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GEORGIA GALLERY

A panoramic view of the work of Georgia artists and photographers. The latest at Georgia art galleries. Plus, photo essays of Georgia tours, events, and outdoor recreation.

Foxfire Museum & Heritage Center

February 28th, 2010
CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO VIEW THE FOXFIRE GALLERY OF 22 PHOTOGRAPHS

Over 40 years ago, a group of high school students took an interest in their mountain heritage and preserved a truly unique American culture by documenting it in The Foxfire Magazine and what has now become 12 volumes of books. The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center continues to preserve, explain and celebrate that culture through demonstrations, self-guided tours of over 20 log structures, exhibits, annual events, a gift shop, and the continued publication of The Foxfire Magazine and books. View this gallery of photographs to learn more about Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center and the special way of life it celebrates. Read more about Foxfire in its detailed Foxfire profile and in a Foxfire feature in the Georgia Tours Blog.

Note that photographs of live demonstrations and costumed participants were taken during Foxfire’s two annual events, Living History Days and the Fall Heritage Festival, and do not represent ongoing features of the Museum and Heritage Center. Read more about Foxfire’s annual events.

Beth Young’s Rivers

January 31st, 2010

Editor’s Note: Since this Gallery was posted, Beth Young has a new book out. Headwaters, A Journey on Alabama Rivers, published by the University of Alabama Press, featuring her photography and text by John C. Hall is available on Amazon.

To view the entire Gallery, click on the image below.

Click on the image at right to see a collection of remarkable river photographs  by Birmingham-based environmental photographer Beth Maynor Young. Beth’s photographs are included in many  private and corporate collections across the country, and one look at the images here will explain the reasons why. The photographer’s short descriptions of the photos, sometimes including information on the time of day the pictures were taken or the logistics of transporting photography equipment into difficult-to-navigate natural areas, add another dimension to the images.

The pictures here are organized into three groups. The first is the Chattooga River: images of the Wild and Scenic River that forms the border between Georgia and South Carolina. Beth describes it as a powerful river with a personality all its own and one with which people from all around the world have a personal relationship. The second group contains images of Tallulah Gorge. In the third group are rivers in Beth’s “Waters of the South” series, a collection of some of her most popular and timeless photographs, including Georgia’s Flint and Tallapoosa rivers as well as waterways in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. The total of 27 images take you on an inspiring river voyage from sunrise on the Chattooga to a full moon on Mississippi’s Gulf Island National Seashore.

After viewing these photographs, it will be a comfort to know that you can own them yourself (or give them to friends) in the form of inexpensive sets of note cards. (Inexpensive meaning really inexpensive, like in the price range of $10 to $14 for a set of 6 cards that come in a custom-designed wrapper with information about the rivers and links to various sources of information). This Kingfisher Editions note card collection places some of the photographer’s work in the public market place for the first time. A wide variety of note card sets are available – not limited to just the images you see here. Fine art prints of some of Beth’s photographs are also available. Learn more about Beth Maynor Young and browse through her collection of note cards and prints on her Cahaba River Publishing website.

Remember that by using the Flickr connection in the BG Gallery, you can send individual images from the Beth Young’s Rivers - or the entire set - to friends.

Other Links

Ellis Brothers Pecans: Touring and Shopping in Georgia’s Dooly County

January 17th, 2010

Click on the image below to visit the Ellis Brothers Photo Gallery.

The short drive from Exit 109 on Georgia I-75 to the Ellis Brothers pecan retail store and farm is a mini-tour of South Georgia farmland and Georgia agricultural history. On 1,200 acres in Dooly County, Ellis Brothers patriarch Elliott Ellis - along with two sons, Brad and Keith and their families, including seven Elliott grandchildren - grow Mahaws, Japanese persimmons, Satsumas, figs, blackberries and 75 acres of peaches in addition to the famous nut for which Ellis Brothers is known worldwide - Georgia Pecans.

The Ellis Brothers’ iconic logo - a comic, buck-toothed pecan with the message “We’re Nuts To Sell this Low” has signaled “Must Stop” for travelers on I-75 for over 30 years.

Take a tour of the Ellis Brothers farm and retail store via this photo gallery, use the INTERACTIVE MAP to visit in person, or tour and shop online at the Ellis Brothers website.

Links:

Extend your visit to Ellis Brothers Pecans by exploring more of Dooly County and Vienna, the county seat.

Georgia’s Barrier Islands

September 27th, 2009

Along the Georgia coast, 15 major barrier islands and many smaller islands are separated from the mainland from an extensive series of marshes and sounds. Unlike many of the developed barrier islands of the east coast,  the Georgia barrier islands still retain much of their natural wilderness. Approximately two-thirds of the islands are designated as parks, wildlife refuges, research reserves and heritage preserves with limited or no public access. This Photo Gallery shows photographs of Georgia’s 16 major barrier islands with brief descriptions and links to more detailed profiles of each island. To view the complete album CLICK ON THE IMAGE ABOVE.

Links:

  • View in conjunction with an INTERACTIVE MAP showing the locations of all of Georgia’s major barrier islands.

Tallulah River

August 30th, 2009

Photos of the upper Tallulah River and Tallulah River Gorge. To view the complete album of 10 photos, CLICK ON THE IMAGE.

View the photo gallery in conjunction with Suzanne Welander’s 10.7-mile Tallulah River Paddling Guide in two sections, the Coleman River Confluence to Plum Orchard Road (4.7 miles) and Tiger Creek Confluence to Tallulah Falls Lake (6 miles).

The Tallulah River is both a small stream of outstanding beauty and a dramatic whitewater run that pushes the limits of navigability. The headwaters are unbelievably clear, attracting avid anglers and occasional paddlers interested in technical Class II-III runs amid moss-covered boulders. At the other end of the river is the celebrated Tallulah Gorge, home to read-and-run whitewater from Class IV+ to Class V. In between these two extremes are four dams and very little navigable river.

South Fork Broad River

August 24th, 2009

 By MICHAEL MOODY

Roger Thomas and Michael Moody spent Wednesday, August 19th, on the South Fork Broad River taking photographs and recording GPS coordinates for an interactive map of Suzanne Welander’s canoeing guide to the stream. Here are the photographic results of their day’s work. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE ENTIRE GALLERY. Read Suzanne Welander’s South Fork Broad River paddling guide and view the INTERACTIVE MAP that includes these photographs along with the latitude and longitude coordinates.

About Georgia Gallery

August 7th, 2009

Hiking experiences, comments, ideas and opinions from Brown’s Guides readers, contributors and editorial staff. Readers may also comment on past posts. Look for previous posts in “Categories,” “Archives,” or “Tags,” all accessible in the left-hand column.

Ogeechee River Trip

August 4th, 2009

Ogeechee-Canoochee Riverkeeper Program Director Dianna Wedincamp organized a mid-summer paddling trip on the Ogeechee. Here are photos of OCR members on the trip, including first-time paddler Anna Thibeau, who blogged about her expereince, “Seriously, I had not expected to get wet above the knees. I had even styled my hair and put make up on carefully before we left home. The drenching was wonderful!”

viewgallery240.jpgRead Anna’s complete blog about her first-ever paddling experience.

First Paddle

By Anna Thibeau

You know those beautiful Impressionistic paintings with couples in row boats? The lady is in a diaphanous gown with a large brimmed hat and the man has on a striped jacket, white pants and a straw hat?  I guess that is what I had in mind when our friend Dianna Wedincamp invited us to join Riverkeeper’s paddle down the Ogeechee River. This being the beginning of the 21st century, bathing suits, bermudas and baseball caps make up a plausible modern version of this idyllic situation.

On the Saturday of our adventure, we set the alarm early so we could be out of the house by 8:00 AM, and after an uneventful trip, arrived at Morgan’s Bridge at the appointed 9:30 AM. The canoes belonging to Riverkeeper were already in the water, and Dianna’s husband Jimmy were keeping guard over them. Other people on the paddle trip were to-ing and fro-ing in cars. I suspected they were doing something useful, but wasn’t quite sure exactly what. Read the rest of this entry »

Children of the Loom

June 14th, 2009

 Text and Photo Caption Editing
By DANIEL M. ROPER

Editors Note: Thanks to Georgia BackRoads publisher Dan Roper for originally publishing these Lewis Wickes Hine photographs in the  Summer 2009 issue of Georgia BackRoads and for making them available to others on the Brown’s Guides website.

Some say that the end doesn’t justify the means, but you couldn’t have viewgallery240.jpgconvinced acclaimed photographer Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940). In  order to further a cause he held most dear, Hine cajoled, deceived and flat-out lied to persuade people to pose before his camera or to allow him onto their property so that he could take pictures. He had no reservations, whatsoever, about the means he used to achieve an end, but withhold your judgment of his actions until you read the rest of this article.

A century ago, Hine embarked on a mission to expose child labor in the United States by graphically portraying the exploitation of children as young as seven years old. These children, Hine and many others believed, should have been in school or at home playing with friends. Instead, they toiled in some of America’s most unwholesome work environments, including canneries, mines, quarries, and fisheries.

In the South, the cotton mills drew Hine’s attention. From Virginia to Alabama, thousands of children worked in textile mills that produced the fabric that clothed a nation. In Georgia, there were dozens of these cotton factories in cities and towns like Lafayette and Athens in the north, Columbus, Macon, and Augusta in central Georgia, and Tifton in the south. Note: Read a New York Times story written February 14, 1898, reporting that because of lower wages, longer hours and lower taxation, Massachusetts Cotton Mill was shifting more of its manufacturing from Lowell, Massachusetts, to the Lindale Mill in northwest Georgia’s Floyd County near Rome.

By 1910, one in four workers in the South’s textile mills was between the ages of 10 and 15 years. These youths received a few dollars a week for tasks ranging from running heavy machinery to monitoring the thread to guard against breaks. This was perfectly legal at the time, but Hine documented many instances of children as young as seven being employed. The youngest of these were usually “dinner toters” paid to carry meals to adult laborers. Schooling for any of the children who worked in the mills was irregular at best, or quite often non-existent.

Hine, who was born in Wisconsin and worked many years in New York, came to Georgia twice to document child labor in the state’s textile mills. His first visit took place in January 1909, and the second in April 1913. (A note on the dates on photographs in the Gallery: Sometimes Hine recorded the exact day on which a photograph was taken, but more often he recorded only the month and year. When an exact date was not specified, Brown’s Guides arbitrarily assigned it to the 15th of the month in which it was taken to satisfy the dating requuirements of the Gallery software). To gain entrance to the mills, he would arrive on the grounds dressed in suit and tie, posing as a Bible salesman, fire inspector, or as an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery. When denied entry, he would linger by an entrance and photograph children as they arrived or departed.

Hine’s stratagems were usually successful, for he proved to be a prolific photographer and researcher. Of 65 reports issued by the National Child Labor Committee, he authored at least 30. He illustrated each report with scores of photographs bearing highly detailed notations right down to the ages and addresses of the children depicted.

His beautiful yet disquieting photographs brought home the humanity – and inhumanity – of child labor. Incongruously, some of his photographs show youngsters with dirty faces and bare feet, dressed in coveralls, while others feature children seemingly freshly scrubbed and wearing fine outfits. Since photography was still very much a novelty at the time, parents aware that their children were to be photographed undoubtedly dressed them for the occasion.

The undeniable beauty of Hine’s photographs and the dignity possessed by his subjects prompted some child-labor activists to complain. They felt Hine should have tried harder to exaggerate the poverty of the youngsters he portrayed.

Yet Hine was an effective and powerful opponent of child labor. He once told an audience, “Perhaps you are weary of child labor pictures. Well, so are the rest of us, but we propose to make you and the whole country so sick and tired of the whole business that when the time for action comes, child labor pictures will be records of the past.”

Thanks in no small part to Hine’s work, in 1916 Congress enacted the Keating-Owen Act that restricted employment of children under 14 in industry. “The work Hine did for this reform,” said the chairman of the National Child Labor Committee, “was more responsible than all other efforts in bringing the need to public attention.”

After finishing with child-labor work, Hine continued his social-advocacy photography. His later career included documenting poverty in the Balkans following World War I, drought and relief efforts in the Midwest during the Great Depression, and construction workers building the Empire State Building in New York City.

Despite his record of accomplishment, Hine found it difficult to earn an adequate living as a photographer. In January 1940, he lost his home to foreclosure. Ten months later, he died in extreme poverty in Dobbs Ferry, New York. His child labor photographs, though, remain a stirring memorial to his work, and all the more since they went so far to abolishing the practice.

Main Street Gallery

April 16th, 2009

 In 1985 Jeanne Kronsnoble and an artist friend opened a studio in  Clayton, Georgia, where they could create and display their own art work. Before long, Jeanne’s interest in the local folk art became a passion and she began traveling the back roads throughout the Southeast to meet artists, hear their stories and collect their work.  In 1996, the gallery moved into a larger historic storefront space to showcase the work of these self-taught artists. The three floors of the gallery abound with artwork by over seventy-five artists. The work includes wood, metal, and found object sculpture, as well as primitive furniture, paintings and Southern folk pottery. Recently, fine art, jewelry, and international pottery were added, but contemporary folk art is still the specialty.

viewgallery240.jpgMain Street Gallery has evolved over the years into one of the premier folk art galleries in the United States, and has been featured in such publications as Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens, and the New York Times.

Five among the gallery’s 75 artists are featured in this Brown’ Guide Gallery:

JOHN “CORNBREAD” ANDERSON is one of the most popular folk painters featured at Main Street Gallery. Most people know him best by his childhood nickname – Cornbread. He was raised on a farm in Lumpkin County, Georgia where he still lives. Like most country kids, he was fascinated by critters and loved to hunt in the woods, fish in the ponds, chase the farm animals around. As an adult and artist he harkens back to these experiences and records them in his paintings. Cornbread is known for a vibrant color palette and an energetic, strong style, mostly working on large panels of wood. Fox, quail, guinea hens, raccoons, deer and fish are among his favorite subjects.

DORETHEY GORHAM is one of the gallery’s most talented artists. She paints colorful landscapes and interiors in a flat style and with a great deal of detail. Her works of art are alive with activity and joy. In her interior scenes, we see intimate glimpses of family life; in her exteriors, we see thriving, busy communities. In both venues the viewer senses Dorethey’s belief in the absolute connection between man/woman and God in even the most basic aspects of every day life.

JEFFERY KRONSNOBLE earned his Bachelors degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his MFA from the University of Michigan in 1963. That year, he was hired by the University of South Florida and continued on the faculty there until his retirement in 2005. Throughout his career he has been dedicated to his studio work and exhibited regionally and nationally in group and solo shows. A 25 year retrospective exhibition of his work was presented in 1990 at the Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland and traveled to museums in Melbourne, Hollywood and Ft. Myers.  In the summer of 2008 he was featured in a one-person exhibition, “Notes on the 19th, 20th and 21st Centuries,” at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia.  Of his art, Museum Curator Jay Williams says, “Kronsnoble’s paintings and drawings are poetic commentaries - he calls them ‘notes’ - about the struggle between order and chaos in modern life and contemporary art.”Kronsnoble’s art includes a range of traditions – from landscapes, portraits and abstractions to mixed media collages, assemblages and large-scale dioramas. His work is represented in the permanent collections of art museums in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Daytona Beach, Jacksonville, New Orleans and in over 200 public, corporate and private collections.  Today he resides in Tiger, GA and Tampa, FL.

KAREN CRONER was born and raised in Arizona. She went on to San Francisco State University where she earned a B.A. in Anthropology.  Her sculptures are inspired by her childhood, her education, and her love of wildlife. She began creating papier mache works of art ten years ago when her young son asked her to make him a dragon sculpture. She fell in love with the art form. Each of her creatures is one-of-a-kind, inspired by a lot of research, photos and up-close looks at the real thing. She makes the pieces by hand and builds the sculpture with wire, then adds several layers, at least half a dozen, of papier mache, using different types of paper. She adds details with shredded paper pulp or paper clay, and then paints with acrylics and finishes it with a coat of acrylic urethane for moisture protection and durability.  These are heirloom works of art.

TOM & KAREN CASSARA are a retired couple who collaborate to make critters out of gourds. The Cassaras are both from New York and moved to Atlanta in 1972.   They owned a hair styling business until they retired in 1999. Looking around for good retirement projects, Karen started painting animals on river rocks and then one day found an interesting book on painting gourds. She thought this could be something she and Tom could do together and it has become a second business for them. Karen does the designing and painting while Tom does the preparation, cutting, and carving. They are known for the charming personalities of their critters.