The Morris Museum of Art Goes to the Dogs

Written by Tony Valverde Friday, 27 May 2011 18:10

 

AUGUSTA, GEORGIA - It’s a Dog’s Life: Photographs by William Wegman from the Polaroid Collection opens to the public on October 11, 2008, and remains on view through January 4, 2009, at the Morris Museum of Art. The Morris Museum is the only venue in the state to host Wegman’s Polaroid Collection exhibition, which includes twenty-nine photographs by one of the art world’s best-known photographers. The prints on view feature a series of compositions involving Wegman’s now-famous pet Weimaraner, Fay Ray,successor to his original dog of the same breed, Man Ray, in a variety of poses and costumes. After Fay’s death in 1995, her offspring became his subjects and muses.

“Wegman composes his photographs very carefully, giving extraordinary attention to the pose and lighting of his subject,” commented Jay Williams, curator of the Morris Museum of Art. “Some of his Polaroid images continue Wegman’s penchant for dressing his subject in zany costumes and disguises, while others appear to be serious portraits—studies of his dog’s physical form that become studies in abstraction.”

Wegman is one of several artists who have completed special projects using Polaroid’s amazing large-format instant camera, which weighs 235 pounds. Polaroid created it to make large-format instant photography available for a wide spectrum of uses, from getting close-up magnified views of Raphael's Transfiguration for the Vatican Museum to taking color portraits of President Clinton at the White House. The photographs in the exhibition are typical of those produced using this special camera and measure 20 x 24 inches.

William Wegman (1943- ) is a pioneering contemporary artist well known for his photographs, videos, and books featuring his menagerie of Weimaraner dogs. “When we first met in Memphis, Tennessee,” Wegman writes of Fay in the 2002 publication Polaroids, “she was six months old and her name was Cinnamon Girl. I named her Fay after Fay Wray, of course…Her fur was taupe…and she had yellow eyes like in a Rousseau painting… In a short time Fay matured from a coltish youth into a Garboesque beauty. My pictures grew with her. Now she was the muse, the adored one. Skin-deep beauty became the soul of my work.”  Wegman and Fay became creatively entwined, resulting in a brilliant body of photographic work for which they are especially known.

Wegman's work is represented in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum; the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., to cite just a few. William Wegman currently resides in New York and Maine where he continues to take photographs and make drawings, paintings, and videos.

Morris Museum of Art

Founded in 1985, the Morris Museum of Art is the oldest museum in the country that is devoted to the art and artists of the American South. The museum’s permanent collection of approximately five thousand paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures, dating from the late-eighteenth century to the present, is displayed in galleries dedicated to, among other things, antebellum portraiture, the Civil War, genre painting, still life, landscape, Southern Impressionism, and Modernism in the South. It is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., and on Sunday, noon–5:00 p.m. For more information about the Morris Museum of Art, visit the museum’s web site at : www.themorris.org  or call 706-724-7501.

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