Join us for a screening of the documentary Mary Crovatt Hambidge: Whistler, Wanderer, Weaver, Utopian (by Hal Jacobs) and a discussion afterwards with Virginia Troy, author of Dynamic Design: Jay Hambidge, Mary Crovatt Hambidge, and the Founding of the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. Virginia is a scholar of twentieth century art and design and will share her experience researching the new book. She will be joined by Donna Mintz and Jamie Badoud. Donna Mintz, who also contributed a chapter to the book, will discuss her perspective and insights, while Hambidge Executive Director Jamie Badoud will share how the Center aims to carry forward Mary Hambidge’s legacy. This event will be held in the Fourth Floor Gallery of Decatur Library.

*Please note, Eventbrite is limiting the number of free tickets we can make available, so note that tickets are not required for this event. Please come even if it's sold out, and feel free to call if you're worried about space. Stay tuned for updates on the Georgia Center for the Book ticketing.

About the Book:

Mary Crovatt Hambidge (1885–1973) was an aspiring actress and a professional whistler on Broadway when she met Canadian-born Jay Hambidge (1867–1924), an artist, illustrator, and scholar. Their relationship would prove to be both a romantic and an artistic partnership. Jay Hambidge formulated his own artistic concept, known as Dynamic Symmetry, which stipulated that the compositional rules found in nature’s symmetry should be applied to the creation of art. Mary Hambidge pioneered new techniques of weaving and dyeing fabric that merged Greek methods with Appalachian weaving and spinning traditions. The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, formed during the mid-1930s, provides an artists’ community situated on six hundred rural acres in the north Georgia mountains where hundreds of visual artists, writers, potters, composers, dancers, and other artists have pursued their crafts.

Dynamic Design details Jay Hambidge and Mary Crovatt Hambidge’s cross-cultural and cross-historical explorations and examines their lasting contributions to twentieth-century art and cultural history. Virginia Gardner Troy illustrates how Jay and Mary were important independently and collectively, providing a wider understanding of their lives within the larger context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and design. They were from two different worlds, nearly a generation apart in age, and only together for ten years, but their lives intertwined at a pivotal moment in their development. They shared parallel goals to establish a place where they could integrate the arts and crafts around the principles of Dynamic Symmetry.

Troy explores how this dynamic duo’s ideas and artistic expressions have resonated with admirers throughout the decades and reflect the trends and complexities of American culture through various waves of cosmopolitanism, utopianism, nationalism, and isolationism. The Hambidges’ prolific partnership and forward-thinking vision continue to aid and inspire generations of aspiring artists and artisans.

About the Author:

VIRGINIA GARDNER TROY is a scholar of twentieth-century art and design and a professor of art history at Berry College. She is the author of three books, The Modernist Textile: Europe and America, 1890-1940 and Anni Albers , Ancient American Textiles: From Bauhaus to Black Mountain, and Dynamic Design. She has also published articles on mid-twentieth-century weaving, Appalachian weaving, Marie Cuttoli, and many other subjects. She lives in Rome, Georgia.

About Donna Mintz:

Donna Mintz is a visual artist who writes about art and literature. Her painting and installation is a meditation on memory, time, and place and can be found in the permanent collections of such institutions as the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Mobile Museum of Art. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Sculpture magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Swing, and the arts journals Burnaway.org and ArtsATL.org where she is a regular contributor. Mintz is a past writer-in-residence at Rivendell Writers’ Colony, a fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. A current studio artist at Atlanta Contemporary, she holds an MFA from Sewanee’s School of Letters at the University of the South and recently completed a book on writer James Agee.

About Jamie Badoud- Executive Director, The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences (Rabun Gap, GA):

Mr. Badoud joined The Hambidge Center as Executive Director in 2009 and previously served in a similar role leading Art Papers Magazine for seven years. He successfully transformed both organizations from struggling to thriving through strategic growth initiatives focused on dynamic programming, grass-roots marketing, unconventional partnerships and fiscal responsibility. Formally trained in both studio art and accounting at Auburn University, Badoud leads from a broad spectrum of skills and experiences. He served as a medic in the U.S. Army Reserves for eight years and has worked as a CFO and public accountant. He currently serves on the Drew Charter School’s STEAM Advisory Board and has chaired FCAC funding panels and served as a panelist for AIA Awards, as well as GCA and City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs.

About the Documentary:

The project began in fall 2014 and included interviews with people who either knew Mary Hambidge or have written about her. Originally planned as a 8-10 minute film, the story kept getting more interesting with more details, resulting in this 30-minute noncommercial documentary. Archival images were graciously donated by Philis Alvic and the Atlanta History Center, which has over 1,100 textile pieces of Mary, as well as her papers.

Southern Shorts Festival: WINNER, BEST DOCUMENTARY AWARD. Nominations for Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematographer (Joe Boris & Henry Jacobs) and Best Sound Design.

Limited funding was provided by the Hambidge Center and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts. Music was generously provided by Takénobu (“Moonshine Still”), Lance and April Ledbetter at Dust-to-Digital, and others. Without Jamie Badoud's enthusiastic support at the Hambidge Center, the documentary would have never gotten off the ground.

About the project, from Hal Jacobs (creator):

I stumbled across Mary Hambidge's story while doing some pro bono editing for a nationally known artists' retreat, The Hambidge Center. The pieces of her story intrigued me: raised in a small southern town on the coast of Georgia only twenty years after the end of the Civil War, educated at an elite boarding school in the Northeast, moved to New York to become an actress AND became a professional whistler, fell in love with the much older (and much married) Jay Hambidge (a well-known illustrator and design theorist), then moved to the north Georgia mountains by herself (now in her early forties) to begin a weaving/farming enterprise, to which she dedicated the rest of her life (more than thirty years). By the end of life she had become something of a colorful eccentric, especially for the Atlanta newspaper columnists. But the deeper I looked, the more I found to respect. She was a woman endlessly fascinated by life, especially its natural beauty. She adopted the creed of Jay Hambidge's dynamic symmetry, related to the Golden Mean. She sought to live her life in balance with nature. As well as encourage other artists to do so. At the end of life, she could have moved to New York City (where she spent most of her winters) and lived in comfort. But she chose to remain in her little log cabin and watch over her 800 acres of pastures, streams, and rolling hills so that it would become a haven for other artists, which it now is.

Learn more at https://www.hjacobscreative.com/maryhambidge