Georgia Museum of ArtTo kick off #PRIDE2023, here’s a work from our collection by artist Anthony Goicolea. He’s particularly close to our hearts because he started his career here, graduating from the University of Georgia with a bachelor’s degree in art history (’92) and a bachelor of fine arts degree in drawing and painting (’93). He also served as an intern at our museum at that time, taking photographs for its newsletter.
When we opened our renovated and expanded building in 2011, we featured this large-scale photograph and a video installation, both snowscapes. The 60-foot-long photograph on Plexiglas, which is hard to capture in a small square image, melds three separate frozen landscapes into one winter narrative. According to Goicolea, this scene and his other landscapes “use the aesthetics and beauty inherent to nature and the sublime to create an exaggerated pastoral scene which bears the imprint of time.”
Goicolea, an openly gay man, has often focused on queer issues and gender fluidity in his work, casting himself in Cindy Sherman-ish fashion to portray numerous characters within a photograph. In response to the Pulse nightclub massacre, the state of New York commissioned him to design its first official monument to LGBT individuals, which stands in Hudson River Park in Manhattan, near the waterfront Hudson River piers.
Goicolea’s sculpture features a series of large bronze boulders, some of which are split and filled with glass. The largest one is split but the center is empty. Inside it are two inscriptions from with quotations from Audre Lorde: “Without community there is no liberation…but community must not mean a shedding of our differences” and “Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”