Beyond Utility: Pottery Created by Enslaved Hands showcases remarkable pots made by enslaved people in the mid-19th century. Although crafted for utilitarian purposes, these jars, jugs and other vessels exemplify the work of experienced and talented artisans. Using a variety of forms and decoration, the featured objects demonstrate how largely unknown potters carefully shaped, molded, [...]
Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960s features works by 24 artists, including several pioneers and a special section devoted to artists who have lived in San Antonio.
When curator David S. Rubin first saw Frank Stella’s 1968 painting Double Scramble, he thought to himself, “That’s the most psychedelic Stella I’ve ever seen!” And then [...]
Encompassing over sixty landscape paintings, this exhibition offers a glimpse of the pre-settlement southern wilderness as late 18th-century naturalist William Bartram would have experienced it during his famed travels through the region. Philip Juras’s work combines direct observation with historical, scientific, and natural history research to depict, and in some cases re-imagine, landscapes as they [...]
George Bellows’ Snow-Capped River of 1911, which depicts a view of the Hudson River and the Palisades from Manhattan’s Riverside Park, is one of the Telfair’s most important and beloved paintings. The work was acquired for the Telfair directly from Bellows by artist Gari Melchers, who served as the museum’s fine arts advisor from 1906-1916.
In [...]
Although the natural landscape of the southeastern United States has changed vastly as a result of European settlement, the region’s wildlife has provided consistent inspiration to naturalists and artists over the centuries.
Decades before John James Audubon would commence work on his famed volume Birds of America, British-born naturalist John Abbot (1751-c.1840) immigrated to eastern Georgia [...]
This fall, the Jepson Center’s Eckburg Atrium was transformed with an intriguing installation of five suspended, wooden birds created by community artist Matt Hebermehl. Incorporating both personal and public references, Birds in Flight represents strength, energy, and love, while also symbolizing Hebermehl’s journey as a local artist and the collective growth and vitality of Savannah’s [...]
This exhibition of highlights from the outstanding collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum will examine the complex and heterogeneous nature of American art in the mid-twentieth century. Featuring thirty-one of the most celebrated artists who came to maturity in the 1950s, the exhibition traces the history of this period through forty-three key paintings and [...]
Dennis Martin’s photorealistic metalpoint drawings of the human figure are brilliantly crafted, inviting the viewer to look closely at these remarkably lifelike images. Martin, whose work was featured in the Telfair’s 2006 exhibition The Luster of Silver, utilized the tone and delicacy of metalpoint to create exacting, beautifully lit portrayals of his human subjects and [...]
In September, the Telfair’s Kahlil Gibran holdings made their Jepson Center debut in the Varnedoe and Levitt Galleries. This ever-popular collection of drawings, watercolors, and paintings by the Lebanese-born, visionary artist and writer Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) spans his career—with works from his first exhibition at photographer Frederick Holland Day’s studio in Boston in 1904 to [...]
For the first time in eight years, the Telfair presents an exhibition from its growing collection of work by self-taught artists, largely from the southeastern United States. The show features many works acquired in recent years that have never been exhibited. Highlights include newly acquired sculptures by Tennessee folk sculptor Bessie Harvey and a rare, [...]