The Beach Institute has a long and storied history. It was built in 1867 as the first school for African Americans in Savannah by the Freedmen’s Bureau. The American Missionary Association was concerned that newly freed slaves, who would build the building, learned how to read and write. It was named after Alfred Beach who was the editor of Scientific American and purchaser of the land for the building.

There were six hundred students in the first year. In 1875 as the public school system took root in Savannah Beach Institute was turned over to the Savannah Board of Education. Along the way it became the birthplace of First Congregational Church and the Savannah Boy’s Club. After the official closing of the school, it rented the basement of the building to the Savannah Boy’s Club, the first floor to a family as a residence, and the second floor to the city school board. In 1939, the building was sold to the Board of Public Education for $5,000. For the next few decades, it operated as the Harris Street Elementary School. After the integration of public schools in 1972, the building was used as the Harris Reading Center and Harris Adult Education Center.

In 1988, the building was sold to Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) as part of a four-school package for $500,000. The following year, SCAD donated the building to the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation, who maintains ownership of the building today. The Institute now serves as an African-American Cultural Center and offers a full schedule of programs and three art exhibits a year which feature arts and crafts with an African-American influence. But the backbone of the collection is the wood carvings by Ulysses Davis, a renowned folk artist.

Ulysses Davis was born in 1914 in Fitzgerald, GA. He and his wife Elizabeth would move to Savannah in 1942, where he lived for 48 years, raising six sons and three daughters. He opened a barbershop in which he earned his living and created his art. He sculpted pieces out of wood that displayed fantasy, patriotism, love, religion, humor, African heritage, and historical subjects. He rarely sold his work. He said, “They’re my treasure. If I sold these, I’d be really poor.” But his work slowly became legendary. He displayed his art in his barbershop. Many people would visit not to receive a trim but to see his collection of carved sculptures. His collection would number over three hundred before he was finished. He gathered wood from lumberyards or friends who brought him pieces. He would take a long hard look at the wood and begin carving what had come to his mind without preliminary drawings. He used a hatchet, hand saw, his barbering tools, chisel and knives, and tools he crafted himself.

His most famous works were his carved busts of forty presidents. One of his granddaughters recalled Davis sitting in front of the television on election night, a block of wood in hand, ready to start carving a bust of the winner. When asked how long it took him to carve a piece he replied in his usual philosophical way,”. "I work in time", he said "and in time I'll finish."

As word spread of his work the world wanted to see it.  He was included in the 1977 exhibit, “Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art: 1770-1976,” which was displayed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. “That was one of his proudest moments,” Milton Davis said of his father’s participation in the “Missing Pieces” exhibit.

He presented President Jimmy Carter with a hand-carved portrait, which is now on permanent display at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta. In 1982, a selection of his works were featured in the landmark exhibition “Black Folk in America: 1930-1980” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In the 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980″ at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., his work was celebrated as important examples of African American vernacular art.

All of this recognition led to his being awarded a Georgia Governor’s Award in the Arts in 1988. Davis would die in 1990. He had longed wished his work would stay together and remain in Savannah. But where would it rest? His family wanted his wishes to be fulfilled. It took an eighteen month campaign and a community wide effort by the King-Tisdell Cottage Foundation; they raised over a quarter million dollars to purchase the collection. The collection officially debuted in 1996.

In 2009 a selection of 80 pieces from the Ulysses Davis Folk Art Collection traveled to the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and other top art venues. His work continues to mesmerize and thrill people throughout the United States. When “The Treasure of Ulysses Davis” traveled to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution named the show one of the top 10 art exhibitions of the year for 2009.

“In many ways, Ulysses Davis’ artwork is a paradox,” says Susan Mitchell Crawley, the High Museum’s curator of folk art. “Its sources could range from prosaic advertising images to the artist’s extravagant imagination, its moods from whimsical fantasy to solemn dignity, its forms from lavishly ornamental to radically simplified. Yet despite these extremes, it is always recognizable as his.”

​A simple gift of a pocket knife led to his earliest piece in the collection at the Beach Institute, titled “First Man”. He carved it at the age of 10. That gift would lead to a life of art celebrated around our country. Ulysses Davis remains one of Savannah’s greatest artists and one of the nation’s greatest folk artist.

It may surprise some people that a Savannahian was once the leading authority and some would say power of the modern and contemporary art movement. Kirk Varnedoe was said to be an early couch potato. He did not love sports and played at academics. But at the age of eleven he decided he wanted to be an athlete and a scholar. Thus began years of hard study and a desire not only to play sports but to be the best. He soon would succeed at both. It was as though he laid in his cocoon for as long as he could before he sprung into the world with his grace, beauty, and intelligence. Was it some knowing inside that his life would not be long thus he wanted it to be long enough?
He would suddenly desire to be sent to St. Andrews in Delaware a preparatory school to challenge himself. At St. Andrews his caricatures ran in the school yearbook and to everyone’s surprise he became a star in several different sports and graduated valedictorian of his class. He would continue to do the same at Williams College playing football and excelling in academics.

His brother Sam Varnedoe, a philosophy professor, remarked about the new Kirk," I guess I have to say he's one of the most competitive people I've ever met. I've played squash with him and you would not want to give up a point needlessly when you play Kirk Varnedoe. He is 57 places in the court at once."

After Williams College he became a doctoral student at Stanford University. He studied under Albert Elsen, a Rodin scholar, which led to his first major exhibition of Rodin drawings at the National Gallery in 1971. Following his graduation from Stanford he taught there and then later at Columbia and in 1980 he was appointed associate professor at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
IN 1984 his genius was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship which awarded him a “genius prize”.  He used the grant to write a history of modernism, ''A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern.'' He borrowed the title from a plaque near the Rugby School in England honoring William Webb Ellis, ''who, with a fine disregard for the rules, invented the game of rugby.'' Varnedoe who had played rugby player proposed Ellis's mad dash with the ball as a metaphor for artistic innovation.

He wrote in the book,” There was nothing inevitable about the stylizing course of modern picturemaking: It was directly contingent on these few artists' "fine disregard" of the status quo, and on their constant willingness to rewrite the rules of art.” A fine disregard of the rules became the rule. This would also be the theme of his new job as the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. He held this position from 1988 to 2001.

His tenure at the MOMA would turn the art world on its ear. He initiated the Artists Choice series. Artists -- Scott Burton, Elizabeth Murray, Chuck Close, John Baldessari, Ellsworth Kelly -- were invited to organize exhibitions of works from the museum's permanent collection. Mr. Varnedoe explained, ''I would really like the public to see the collection through the eyes of the people to whom it means the most.'' This allowed contemporary artists to critique and define the modern masters. A power shift was going on at the MOMA.

He also invited himself to rearrange the collection. He sold four paintings to purchase a Van Gogh that he thought was more pertinent to where the museum should go. Critics were appalled. He acquired paintings of the 60s and 70s: James Rosenquist's iconic pop mural ''F-16,'' Andy Warhol's famous suite of soup-can paintings and major works by Richard Serra, Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Cy Twombly and others. He was determined to contemporize and reshape the museum's collection. As if his new purchases were not enough to disturb his critics he began the crusading art shows.
In 1990 with his former student and critic Adam Gopnik with the New Yorker he did the ''High & Low' art show.  It was a historical survey that put contemporary artists with the masters. And worst of all to his critics it assumed you knew about the masters and spent more time developing the contemporary artists and their philosophies and art. It questioned the connection if any of the modern masters to popular culture. The implication of the exhibit was art needed to speak of the here and now and who was better to do that than contemporary artists.

He did individual retrospectives that questioned the artists as products of their times but as geniuses breaking the mold of their times to push art forward. So a Jackson Pollock retrospective in 1998, which he organized with Pepe Karmel, a former student, and retrospectives of Jasper Johns (1996) and Cy Twombly (1994). Symbolically what he was doing to the interpretation of Modern Art was seen in the realistic-looking dynamite (actually a clock that would be ticking) sitting on his desk.

Nothing could stop him as he stood regal like above the noise paving a path for the modern art museum. It was 2001 that he discovered he had incurable cancer.  In 2002, Varnedoe stepped down at MoMA to be the fourth professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The athletic, debonair, motorcycle rider, and art scholar needed to slow down.  This would give him time to write the Mellon Lectures which he was to deliver at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring. His subject was to be abstraction since 1945, not normally a barnburner of a subject. The lecture was to be  called "Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock." He would give one final series of lectures to define his position on Modern art. On the days of his lecturers the lines were long as the public and scholars gathered outside of the National Gallery of Art to hear the master speak. It would be one of his last lectures. He spoke without notes for the six lectures. He had mastered the subject long ago. He concluded the series with these words. "I have shown it to you. It has been done. It is being done. And because it can be done, it will be done. And now I am done." He died on August 14th, 2003.

​Varnedoe would leave a legacy of 18 books, students of his such as Gopnik, Jeffrey Weiss, head of the department of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery, and Pepe Karmel, formerly a curator at MoMA and now an associate professor of fine arts at NYU and many others. A change in the way modern and contemporary art is viewed. He is also honored by the Kirk Varnedoe collection of works on paper; artists who he worked with throughout his career donated in his memory to the newly built Moshe Sofide building, the Jepson Center. The Jepson Center challenged Savannah with the place of contemporary buildings in a historic district.  The collections include Jasper Johns, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Richard Avedon among others. Out of his cocoon arose a butterfly whose life though short was filled. He was a man for our time.

​Savannah has three art museums: Telfair Museums, SCAD MOA, and Beach Institute. Each has unique collections ranging from a celebrated folk artist, a leading African American artist collection, one of the great photographers of the 20th century, the largest collection of Kahlil Gibran’s art in North America, American Impressionists, silver,  and others. These collections have come into the museums’ possession because of the connections of Savannahians themselves have brought them into the three museums collections. For the next few weeks I would like to look at the stories of a few of these individuals. The first is Mary Haskell Minis.
Mary Haskell Minis once wrote, ‘"I am thinking of other museums ... the unique little Telfair Gallery in Savannah, Ga., that Gari Melchers chooses pictures for. There when I was a visiting child, form burst upon my astonished little soul." Mary had a cousin who lived in Savannah that she visited often and during those trips she would venture to the Telfair Museum. Gari Melchers a prominent American artist who was married to a Savannah woman Connie Lawton was creating a stir as he was amassing for the Telfair a prominent collection of American Impressionists and Ash Can School paintings. The museum was the first art museum in the South and the first museum founded by a woman in the United States, Savannah philanthropist Mary Telfair. Mary Haskell would come to Savannah to take care of her cousin during an illness from which she died. A year later she would marry her cousin’s husband a man from one of the first families to settle in Savannah Jacob Florence Minis.
Mary had been born into a wealthy South Carolina family and had received a good education. She ran a girls’ school in Boston. Her marriage to Minis allowed her to become an even greater patron of artists. It was here in Boston she would meet the painter Kahlil Gibran. Gibran at their meeting had not yet established a writing career. His work was being shown at the Day
Gallery and was attracting attention but to everyone’s horror the Gallery caught on fire and all of Gibran’s paintings were burned. While this must have been a gut wrenching experience it helped him to move strictly from a painting career to a career from which he would gain international fame: writing. He wrote at the encouragement and request of Mary. Mary had become his patron, guide and most say lover. She encouraged him to write in English because this language would help him gain international notice. He would eventually write his classic The Prophet. Gibran as William Blake before him would include in his book drawings that helped to amplify his written word. The Prophet was the second best-selling book in the nineteenth century, the sales only behind the Bible.
Although after their meeting and forming a relationship, she would move to Savannah in 1924 and marry Minis in 1926 the two never lost their passion for one another. Gibran would write of her:
When I am unhappy, dear Mary, I read your letters. When the mist overwhelms the “I” in me, I take two or three letters out of the little box and reread them. They remind me of my true self. They make me overlook all that is not high and beautiful in life. Each and every one of us, dear Mary, must have a resting place somewhere. The resting place of my soul is a beautiful grove where my knowledge of you lives.
Gibran died in New York City on April 10, 1931. Gibran left most of his studio and its belongings to Mary. He expressed the wish that he be buried in Lebanon. To fulfill this wish Mary Haskell and his sister Mariana purchased the Mar Sarkis Monastery in Lebanon, which has since become the Gibran Museum. The words written next to Gibran's grave are "a word I want to see written on my grave: I am alive like you, and I am standing beside you. Close your eyes and look around, you will see me in front of you ...."
Mary also favored the museum she had first discovered form with over eighty works of Gibran, the Telfair Museum of Art. This collection is the largest in the United States. Excerpts of the over six hundred letters between Mary and Gibran were published in "Beloved Prophet" in 1972. In the letters they call each other “Beloved,” and talk about “greater selves” and how their meeting had transformed their lives. She also with her gift to the Telfair Museum was able to pay back the insight a museum once gave her.