Reflecting on Rembrandt: Lamar Dodd Collaborative Student Exhibition with GMOA

In the fall of 2019, students from ARHI 4310/6310 and ARST 3315 worked in collaboration with the Georgia Museum of Art in order to create and organize a unique exhibition honoring the legacy of Rembrandt van Rign.

Students in ARHI 4310/6310, an upper-level undergraduate and graduate art history class on Northern baroque art at UGA taught by Professor Shelley Zuraw, worked with museum staff to organize an exhibition in honor of the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death in 1669. Inspired by Rembrandt’s extraordinary facility and fame as an etcher, this exhibition seeks to consider his own development over a 40-plus-year career as well as the response of other artists from the 17th through the 21st century. The exhibition also includes responses to Rembrandt’s prints made by studio art students in Professor Mark Callahan’s ARST 3315 class on etching.  

This exhibition of prints selected and created by students in the Lamar Dodd School of Art commemorates the artist’s profound impact, especially as a printmaker. For most students in ARST 3315 Printmaking: Etching, the works in this exhibition represent some of their first efforts with this demanding medium and a response to the tradition of viewing Rembrandt as a guide and standard of achievement.

Orchestrating this demonstration of influence, students in ARHI 4310/6310 Northern Baroque Art combined these contemporary works with prints by Rembrandt, his peers, and his followers. Their choices reveal both the extent of Rembrandt’s own interests in technique and composition as well as the impact these had on artists and viewers to follow. Students in ARHI 4310/6310 and ARST 3315 created prints using the same techniques employed by Rembrandt in the seventeenth century, through etching on copper plates and then using a printing press.

This unique collaboration between Professor Callahan and Professor Zuraw and their students resulted in the exhibition currently on display at the Georgia Museum of Art. This exhibition also presented a unique opportunity for Dodd undergraduate and graduate students to curate a museum exhibition, as well as undergraduate student artwork to be featured in a museum exhibition. Make sure to visit the Georgia Museum of Art to see Reflecting on Rembrandt: 500 Years of Etching, on display from January 18 to April 19. Join students and faculty from both courses for a discussion of the exhibition.

Tillie Allen, Tillie Drawing at a Window