Georgia's State Art Collection

 

Georgia's State Art Collection comprises hundreds of art pieces collected over nearly three decades by the Georgia Council for the Arts in the late twentieth century. The collection incorporates a diversity of media, including etchings and drawings, jewelry, mixed media, paintings, photographs, pottery, sculptures, textiles, and wooden bowls and toys. The works range from the abstract to the realistic, with the latter often depicting landscapes and people in Georgia and beyond. Some of the artwork is formal, produced by artists trained in the nation's top schools, while other pieces are the creations of folk and outsider artists, often working in the communities where they were born and raised. While many of the artists are native Georgians, others spent only a brief time in the state, teaching at universities or art schools and exhibiting in museums and galleries.

The story of the collection begins in the late 1960s, when the Georgia Council for the Arts launched the Georgia Art Bus Program, sending a bus transformed into a traveling exhibition space to venues around the state. Several years later the Georgia General Assembly created the Art Acquisition Program to purchase works created by artists in Georgia. Each year a panel of expert judges met to recommend acquisitions, and eventually the collection grew to more than 600 pieces. Works by such nationally recognized figures as Benny Andrews, Lucinda Bunnen, Howard Finster, and Nellie Mae Rowe were collected alongside lesser known artists and displayed in government buildings around the state. When the acquisition program ended in 1991, most of the collection was put into storage.

In 2013 the Georgia Council for the Arts, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia Humanities, and the Georgia Museum of Art, selected twenty-eight pieces from the collection to tour nine venues around the state. Entitled Inspired Georgia: 28 Works from Georgia's State Art Collection, the traveling exhibition opened in October 2013 at the Quinlan Arts Center in Gainesville before moving on to Monroe, Toccoa, Summerville, Tallapoosa, Jonesboro, Dublin, and Tifton. It closed at the Historic Train Depot in Kingsland in December 2014. Featured in Inspired Georgia were two-dimensional artworks by Benny Andrews, Dick Baldwin, Lucinda Bunnen, Herbert Creecy, Dennis Darling, William Entrekin, Howard Finster, Steven D. Foster, Frank Hunter, Michael Junkin, Ted Kallman, Ruth Laxson, Edmund Marshall, John McWilliams, David Mudrinich, John T. Riddle Jr., Nellie Mae Rowe, Margo Newmark Rosenbaum, Ben Smith, Spurge Smith, Freddie L. Styles, and Art Werger.

A list of artists and works included in Georgia's State Art Collection appears below.