ATHENS, GA.- According to feminist artist Judy Chicago, work by women artists makes up only 3 to 5 percent of major permanent collections in the U.S. and Europe. Southern artists are also underrepresented, and work by southern women artists is rare. The exhibition “Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection” features 42 of the latter and made its debut at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia. On view June 30 through September 23, it focuses on works by women who worked throughout the South between the late 1880s and 1960 and is organized by the Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the University of South Carolina Press has issued a companion publication of the same name in which several notable art historians offer insight on the achievements of these artists. Each artist faced different challenges but all of them faced the challenge of being a woman artist during a period in the history of the American South in which women’s social, cultural and political roles were changing and being redefined.

Nell Blaine (1922–1996), one of the featured artists, wrote, “Art is central to my life. Not being able to make or see art would be a major deprivation,” supplying the title for the exhibition. The Virginia artist painted from a wheelchair after suffering from polio, and although she was hailed in her day, her name is not well known now.

“Central to Their Lives” features sculptures, drawings and paintings by artists such as Minnie Evans, Anne Goldthwaite, Clementine Hunter, Nell Choate Jones, Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer, Alma Thomas, Mary Leath Thomas, Augusta Savage, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner and Kate Freeman Clark. The exhibition takes time to highlight the story of each. Clark, for example, signed her paintings “Freeman Clark” to disguise her gender and never sold any of her work in deference to her mother, who strongly disapproved of ladies conducting business. Savage left her small Florida hometown with only five dollars in her pocket, attempting to escape prejudice and poverty. She became a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, where she served as a teacher and mentor to important African American artists of the postwar era. Thomas, born in Columbus, Georgia, only began to paint seriously after she retired from 38 years as a public school art teacher in Washington, D.C. She was also the first African American woman artist to receive a solo exhibition at a major national arts institution.

William U. Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art and a strong proponent of this project, says this exhibition is a collection of works by “prominent or preeminent, but neglected, southern women artists.” He continues, “I’m most excited that, in addition to the exhibition itself, there is a catalogue, and that the exhibition and the catalogue will spur further research on a neglected and too often forgotten group of artists from the South.” Although the exhibition displays work by 42 women, the catalogue includes a substantial index of thousands more.