The School of Art originated from the combination of art departments in the Georgia State College of Agriculture and the former Georgia State Teachers College which had been merged into UGA in 1933. Known as applied art in the College of Agriculture, it was a part of the department of Home Economics. In 1937, the University hired Lamar Dodd to the position of resident artist with a title of associate professor. The next year he was made the department head, and he earned a full professorship in 1939. With an enrollment of fifty art majors in 1937, Dodd had grown that number to 225 by 1948. Dodd brought in John Held, Jr. for the 1940-1941 school year and Jean Charlot for the 1941-1942 school year as artists in residence. Charlot adorned the Fine Arts Building with a fresco depicting music, drama and the visual arts. Dodd also began an annual art auction in 1940 of the works of student and outside artists to raise money to promote the arts. He built the permanent collection of the Art Museum and created an annual Georgia Student Art Exhibition to display the works of local high school and college students. The scope of the art department grew from public school and commercial art to all facets of artwork. The year 1940 also marked the opening of the Fine Arts building with the entire left wing being occupied by the Art Department. The central portion of the building contained a 2000-seat auditorium, and the music department occupied the right wing. In 1945, Alfred Heber Holbrook, a prominent lawyer in Manhattan for several decades, donated the Eva Underhill Holbrook Memorial Collection of American Art initially totaling 100 paintings from his personal collection to the University of Georgia in memory of his deceased wife Eva and in order that the university might found an art museum, the Georgia Museum of Art. Holbrook served as the initial director of the museum, which opened its doors in 1948, and continued to donate artwork to the collection. His collection included Winslow Homer's Sunflower for Teacher, John Singer Sargent's portrait of Joseph Jefferson as Rip van Winkle, James McNeill Whistler's Red Rosalie of Lyme Regis, George Luks's Plaza Cabbie, George Bellows' Sea Spume and canvases by John Sloane, Marsden Hartley and John Marin. Dodd headed the art school until he retired in 1972, and the school was named in his honor in 1996.
As of 2006, the art school had 1000 undergraduate and 100 graduate students and was housed in seven separate locations on the UGA campus; however, in 2008, the school of art moved into a new facility built on east campus. The $39 million building has of space. Additionally, a stand-alone facility devoted to ceramics was completed in 2011 and is located adjacent to the main building on east campus. On north campus, the Thomas Street Art Complex houses both sculpture and jewelry & metalwork, and the Broad Street Studios house the Interior Design program.
Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries
The are dedicated to understanding and promoting contemporary art as a tool and catalyst for education. The Galleries consist of five exhibition spaces that act as laboratories and testing grounds for innovation located among our classrooms and studios. Committed to the idea of art-as-research, the galleries host established and emerging artists, designers, critics, and curators of national and international stature along with interdisciplinary programming designed to question, educate and inspire. The mission of the Galleries is to challenge contemporary perceptions of art-making and promote the idea that art is essential to the production of knowledge. The Galleries produces rotating exhibitions and events that examine the cultural and social contexts around us, instigates cross-disciplinary dialogues and essential art experiences, and provides a framework for intellectual and creative inquiry.
