia Museum of Art is here to help you meet your goals.

As it turns out, art has been proven to have a positive impact on mental health. According to a 2019 World Health Organization (WHO) analysis of research about the health benefits of the arts, there’s ample evidence to show just how valuable art is for our health. A recent analysis of over 3,000 studies showed that:

Overall, the findings demonstrated that the arts can potentially impact both mental and physical health. Results from the review clustered under two broad themes: prevention and promotion, and management and treatment. In each theme, a number of subthemes were considered:

within prevention and promotion, findings showed how the arts can:– affect the social determinants of health
– support child development
– encourage health-promoting behaviors
– help to prevent ill health
– support caregiving

within management and treatment, findings showed how the arts can:– help people experiencing mental illness;
– support care for people with acute conditions;
– help to support people with neurodevelopmental and neurological disorders;
– assist with the management of noncommunicable diseases; and
– support end-of-life care.

To that end, the Georgia Museum of Art is proud to tout new art exhibitions and events in 2024 that can help you stick to your resolutions for self improvement. Come take a walk through the galleries, come to a Morning MIndfulness or Yoga in the Galleries session, scratch that ol’ noggin with a lecture or special tour or find community at one of our special events.

Here’s what the museum has to offer in the first few months of the new year:

Exhibitions on view now:

• • Nancy Baker Cahill: Through Lines (October 28, 2023 – May 19, 2024)
    • “Nancy Baker Cahill: Through Lines” highlights the artist’s interdisciplinary artistic practice and the role of emerging technologies in contemporary art. Nancy Baker Cahill’s work examines ideas of systemic power, consciousness, the human body and the impact of humans on the biosphere. In two gallery spaces, as well as the Harry and Jane Willson Outdoor Sculpture Gallery, the artist uses augmented reality (AR) to help viewers fully experience and immerse into the depths of her work. Read more about her work on our blog.

• • Power Couple: Pierre and Louise Daura in Paris (Through May 5, 2024)
    • In 1928, Pierre Daura and Louise Heron Blair married in Paris. Their social sphere included artists, writers, musicians, gallery owners and critics. Among their entourage was Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García (1874 – 1949), whom Pierre had befriended and helped settle in Paris in 1926. The Torres and Daura families lived in the same apartment complex in the famed Montmartre district known for its vibrant artistic life full of studios, salons and cafés. During this period, Louise painted several portraits of Torres-García’s daughters, Olimpia and Ifigenia, while Pierre produced several engravings of the young girls, a testament to the families’ friendship and affection.

• • Decade of Tradition: Highlights from the Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Collection (through July 3, 2024)
    • In 2012, Larry and Brenda Thompson gave 100 works of art by African American artists to the Georgia Museum of Art, mirroring the original donation of 100 American paintings by museum founder Alfred Heber Holbrook. In addition, they endowed a curatorial position to steward this collection to help fulfill the museum’s vision of an inclusive canon of American art. This exhibition includes works from the 2011 traveling exhibition “Tradition Redefined,” which preceded the gift, as well as subsequent works added in recent years that have not been on view in other galleries. These works celebrate the expansion of the museum’s permanent collection through this transformative gift of works by African American artists.

• • Power and Piety in 17th-Century Spanish Art (Through July 28, 2024)
    • This exhibition is part of a continued collaboration between the Georgia Museum of Art and Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery in Greenville, South Carolina, and provides visitors with the opportunity to see works by premiere Spanish baroque painters such as Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Murillo, Pedro Orrente and others. Viewers will be immersed in a selection of paintings that uphold the tenets of Catholic Counter-Reformation Art illustrative of the struggle between the Catholic church and the rise of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which dominated the art scene in 17th-century Spain.

NEW Exhibitions:

• Kei Ito: Staring at the Face of the Sun (Opens January 27)
  • • Kei Ito uses photography to examine the intergenerational trauma of nuclear disaster and the possibilities of healing and reconciliation. Ito’s grandfather, who survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, described the day as if there were “hundreds of suns lighting up the sky.” Ito uses camera-less techniques, exposing light-sensitive material to sunlight for the length of a single breath. In this way, he ties the invisibility of radiation (whether from the sun or nuclear weaponry) to the life-breath of the human body. Ito’s work also connects nuclear war’s impact abroad to the effects of nuclear testing on “down-winders” on the American continent. As a result, he poignantly underscores our collective inheritance in the nuclear age, as both the attacker and the attacked suffer at an apocalyptic, global scale.

• Richard Prince: Tell Me Everything (Opens February 10)
  • • “Tell Me Everything” features artist Richard Prince’s most recent suite of works based on the joke archives of influential 20th-century American comedian Milton Berle (1913 – 2000). Berle, whose career lasted more than eight decades, often documented jokes on index cards, which he organized by subject in file drawers. Prince, an avid book and rare manuscript collector, bought four cabinets of thousands of Berle’s jokes at a Los Angeles auction. Although viewers are not privy to individual jokes, the enlarged inkjet images developed from this archive reference the centrality and lasting significance of jokes in communicating ideas about everyday life, taboo subjects and broader cultural norms.

Beyond exhibitions on view in the galleries, the Georgia Museum of Art also offers a variety of programming for well-being, children and families, lectures and events throughout the year. Please join us for upcoming events such as: Yoga in the Galleries, Morning Mindfulness, Creative Aging Seated Yoga, Third Thursday, 90 Carlton, Family Day, Toddler Tuesday, Tour at Tour, Sunday Spotlight and so much more.

Want to know more? Take a look at our website calendar and explore our offerings. Our quarterly newsletter, Facet (available at the museum or by mail as a free “Friend of the Museum” member), also offers an overview of events, lectures and exhibitions throughout the year. Our latest newsletter and calendar are also online.