GC Art Lecturer Ernesto Gomez discusses a photo in the Inspired Georgia Exhibit. The exhibit is on display from now until Oct. 26. 

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — One of Georgia’s premiere artist showcases is hanging at Georgia College this week. 

The Inspired Georgia art exhibition, a collection of contemporary photos from artists throughout the state, will be on display at Georgia College’s Ennis Hall through Oct. 26. The exhibit features more than 40 photographs on a variety of subjects, combining to create a cross-section of the state’s most talented visual artists.

“To my knowledge, this is the first time where we’ve actually exhibited photography and poetry together,” said GC art professor Ernesto Gomez. “It’s based on a book which is titled Inspired Georgia, and all the photos and the prose are from Georgia artists, so it’s all regional to our state. To have them all here has been really special.”

For the past several weeks the show, a joint project of the Georgia Council for the Arts, Georgia’s Poet Laureate Judson Mitcham, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, and the Georgia Humanities Council, has travelled around the state in support of the book of the same name. The book combines the more than 40 photos on display at the exhibit with entries from some of Georgia’s most talented poets, blending poetry and photographs together in a unique collection of the state’s finest contemporary art. 

“My colleague, Alan Gee, from the English and Rhetoric Department was up in Athens at the precursor to this exhibit, and was speaking either to Judson Mitcham or to Karen Paty herself with the Georgia Council [for the Arts] saying that the show was fantastic” said Gomez. “He told them he would love to bring it down to Georgia College, and it happened right there. Alan contacted Carlos [Herrera, Gomez’s colleague in the Department of Art] and myself maybe last March, maybe February.”

Since the middle of September and continuing into next April, the exhibit will be on display in cities across the state. After leaving Milledgeville, the show will grace galleries in Rome, Vidalia, Statesboro and Albany, covering as nearly as many places as the photographers themselves. At the exhibit’s opening in Ennis Hall earlier this month, attendees took in readings from four Inspired Georgia poets including Mitcham himself, a two-time winner of the Townsend Prize for Fiction. In both prose and photographs, Inspired Georgia highlights images and subject matter that are uniquely fitting to Georgia, ranging from the lowest marshlands of Georgia’s coast to high atop its northern mountains.

“The South has been really hot in terms of photography in the last 10 years, and the exhibit is a great cross-section of what’s happening in the region,” said Gomez. “It speaks to family, to the Southern landscape, which is very diverse and very attractive image-wise, and also to he people. Some of the photographs of people are just amazing. … You see Southern living. Some of it’s tough, some of it’s honest, some of it’s beautiful — you get that kind of Flannery 

O’Connor darkness, and then you also get that very happy, beautiful feeling as well.”

In bringing some of the state’s finest art to Georgia College, Gomez and his colleagues hope to turn the exhibit into a learning experience, both for people wanting to take in the works and for students in the Department of Art. The art lecturer, who is actually a sculptor by training, said that in addition to inspiring them with the actual works in the gallery, he has tried to impress upon his students the importance of behind-the-scenes work required to bring an art exhibition together. The day before the exhibit is scheduled to be taken down, Gomez and Inspired Georgia will give away a copy of the book before the exhibit travels to Rome for two weeks. Although the exhibit will be a valuable learning experience for his students and for local residents, Gomez said he simply wants to share the beauty of photography with anyone wishing to take it in.

“I tell my students that the beauty of photography is that it captures a moment,” he said. “They’re always taking pictures with their phones, and I’m guilty of it, too, of making an image. You might go back and look at that image on your phone, pinch it, and blow it up, and you see more detail. You might say ‘Wow, I was standing right there live, and I didn’t notice that there was a bee on that flower’, and I think that’s the beauty of it. … Not to be ‘punny’, but that saying, ‘Stop and smell the roses’? That’s what that saying means. Take time to look at it, take it in, and engage a different sense.”

The Inspired Georgia photography exhibit will be on display at Georgia College’s Leland Gallery from now until Thursday, Oct. 26. The gallery is located in GC’s Ennis Hall next door to the Magnolia Ballroom, and is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The exhibit is free and open to the public.