The Georgia Museum of Art’s Shannon and Peter Candler Collection Study Room provides faculty, students, researchers and members of the public access to nearly 20,000 works of art from the museum’s permanent collection. When these works are not displayed in the galleries, they can still be viewed in the collection study room by making a request to pull one or more objects from the vaults.
Recently, Professor Jon Swindler’s ARST 4330/6330: Special Topics in Printmaking class at UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art took advantage of the collection study room to view 20 different works related to comics, primarily by English painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) and Japanese printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 – 1858). Hogarth’s works are predominantly satirical caricatures that range from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of images called “modern moral subjects.” Recognized as the last great master of the ukiyo-e woodblock printing tradition, Hiroshige created approximately 8,000 prints depicting everyday life and landscapes of Japan’s Edo period.
Swindler’s class delves into the production of comics, posters and zines (small, independently published magazines) through techniques such as printing, binding and etching. The course’s objective is to “encourage a personal exploration of the creative potential of sequential art,” so Swindler searched for “prints with a strong narrative quality.” The class examined 10 plates from Hogarth’s “Industry and Idleness,” a series of plot-linked engravings intended to illustrate the rewards of hard work and the consequences of idleness. Students also viewed five prints from Hiroshige’s 1858 series “Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji,” which depicts Mount Fuji in various seasons from different vantage points, often with human activities in the foreground.
Swindler shared that the most enjoyable part of the experience for students was the behind-the-scenes access. “It allows them to be close enough to smell the paper and ink, which is exciting to most,” he said. Swindler also plans to bring students from his intro to etching and digital printmaking courses to have the same immersive opportunity.
Campus and community members alike can use the collection study room to view works from the museum’s vaults. The museum offers this service to encourage knowledge about art as a discipline and form of expression. People who are interested in pulling works from the collection to view can use the museum’s online collections database to find information about them, then fill out a request form online, giving at least three weeks’ notice.
Authored by:
Jessica Doane
