Oglethorpe University Museum of Art Winter Exhibits (fridays)

From the venue:

OUMA Collects 2025: Figurative and Female

OUMA demonstrates the breadth and diversity of our collection with an exhibition focused on women artists producing figurative works of art in a variety of media including oils, graphite, various print media, and mixed medias.

The installation includes 24 works of art by 13 artists including Nellie Mae Rowe, Yehimi Cambrón, Hattie Saussy, Pilar Martínez, Marie Laurencin, Mattie Lou O’Kelley, and Shanequa Gay among others. Most objects on view were acquired within the last ten years.

OUMA Collects 2025: Figurative & Female is organized by Elizabeth Peterson Jennings, museum director. Support was provided by Noah Dake ’23, interim collections manager and registrar.

exhibit here

Fragile Genius: Catherine Wiley and Beauford Delaney

At first glance the lives and works of Catherine Wiley and Beauford Delaney may appear incongruent. A closer examination of each reveal two artistic journeys with shockingly similar goals, aspirations and challenges. The dichotomy of the lives and brilliance of Catherine Wiley and Beauford Delaney is a fascinating riddle to the art historian. The two shared geographical origins and an early mentor in Lloyd Branson. Their respective journeys toward success showed rather a number of parallels but above all it was their brilliant artistic journeys challenged by mental illness that bonded the two with both dying in mental institutions.

The narrative of Anna Catherine Wiley has previously begun with a litany of proud and noble ancestors coupled with the assumption of storied Southern wealth from coal mines. As a proud and genteel yet headstrong spirit Wiley strived to achieve artistic acclaim in spite of the limitations imposed by gender in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After studies in New York Wiley returned to her native Knoxville to serve as one of the first instructors of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Tennessee. By the second decade of the twentieth century she would exhibit work throughout the country and won numerous awards. However, by the 1920s as Wiley endured the loss of numerous family members and her great mentor Lloyd Branson Wiley’s mental health sharply declined. By the end of the decade she was committed to the State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown, Pennsylvania where should would remain until her death in 1958.

Delaney was born in 1901 one of ten children but only four would survive to adulthood. His father was minister of the African Methodist Episcopal church and his mother a talented seamstress. In 1916 Beauford’s artistic promise was discovered by Wiley’s mentor, noted Knoxville artist Lloyd Branson By 1923 Branson urged Beauford to pursue his studies in Boston before later travels to New York and Paris. By the 1930s Delaney would exhibit work in significant venues such as the Whitney Studio Galleries (precursor to the Whitney Museum). In Paris Delaney’s work gained even greater acclaim. However, like Wiley Delaney’s mental health declined sharply in latter years. Under the guardianship of his closet friend James Baldwin, Beauford Delaney spent his final years at St. Anne’s Hospital in Paris where he died in 1979. A year earlier Delaney was the subject of a major retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

exhibit here