FALL 2009
All events are free and open to the public.  In compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, Georgia Southern University will honor reasonable requests for accommodations. The Center for Art & Theatre is open Monday through Friday from 9am - 5pm and by appointment. Docent tours are welcome and available upon request by calling (912) GSU-ARTS. 

[ view: past exhibitions | parketing & directions ]                               

[ August 17 - December 11 ]

exhibition: SACRED & PROFANE
Arts Building
Smith Callaway Banks Southern Folk Art Collection

The Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art is pleased to announce Sacred & Profane, a folk art exhibition on display through December 11 in the Folk Art Research Center, located in the Fine Arts Building on Georgia Southern’s Statesboro campus. The public is invited to attend a reception on Wednesday, October 29 where they will be able to meet the curator, Smith Callaway Banks.

Sacred & Profane highlights vibrant folk art that illustrates the divide between good and evil. What is sacred? What is profane? The sacred artwork is inspired by a higher being while profane illustrates grotesque figures that often take the shape of folk arts’ popular face jug. From paintings and dioramas to three-dimensional ‘Face-Jug’ portraits, these artists have recreated their visions and warnings through the visual power of texture, color, form and text.

Smith Callaway Banks has created a thought-provoking exhibition that is lively in both content and scale. There are approximately 100 works of art on display that range from Lenzo’s Blue Devil Face with Porcelain Teeth to the appliquéd and 3-dimensional stuffed figures of the Garden of Eden by an unknown artist. Also included in the exhibition are well-known folk artists Stacy Lambert, Chris Hubbard, and Howard Finster, among many others, present gallery viewers with their enlightenment, their warnings, and their visions.

Smith Callaway Banks says, “This exhibit, Sacred & Profane, is my collection of folk art pictures, figures and jugs. You will see Biblical scenes, church scenes and images of Jesus and angels. The jugs have faces of Jesus, angels, devils, demons and ghouls. I hope all will enjoy this collection that shows how Southern folk artists have depicted and interpreted good and evil.”

Angel & Devil Faces, by Jon Stucky, is the iconic artwork of the Sacred & Profane exhibition. Known only as Stucky, his painting simultaneously shows both sides of the spiritual divide—angel on one side, wing aloft - devil on the other, horn of pain. Stucky, born in 1972, has been interested in painting since a very young age when his first media were crayons and sidewalk chalk. Stucky’s favorite part of the creative process is mixing the paint colors. Stucky’s works have been heavily influenced by the bright patterns and bold colors of Amish quilts.

Smith Callaway Banks’ generous donation of his folk art collection to Georgia Southern University has created the opportunity to introduce folk art to children and adults alike. Folk art is made by people who have not had formal art training but whose art styles and craftsmanship has been handed down over the generations. The traditions of folk art come from people living in our country’s rural areas and because of that, folk artists often use animals, snakes, demons and angles as their subject matter. People of all ages are drawn to their sometimes scary, sometimes uplifting visions.

[ October 26 - November 12 ]

exhibition: Seeds of Passage
Center for Art & Theatre
Contemporary Gallery

Seeds of Passage, an exhibition of sculptures by Master of Fine Arts Candidate Olu Amoda will be on display October 26 – November 12, 2009 at the Center for Art & Theatre at Georgia Southern University. The public is invited to meet the artist on Friday, November 6th, from 5-7 pm.

Death and the King’s Horseman, a play written by Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, inspired Amoda to create Seeds of Passage. The play, based on an actual incident that took place in Nigeria in 1946, examines the explosive tension and conflict between the traditional cultures of Africa and the West. Death and the King’s Horseman received the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Replacing the actors with art-objects, Amoda has created an interpretation of the play that delivers an emotional impact that is true to Soyinka’s intent while expressing, in sculptural form, the activity and culture of Nigeria through the artistic use of materials, scale, and form. As the viewers’ eye navigates through the gallery and perceives the exhibition they receive meaning as time flows. Amoda states, “Seeds of Passage attempts to provoke the viewers’ interpretation of the meaning of the play through the ways I have rendered the visual elements within a sculptural framework. Gallery visitors experience a similar continuity of time as do viewers of the play.”

Amoda’s interpretation of the play is infused with his primary thesis, that the value of objects, handmade and found, is generated through human contact and its history of use. “The found-objects I discovered in my late mother’s collection enhanced my desire to use found-objects in my art work. Found-objects are repositories of latent energy and become reminiscent of historical events and as representatives of discourse become valuable.” For example, Amoda’s use of the common wooden palette used in shipping and storage to symbolize the cyclic pattern of discards that evolve into highly regarded art materials.

The Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art currently enrolls 23 full-time students in their Master of Fine Arts degree program. The sixty-credit degree is the terminal degree in the visual arts, in which a student’s thesis exhibition is regarded as the capstone product of a candidate’s creative research. The Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art is one of only 267 art programs accredited by the prestigious National Association of Schools of Art and Design.

exhibition: A generation of printmaking
Center for Art & Theatre
University Gallery

A Generation of Printmaking, an exhibition of fine art prints created under the tutelage of the late Professor Bernie Solomon, will be on display at the Center for Art & Theatre from October 26 – November 12, 2009 in the University Gallery. A public reception will take place on Friday, November 6th from 5 – 7 pm.

Bernie Solomon (1946 – 1995), Professor of Printmaking and contemporary American wood engraver, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology before taking a faculty position at Georgia Southern University, where he spent the majority of his academic career.

Solomon was one of the founding members of the Southern Graphics Council, where he hosted the first workshop out of Georgia Southern College. Solomon was a recipient of Southern Graphics Council’s Honorary Member of the Council Award in 2009. The conference program stated, “Bernie’s passing leaves an irreplaceable void in the world of prints and artist’s books. The example of his life and work, as well as his simple philosophy of giving more of himself than he took, will serve as his extraordinary legacy.”

Bernie Solomon made an impact on both students and the Statesboro community. When teaching, Solomon never created a duplicate of himself through students. He pushed students to be unique in their creative ideas and to have a style they could claim as their own. He wanted to empower artists.

In printmaking, Solomon’s unique talent was wood engraving, considered a lost art by many. “If no one works to re-establish wood engraving, the chances are that it will die out eventually,” the St. Petersburg Times quoted Solomon in 1974. Solomon achieved much recognition for his wood engravings and woodcuts, published both individually and as suites of images for limited edition illustrated books. Much of his fine art deals with religious themes, particularly pertaining to Judaica.

An active leader in the art world, Solomon organized and brought together most of the printmakers in the Southeast. An advocate of the arts, he realized that most grant money funded urban areas rather than rural. He fought to bring the arts to small towns, such as Statesboro, by organizing many exhibitions and art exchanges with other artists. Solomon wanted to Statesboro to be more than “Fleas, Falcons and Football,” as he believed art is something everyone can understand and relate to.

In 1981, Solomon worked with, what began, as an exchange of exhibitions between American printmakers of the South and a group of Soviet printmakers, an idea that grew into the Festival of Yiddish Spirit. The event was the first Yiddish-Jewish festival ever to take place in the US. Only twice before this, both in Europe, had the world seen such a gathering.

After Solomon’s death, Paula Solomon, Bernie’s wife, donated Bernie’s collection of student work to the Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art. These pieces are still used today as examples in the classroom and remain as a symbol of Bernie Solomon’s passion for the arts.

[ November 16 - December 4 ]

exhibition: form & Content
Center for Art & Theatre
Contemporary Gallery

Foundations courses are required of all students who pursue a major in art and include courses in drawing, two-dimensional design and three-dimensional design, as well as art history. Foundations coursework is rigorous and demonstrates why the pedagogical research by Georgia Southern foundation art faculty in this field is highly regarded in the profession.

“Students wanting careers in art and design are challenged technically and conceptually in our six foundation courses, which consist of observation based drawing, concept based drawing, two and three dimensional design and two art history survey courses,” said Foundations Director, Professor Bruce Little, “These courses provide students with the underpinnings needed to be maximally successful as they move forward through the various concentrated areas of study. This pedagogically based exhibit is intended to honor their efforts in rigorous training, demonstrate to other foundation students what exemplary performance looks like and to provide the public with insights into how artists acquire both knowledge and skill. Art foundation faculty members will also provide descriptions of the learning activities demonstrated in the students works judged to be of sufficiently high quality to be exhibited.”

The mission of the exhibition is to showcase and honor the efforts of beginning art students; to provide an avenue through which high achieving art students can earn recognition and awards; and to demonstrate to future students the expectations placed on students who take foundations courses. A panel of Georgia Southern art professors who teach major courses in various artistic areas juried the exhibition.

exhibition: Denotation Connotation
Center for Art & Theatre
University Gallery

The Graphic Design students from the Master of Fine Arts graduate program in the Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art invite the public to Denotation Connotation, an exhibition that explores how people create and express language, communication, and meaning – visually.

Denotation Connotation runs November 16 through December 4, 2009 in the University Gallery of the Center for Art & Theatre at Georgia Southern University. The public is invited to a closing reception, December 4, 2009 5-7 pm at the Center for Art & Theatre, Georgia Southern University. Visitors will have the opportunity to meet the artists and learn more about their perspective on contemporary design.

The Graphic Design program at the Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art is a dynamic, multi-faceted program that has graduated many talented and gifted undergraduate students. Denotation Connotation will be the premier showing of work by the inaugural class of graduate students enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts degree program in Graphic Design, Ashley Clement, Jermaine Dawson, Victoria Ivey, Stephanie Arends Neal, and Collin Smith.

Inspired by a Semiotics class taught by Professor Edward Rushton, the exhibition presents works that explore linguistic signs, unlimited semiosis, denotation connotation, anchorage, official language, fly posting, and hyper-intuitionalism.

Semiotics is the study of the relationship between signs, signifiers and what is represented. Through graphic compositions, along with written explanations of critical decisions made in the creative process, students will understand, master and manipulate meaning in visual communication.

Professor Edward Rushton states, “this exhibit will be aesthetically beautiful – now to understand that statement we must have a mental construct of what is beauty, while simultaneously having a physical reality of beauty—the object. This exhibition will be that expressed object of beauty.”

[ December 3 - 5 ]

event: Club mud exhibition & Sale
Ceramics & sculpture building
Ceramics studio

Ceramics & Jewelry created by students in the Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art.

Hours: Thursday & Friday: 10am - 9pm, Saturday: 10am - 6pm

[ December 7 - December 11 ]

exhibition: BFA Senior Exhibition
Center for Art & Theatre
Contemporary & University Galleries

Ehibiting: Mae Chabra, Samantha Jo Tiernan, Jon-Erik Benefield Montgomery, Marenn Mosley, Brianna Renee Goodwin, Michael Berzsenyi, Lauren McSwain, Obie Beal and Kelly Anne Vermeil