“My first vivid art memory is of my grandmother and I,” said Calli Laundrè during this week’s episode of Art on the Air. “We were laying on the floor of her living room, and we were coloring in a coloring book. And I remember watching her make her marks, and they were so precise and so smooth. And I just wanted so badly to color like her.”
Many of us have had an experience like Calli’s, surrounded by a mishmash of art supplies, joyfully working away at pure creation, not a care in the world. I have said it countless times on my radio show (and really anytime and anywhere I can where it even vaguely makes sense) that when we’re four years old we’re all artists; life unteaches us to be creative.
While the world waits for COVID-19 vaccinations and the pollen to clear the air, Telfair Museums has a number of intriguing art exhibitions to venture into safely. The exhibitions range across from Telfair’s two out of three museum sites and offer exhibitions of interest in many areas.
All of the current exhibitions include include “Vehicles of Change”, “Picasso to Hockney: Modern Art on Stage”, “David Gumbs: From Dust to Gold”, “Progressive Regression: Examination of a 19th Century Museum”, “Youthful Adventures: Growing up in Photography”, “Savannah Scenes”, “Before Midnight: Bonaventure and the Bird Girl”, “Katherine Sandoz:
katniss”, “Late Afternoon near the Academy” and “Mansion to Museum”.
The pieces by Pablo Picasso and David Hockney may get top billing, but I was impressed again and again by the exhibition’s breadth.
Three ink drawings by filmmaker, writer and artist Jean Cocteau were done for a 1952 production of Igor Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio “Oedipus Rex.” With quick gestures and brutal specificity, Cocteau depicts the blinding of Oedipus and the hanging of Jocasta.
A seductive, stylized piece by Russian artist Leon Bakst captures Vaslav Nijinsky as a Chinese dancer in a 1917 production of “Les Orientales.”
The show also includes a dark silk robe with metallic embroidery and metal studs created by Henri Matisse for a 1920 production of Stravinsky’s ballet “The Song of the Nightingale.”
Pocket watch discovered in the wreckage of the Steamship Pulaski by the Endurance Exploration Company.
As a novelist, I have long been fascinated with finding the hidden stories instead of retelling the known stories. Hearing an untold story is like having a great secret whispered in your ear.
I’ve learned that sometimes, to find those hidden stories, I need to log off the computer and walk through the doors of history centers and museums. When I first started my research for my new historical fiction novel,
Surviving Savannah, which tells the tragic tale of the grand Steamship Pulaski and its sinking off the coast of North Carolina in 1838 with an elite Savannah family on board, I had trouble finding the information I needed.