Campus News

Art EXPANDS

Forte
Larry Forte

New additions, events will mark Jan. 29 reopening of Georgia Museum of Art

The Georgia Museum of Art will reopen with a weeklong celebration, Art Expands, from Jan. 29 to Feb. 5. The museum has been closed since March 2009 for construction on its Phase II expansion, designed by Gluckman Mayner Architects of New York.

GMOA broke ground on its expansion in 2009, after raising $20 million in external support to fund the entirety of construction. The addition includes more than 16,000 square feet of new galleries, an outdoor sculpture garden, an expanded lobby and additional storage space. The new gallery space allows for continual viewing of the museum’s permanent collection. Another major addition to GMOA is the Study Centers in the Humanities. Partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the centers contain archives from the museum’s collections and consist of the C.L. Morehead Jr. Center for the Study of American Art, the Henry D. Green Center for the Study of the Decorative Arts, the Jacob Burns Foundation Center and the Pierre Daura Center. Curators of each collection now have offices in the corresponding study center, making information and archives easily accessible to students and researchers.

GMOA will kick off its grand weeklong reopening (see below), Art Expands, with the official ribbon-cutting ceremony and the museum’s fundraiser gala Elegant Salute XII: Metamorphosis.