When you start a new job somewhere, there’s no telling what it will lead to. I heard a story years ago about a guy that answered the phones at Industrial Light & Magic who eventually became a visual effects supervisor there. I don’t work at ILM, but my college internship produced a relationship that lasted 14 years. Plus we celebrated quite a few accolades along the journey.
In 1994 while attending the University of Georgia for Graphic Design I was fortunate enough to begin an internship with the Georgia Museum of Art, the state’s official art museum. Around that time I was also the Graphic Editor for The Red & Black student newspaper in downtown Athens. Bonnie Ramsey was the Director of Publications and Public Relations for GMOA, and she was my mentor. Bonnie had a deep passion for advertising and identity design. The very first piece I designed was for an exhibition of Art and Margo Rosenbaum’s work. It was called Shout! and I used the ‘o’ as a metaphor for a mouth shouting. Bonnie said when she saw that clever play on typography she knew we would get along quite well. After my internship ended, Bonnie and I kept in touch and nearly every year for 14 years we produced a handful of award-winning, including Best In Show, exhibition catalogs, checklists, and hard and soft cover texts. Bonnie is retired now, and I am pleased that we are collaborating on another project.
I was also fortunate to meet Lamar Dodd in his home one afternoon while he was cataloging his work. I had designed a poster earlier that year which included one of his daughter’s paintings. Per the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art website: “Founded in 1937, the School of Art is named for Lamar Dodd who as a young man in the 1920s traveled from his home in Georgia to New York to be part of the Art Student’s League. There he learned from and worked with many of the luminaries of American art. He returned to Georgia to head the Art Department at the University of Georgia from 1939 until his retirement in 1972. Under his leadership, the department grew significantly. The department was renamed the Lamar Dodd School of Art in 1996.”
Visit GMOA.
Visit the Lamar Dodd School of Art.