Augusta Collects Southern Art

This exhibition, drawn from private collections, demonstrates two things: first, that there is great depth within private collections in the Augusta area, and second, that the Morris Museum of Art, over the length of its twenty-five-year-long history, has had a significant influence on Augusta’s collectors, helping to school them in the art of the South and to guide them toward work of high quality and lasting value.

Augusta Collects includes work by artists from every part of this larger South, including a traditional landscape painting by Texas artist Porfirio Salinas, Jr., and an abstract vision of the landscape of coastal South Carolina by Brian Rutenberg. Of local interest are paintings by two early directors of the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, Horace Talmage Day and Elizabeth Panknin Wright, as well as paintings by some of Augusta University’s William S. Morris Eminent Scholars in Art—Philip Morsberger, Tom Nakashima, and Cheryl Goldsleger. Such Morris Museum favorites as Jonathan Green and Edward Rice are also represented here, as are a few surprises, both historical and contemporary.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website