profiles

Folk Artist and Memory Painter

In the winter of 1981, Linda Anderson’s spirits were at rock bottom. Her daughter, B.J., had suffered a stroke and needed Anderson’s constant care. But, as she sat by B.J.’s bed, Anderson was filled with a sense of hope and her life changed forever. The next morning, Anderson discovered she had a talent to paint, to tell stories from her childhood in colorful resonant images and to connect with a wide audience of art lovers. From moonshine stills to home childbirth, Anderson’s memory paintings depict a North Georgia that has now disappeared.

Anderson was born in Floyd County, in 1941. Her family was poor and the five children worked more than they played or studied. But it was a childhood enriched by community, faith and natural creativity – all of which can be seen in her works, which are filled with action, drama, humor and detail.

Over the years, Anderson has expanded her inspiration to include biblical stories, animals and movie stars. Today, she is considered one of the foremost living memory painters, one of a dying breed of rural folk artists.

Barbara Archer Gallery

A priceless discovery: hand-painted movie posters from Hollywood’s Golden Era

Some people are, with apologies to Shakespeare, “snappers-up of unconsidered trifles”. Sharpsburg native, Herb Bridges, fits that description perfectly. A lifelong fan of movie memorabilia, Bridges is best-known for his Gone With The Wind collection – at one time the world’s largest. So, when Bridges heard about a mysterious stash of movie posters that had surfaced in a storage unit in Carrollton, he just had to explore them. They proved to have a connection to his past and to be a glimpse into a little-known aspect of movie history.

The seventy posters were hand-painted at Atlanta’s Loew’s Grand Theatre by staff artists. As a teenager, Bridges worked as an usher at the Loew’s and the posters brought back memories of two very busy, very talented and rather abrupt artists working backstage. In an era when movies changed weekly and rarely re-ran, poster artists generally trashed their work or re-used the materials, making the Carrollton collection, painted by Sid Smith and Charles Reese Collier, rare and exciting. We may never know why these specific posters were saved or by whom, but Bridges is working hard to fill in the gaps in their history.

Muppets creator Jim Henson and his Atlanta Legacy

Almost thirty years ago, Vincent Anthony opened the doors to Atlanta’s own Center for Puppetry Arts. Cutting the ribbon that day was personal friend and Center supporter Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets and world renowned for his puppetry genius. Over the next ten years Henson would visit the Atlanta Center for Puppetry Arts and donate his time, talents and name to the organization. After his death in 1990, Henson’s family continued to support the Center, which is the largest of its kind in the United States. Recognizing the importance of the Center’s mission to entertain and enlighten audiences, nurture the world community of artists, expand the puppetry art form, and explore the past, present, and future of puppetry, Henson family members have donated their personal collection of Muppet memorabilia to the Center.

Visit the Center for Puppetry Arts website for more information at www.puppet.org

The Center for Puppetry Arts plans to open a new Jim Henson Wing in 2012. The facility will allow visitors to “travel to his early days on local Washington, DC television, proceed through the creation of the world-famous Muppets, and then journey into the breath-taking worlds of his fantasy films.” This exciting project will only be possible if the Center is able to raise the funds for the new building, which is designed to house hundreds of artifacts from Jim Henson’s personal collection. Until the new wing is complete, visitors can enjoy exhibits featuring some of the collection including “Jim Henson: A Man and His Frog” and “Jim Henson: Puppeteer.”

I didn’t want to just do theatre, I wanted theatre to do society. I wanted to participate in theatre that deeply, truly mattered. – Susan Booth

From small town Ohio to big city Chicago and now in Atlanta, such drive has led Susan Booth to nurture, direct and create plays and musicals that speak to their particular communities and leave their audiences buzzing. Since 2001, Susan Booth has been the Artistic Director of Atlanta’s flagship Alliance Theatre. With her husband, Max Leventhal, as the theater’s General Manager, the Alliance is now a family business that is paying big dividends for Atlanta’s artistic prestige. In 2007 the Alliance was awarded the Tony for Regional Theater in recognition of the theater’s programming and community engagement – but Susan Booth has big dreams for even more.

Rising opera star from Georgia

Soprano Leah Partridge has received consistent praise for her virtuosic technique and dramatic insight. She has made some of the great bel canto roles her own, and her career already includes many performances of the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor, Violetta in La Traviata, and Gilda in Rigoletto.

In the 2008 season, Leah Partridge makes her Metropolitan Opera debut singing the First Niece in a new production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes.

Born in Lincolnton near Augusta, Partridge lives today in Macon, Georgia. She attended Mercer University there as an undergraduate music major and went on to study the operatic repertoire at Indiana University as a graduate student. In between her globe-trotting engagements in opera houses around the world, Partridge found time to perform for State of the Arts at the GPB studios with Craig Kier, esteemed accompanist for the Atlanta Opera. Learn more about Ms. Partridge at the Columbia Artists Management website.

Somebody I attended a workshop with called them book works, art works in book form. And that kind of works for me. – Larry B. Thomas

Every artist finds the medium that best expresses their ideas, and Larry Thomas's hands led him to artist's books. It's a genre that's unfamiliar to many people, but Thomas is one of its masters. He crafts pop-ups, accordions, scrolls – books of every shape and construction you can imagine – and populates them with collages, created from old books, fliers, posters – any paper ephemera that catch his eye. His books amuse and disturb his viewers with humor and irony. They demand attention and interaction in a way that most art forms do not. And they reflect the quirky personality of this retired print professor. Larry Thomas is one of a kind – and so are his books.

Larry Thomas was recently featured at the Robert C. Williams Paper Museum. To see more of the Museum’s works, visit their website.

A New Look at Author Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor is considered by many to be one of America's greatest writers. A native of Savannah who lived nearly all her adult life in Milledgeville, O'Connor developed lupus when she was 25 and died from the disease at age 39. In her brief life she wrote two novels and some of the finest short stories ever penned by an American writer.

A devout Catholic, O'Connor’s fiction is filled with violence and grotesque characters, creating a mystique around O'Connor which remains to this day. So when 274 letters written by O'Connor to a fan were unsealed after 20 years in May 2007, both critics and the public eagerly sought to learn more about the enigmatic writer from Georgia. In this segment State of the Arts takes a new look at Flannery O'Connor. To learn more about O’Connor and her work, visit Andalusia Farm's website.

LOJA is the work of artists Lori Keith Robinson and Jan Clayton Pagratis, who fuse their styles and palettes into a collaborative body of work that explodes with color and energy. The artists paint on the same canvas at the same time, allowing the paintings to grow through their shared instincts and distinctive brush strokes. Each piece is a color-infused interpretation of the Lowcountry as well as a testament to the working relationship and artistic alignment of the artists. The name LOJA is a fusion of their two names, reflecting both the collaboration and creation of a distinct style of its own.

Lori Keith Robinson and Jan Clayton Pagratis are founders of the Chroma Art Gallery for Fine Contemporary Art located in Savannah, Georgia. Chroma has been voted Best Gallery by both Savannah Magazine and Connect Savannah. The gallery exhibits prominent regional and national artists working in painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, glasswork and jewelry.

Visit the Chroma Gallery website for more information and paintings.

(1900-1980)

Hale Woodruff was one of the 20th century's greatest African-American artists. A painter and muralist, he is best known for the Amistad Murals, which depict the history of slavery and are housed at Talladega College in Alabama. He also created a powerful series of murals titled "The Art of the Negro" for Atlanta University Center, which can be seen today in the Trevor Arnett Library at Clark Atlanta University. Woodruff was an outstanding teacher and hoped these murals would inspire future generations of young African-Americans to appreciate their cultural and artistic heritage, beginning in the days of ancient Africa.

A Midwesterner by birth who trained in Paris, Woodruff moved to Atlanta in 1931, where he founded one of the nation's first black art departments at Atlanta University Center. This year the Spelman College Museum honored Woodruff on the 75th anniversary of the art department's founding with a major exhibition of his diverse and powerful work. Before the exhibit opened to the public, State of the Arts followed several of Woodruff's paintings as they went through a process of conservation and restoration. To learn more about Hale Woodruff, look him up on the web.

To find out more about the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, visit their website.

His name is mostly unknown except in musical circles, but Randy Wood definitely qualifies as one of Georgia’s hidden treasures. Wood, a native of Coffee County, has combined masterful woodworking skills with a love of music to become one of the most sought-after fretted instrument-makers in the country, crafting guitars, mandolins and dobros.

Opportunity took Wood to the music centers of Muscle Shoals and Nashville, where he honed his skills repairing and improving instruments for everyone from Elvis to Emmylou to Eric Clapton. In the mid-1970s home called, and Wood is now settled in tiny Bloomingdale, outside Savannah, where his store and workshop draw musicians from near and far. Ever-modest, Wood describes himself as a woodworker who happens to make instruments, but thousands of musicians around the world disagree and consider him a real artist.

Visit his website for more information.