Pattern and Palette in Print: Gentry Magazine and a New Generation of Trendsetters

March 17–June 17, 2012

A collaboration with undergraduate fabric-design students at UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, this exhibition takes as its inspiration Gentry magazine, a 1950s men’s lifestyle magazine that artfully captured nearly a decade of trends in menswear, with special emphasis on textiles and color. As part of a lesson in color forecasting and its significance to

fabric design, students were asked to find inspiration in the pages of Gentry and in other 1950s-era media for creating a relevant master color palette, which they ap-plied to patterns of their own design, inspired by imagery and themes in the magazine.

The exhibition consists of all 22 Gentry magazine covers, the students’ patterns, a small selection of period menswear and gift items for women frequently advertised in the magazine and ob-jects from the Color Association of the United States, including a book of original color forecasts for 1949–1954. The exhibition features interior pages of both Gentry and American Fabrics magazines to illustrate the students’ sources of inspiration as well as period color trends.

Front, top: Gentry, no. 11, Summer 1954, Japanese woodcut by Yanagawa Shigenobu, 1820

Front, bottom: Alice Serres, Koi Meditation, 2010–11

Back: (left) Gentry, no. 10, Spring 1954, drawing of a Japanese actor, 19th century

(right) Cleveland Covington, Flower Sermon, 2010–11

Curators: Mary Koon, editor, Georgia Museum of Art; Clay McLaurin, fabric design chair, Lamar Dodd

School of Art; and Susan Hable Smith, creative director, Hable Construction

Gallery: Dorothy Alexander Roush and Martha Thompson Dinos Galleries

Sponsors: The W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art

Students were asked to find inspiration in the pages of Gentry and in other 1950s-era media for creating a relevant master color palette, which they applied to patterns of their own design.