As the Georgia Museum of Art celebrates the 75th anniversary of our museum, with an open house and birthday party scheduled for November 5, we’re looking back at our history. This time: the 2000s.
The move to a state-of-the-art building on East Campus in 1996 helped usher in the new millennium for the museum. It made moves toward expanding the research it enabled as part of UGA, with the founding of the Henry D. Green Center for the Study of the Decorative Arts and the Pierre Daura Center, both of which hold archives.
The bigger space meant the museum could now host more exhibitions of all kinds and it did just that, but it needed still more room to display selections from its permanent collection year-round. An expansion and renovation broke ground in early 2009, and the expanded building reopened in January 2011, with a new wing for the collection and the Jane and Harry Willson Sculpture Garden.
That gallery space continues to serve the museum well, facilitating educational outreach and programming of all kinds. The museum’s research initiatives continue to thrive, and it hosts thousands of UGA students every year for class visits and tours. Other students pursue internships, valuable experiential learning that lets them participate in behind-the-scenes work. A new director, David Odo, took the helm this summer and is poised to make his own mark on the museum’s history and impact as an institution for the UGA campus and the state of Georgia. Stay tuned for what the next decade will bring at the Georgia Museum of Art.