Tag Archives: alabama

Family Slow Drawing at Wiregrass Museum of Art in Alabama

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The Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan, Alabama, celebrated its sixth Slow Art Day on April 11, 2026, though this doesn’t tell the whole story. Dana Marie Lemmer, the Executive Director of the museum, played a key role as (volunteer) Director of Global Operators in the Slow Art Day movement from 2012 to 2014.

This year, Dana’s colleague, Janin Wise, Art Educator and School Programs & Volunteer Coordinator, hosted the Slow Art Day event using both facilitated discussion and drawing exercises.

Wise invited guests to sit with her for guided slow looking in chairs around a bench in the Marie Saliba Gallery. She started the process by asking “What first caught your eye?”, then by scanning for color and composition, and discussing the artist’s hand.

The featured artworks included:

  • “Lilly, 2022” by Sam Gilliam, an acrylic with sawdust, encaustic, and polypropylene on canvas with beveled-edge stretcher
  • “Magnitude of Regions, 1962” by Alice Trumbull Mason, an oil on canvas
  • “Prelude on Gray, 1982” by Richard Crist, an acrylic on canvas
  • “Untitled, 1960” by Angelo Granata, an ink on paper
  • “High Beams, 2020” by Derek Cracco, an acrylic on panel

Sam Gilliam’s ‘Lilly, 2022’. Photo courtesy of Joan McDonald and Janin Wise.
Alice Trumbull Mason’s ‘Magnitude of Regions, 1962’. Photo courtesy of Joan McDonald and Janin Wise.

One family with a 17-year-old daughter was drawn to the texture and color of Gilliam’s “Lilly.” When discussing Alice Trumbull Mason’s “Magnitude of Regions,” the mother expressed both empathy, seeing “sunlight through dark curtains”, and hope, after learning the artist made the work after her son’s death.

At the same time, a Korean American family, participated with an older brother translating for his mother and nonverbal younger brother. That family also appreciated the color and texture, and the geometry of Mason’s piece. Everyone who participated were astonished to learn they could literally see the artist’s hand in Gilliam’s work.

Participants engaged in slow looking and drawing exercises. Photo courtesy of Joan McDonald and Janin Wise.

For Derek Cracco’s “High Beams,” a drawing exercise was introduced that led to laughter and discussions about childhood art classes and local art opportunities. Participants folded paper into quarters and completed four different drawing tasks:

  • a 10-second quick sketch
  • drawing with their non-dominant hand
  • drawing without looking at the paper
  • a continuous line drawing where they imagined changes in time or space

Janin Wise noted that participants were surprised by how relaxing it was to spend so much time with a few pieces of art. Visitors were delighted by the calm, guided slow looking relaxing and by their newfound ability to notice new details and use their imaginations to step into the artwork.

Most did not typically consider themselves “abstract art kind of people” and yet, by slowing down, they thoroughly enjoyed the art.

Yes! That is exactly the kind of discovery Slow Art Day we hope people make.

It turns out that by simply slowing down, participants can find a new relationship to art, including art they may think they don’t like, or don’t understand.

We at Slow Art Day HQ are grateful to Janin Wise and the Wiregrass Museum of Art for their continued dedication to our slow looking movement. We look forward to seeing what they create for Slow Art Day 2027.

— Ashley, Johanna, Jessica Jane, and Phyl

P.S. View them on Instagram and their website.

Slow Walking Video at Gorgas House Museum

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For Slow Art Day 2025, students at the University of Alabama participated in a project titled Walking In It, developed under the direction of Professor Sharony Green and presented in connection with the Gorgas House Museum in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The project focused on an experimental video that encouraged people to notice walking and to think about it as something shaped by history and circumstance, not a simple experience that everyone can take for granted.

As part of the project, students enrolled in Professor Green’s Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 history courses contributed 30-second long videos of themselves walking through campus and around Tuscaloosa. These clips were combined into a single “digital quilt” bringing together repeated movement across shared spaces.

Gorgas House Museum on Slow Art Day.

The completed video was featured online and projected onto the exterior of the Gorgas House Museum on April 4, 2025, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. The projection was designed as a come-and-go experience, allowing Slow Art Day participants and passersby to encounter the work throughout the day. The setting of the projection on Gorgas House, the campus’s oldest dwelling constructed in 1829, provided historical context for the project’s focus on movement and access.

Watch the video projection:

Additional components were coordinated by Sonya Harwood-Johnson, Director of the Gorgas House Museum. These included interpretive displays featuring nineteenth-century shoes and an interactive station where members of the campus community could decorate miniature boots produced with a 3D printer, inspired by a Mexican artist’s project.

In addition to the video projection, the Slow Art Day project included a campus-wide scavenger hunt. Participants were invited to move through campus using the scavenger hunt prompts, with a prize offered to those who completed the activity.

Students also created a short video previewing the event, offering viewers a sense of the site and project setup:

The project received coverage in The Crimson White – Gorgas House hosts The University of Alabama’s submission to global Slow Art Day – the University of Alabama’s student newspaper, which reported on the Gorgas House Museum’s participation in the global Slow Art Day initiative. Across digital platforms, the project reached a wide audience, with more than 1,100 views on Instagram and over 1,200 additional views and impressions across other social media channels.

Professory Sharony Green and students.

We thank Sharony Green, Sonya Harwood-Johnson, and the participating students for their innovative Slow Art Day events, and look forward to seeing what they come up with for Slow Art Day 2026.

– Ashley, Johanna, Jessica Jane, and Phyl

P.S. Read more about the project, Walking In It: An Experimental Video, on the Gorgas House Museum website. You can follow the Gorgas House Museum on Facebook and Instagram.

The Significant Blue Bead at Gorgas House Museum in Alabama

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For their third Slow Art Day, the Gorgas House Museum, which is the oldest dwelling on the campus of the University of Alabama, hosted an event focused on a bohemian blue bead that was found behind the museum and is believed to have once belonged to an enslaved person.

Slow Art Day coordinator, Dr. Sharony Green, Associate Professor at the Department of History at the University of Alabama, asked her students to study the bead and slavery in advance of the event, then create art based on their study (some even created haikus). She then invited the campus and local community to slowly look at the bead and hear about the students’ work.

Visitors were also invited to use bead stations that were set up in the front parlor of Gorgas House to make a blue bead bracelet to commemorate the event.

Photo of one of Dr Green’s Students. Photo by Sharony Green.
Photo of two UA anthropologists studying the blue bead. Photo by Sharony Green.
Slow Art Day: The Blue Bead Project
A Blue Bead (WordPress)

Above is a preview/link to the website they used to promote the project.

The bead station at Gorgas House before the event began. Photo by Sharony Green.

Dr. Green gave us some history about the bead:

The bead was found in an outdoor cooking area and was likely owned by an enslaved person. Some researchers believe it arrived via the Pacific Northwest and was brought to the Deep South via an indigenous trade network and that it was subsequently used as a protection amulet by an enslaved worker. While we speculate, we can also study the bead and sort through its significance during the antebellum period.

Dr. Sharony Green

Here’s a link to view some of the projects from Dr. Green’s students: Blue Bead Project Catalogue, and below you can scan a few of their photos and videos. All students took either an introductory level History class or an upper level History class taught by Dr. Green.

At Slow Art Day HQ we love how Dr. Green designed this whole Slow Art Day program – and that one small object, a bead, and its deep historical significance, became the point of inspiration for Slow Art Day. Thank you to Dr. Sharony Green, and her students, for such a unique event, and we look forward to whatever they come up with for Slow Art Day 2025.

-Johanna, Ashley, Jessica Jane, and Phyl

P.S. Stay up to date with future events at the Gorgas House via their social media @TheGorgasHouse

A friendship bracelet and student sewn piece. Photo by Rebecca Johnson.

Birmingham Museum of Art hosts 9th Slow Art Day

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The Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) in Alabama — one of the founding Slow Art Day host museums back in 2010 — invited visitors in 2022 to a Slow Art Day featuring contemporary pieces of art in their collection.

Participants were invited to look at two pieces of art, including “The Deserted Studio” by artist Robert Motherwell.

Robert Motherwell, “The Deserted Studio”, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, Birmingham Museum of Art collection.

After 5-10 minutes spent individually contemplating the artworks, participants took part in a relaxed discussion hosted by Julia Stork, Master Docent at the museum.

The event was attended by BMA docent alumni alongside local Slow Art Day enthusiasts, who all appreciated the event, with one participant exclaiming “Let’s do this again sooner than next year!” (The BMA used to host Slow Art Sundays, but discontinued them when the pandemic hit — we hope they can start them up again in the future.)

We can’t wait to see what the BMA comes up with in 2023.

– Johanna, Ashley, Jessica and Phyl

Birmingham Museum of Art Celebrates 9th Slow Art Day

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The Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama participated in their 9th annual Slow Art Day, where Master Docent Marlene Wallace won new converts to the art of slowing down by observing and discussing 5 selected paintings from the museum’s collection. 

A first-time participant (above left) from the University of Alabama was so inspired that she will be writing a paper about the artwork that she and docent Marlene Wallace (above right) stood in front of: Floral Garland with Holy Family (Descriptive) by Jan van Kessel the Elder, Flemish, Antwerp 1629-1679.

When we originally started Slow Art Day, we had hoped that museums would integrate a variety of slow looking exercises into their regular programming throughout the year. The Birmingham Museum of Art was one of the first to do that when they pioneered Slow Art Sundays.

We look forward to more innovation from The Birmingham Museum of Art including participation in their 10th Slow Art Day in 2020!

Ashley