About The DoGood Fund
The Do Good Fund, Inc. is a Columbus, Georgia based public charity. Since its founding in 2012, the fund has focused on building a museum-quality collection of photographs taken in the American South since World War II. The collection ranges from works by more than twenty Guggenheim Fellows to images by lesser known and emerging photographers working in the region.
Do Good’s mission is to make its collection of more than 600 images broadly accessible through regional museums, nonprofit galleries, and nontraditional venues and to encourage complementary, community-based programming to accompany each exhibition.
Statement from Curator Birney Imes
The South has long been recognized as a land dense with stories. Tellers of these stories, working in both the literary and oral tradition, are widely celebrated. The same material these storytellers have drawn from has provided abundant material for visual storytellers, who have also mined this rich vein with success. The superlative collection of more than 700 photographs amassed in less than 10 years by Alan Rothschild of The Do Good Fund, offers ample proof of this assertion. A selection of these pictures, chosen for the two concurrent exhibitions at the Rosenzweig Arts Center and the MUW Galleries, mirrors shifting trends of photography in general.
For much of the 20th century, photographers in the largely agrarian South often hewed to the documentary tradition. Their work explored the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow; the complex ties between its people and the verdant, irrepressible landscape; the fundamental act of living one’s life, often in spare circumstances. A selection of these images, the “Then” exhibit, are on display at the Rosenzweig.
More recently, young, often urban-based photographers began to use the medium in a more introspective way to comment on and explore such issues as gender, sexuality, race and the environment. These pictures, comprising the “Now” exhibit, are on view at The W. In curating these two exhibitions, I have tried to delineate between these two trends. Certainly, there is crossover among the two groups, but, as the viewer will see in both cases, the Southern tradition of visual storytelling remains persistent and compelling.
Birney Imes
Columbus, Mississippi
August 19, 2021
Sydney Gruber in Artist Alley
Bio
Sydney Gruber invites you to connect with her world of raw energy through the mirror of art by exploring the relationship between the internal and external. She specializes in creating sublime meditation paintings that draw people towards the pulse of life in color. Moving through her like harnessed electricity, Sydney plays the role of interpreter and intuitively layers her colors and textures to chronicle experiences and environments. From large focal point paintings to signature chess sets, Sydney encourages you to consider abstractions and sensory impressions. She strives to match reason with passion and oscillate between living like the salt of the earth and sucking the nectar out of life.
Sydney works full-time as a creative in Alabama and enjoys her role in this modern art renaissance by pursuing expression, connecting authentically, and living in the discovery.
Artist Statement
Moving through me like harnessed electricity, my colors are layered and mixed intuitively to express raw energy and capture the pulse of life. Like a meditation, natural movements and emotions guide my hand during the creation process, and when I’m in flow—it’s like a force of nature moves through my body until I hit canvas. I create large focal point abstracts and signature hand-painted chess sets that are now sold internationally. My paint is applied with heavy texture, kissed with gold leaf, and varnished with high gloss resin as smooth as glass. When I paint, I am exploring internal and external space and giving myself to the canvas. While seeking myself, I have found a lot people and it’s a pleasure to connect with the world through art. I strive to match reason with passion and oscillate between living like the salt of the earth and sucking the nectar out of life.