A Sense of Place 2025 at GHIA

      I am honored to have two pieces included in the 43rd annual juried fine art competition at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, Georgia. This national exhibit received 543 entries from 35 states, with 63 pieces chosen by juror Marshall Price, Chief Curator, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Coincidentally, I visited the Nasher in the spring and found the exhibits of contemporary art there thought-provoking and visually stimulating.
     The two artworks I contributed to this exhibit are in disparate media, one being a surrealistic landscape painting, “Midnight Pond”, and the other being a complex assemblage and sculpture piece I call “Chart for Decoding Dreams”, a work that debuted in an exhibit in Charleston earlier this year. I think they both show my penchant for orderly yet mysterious juxtapositions of shapes and objects, and are deeply personal works.
      My family has a bit of history with the GHIA. My grandmother, Faith Cornish Murray, had an exhibit of her paintings there during one of the first exhibit seasons in 1937. She was known as a member of the “Charleston Renaissance” and a proponent of modern art. My mother, Faith Murray Britton, made puppets and performed with a puppet theater associated with the Institute in the early 1950s, and met my father in Augusta. Back in 1982, I had an artwork exhibited at what was then called the Gertrude Herbert Memorial Art Institute in a juried regional show. I was living in Atlanta at that time and making works on paper, etchings and large charcoal drawings.
      David and I enjoyed driving to Augusta to drop off the artworks and explore a bit of the old part of Augusta. To me, these old Southern towns are both nostalgic and ripe with possibilities. The GHIA is housed in a lovely Federal style building dating to 1818. The buildings in the neighborhood and nearby commercial streets are partly empty and boarded up and partly gentrifying, like many historic main streets. There are some exceedingly ugly structures from the 1960s or 70s as well. We visited the Morris Museum of Art and found a well-put-together survey of Southern art in chronological order. I especially enjoyed studying the contemporary section, with large figurative works by artists known to me like Manning Williams and Wolf Kahn, and new such as Terry Rowlett and Virginia Derryberry. Augusta also has a riverside walk that we didn’t have time to take advantage of but will look forward to visiting in future.
      The exhibit will open in the Main Gallery at GHIA with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. on September 5 and will be on view through October 10. For more information go to www.ghia.org/exhibits/sense-of-place2025.