Luis Lozowick, a Ukrainian-born American artist, created this lithograph on white wove paper in 1930. It was on loan from the Brooklyn Museum.Courtesy Georgia Museum of Art/ University of Georgia

John Roebling was an artist.

That's obvious to Sara Kate Gillespie, a Brooklyn native and curator of American art at the University of Georgia Museum of Fine Art in Athens, Ga.

Last fall Gillespie coordinated the museum's three-month exhibition, “Icon of Modernism: Representing the Brooklyn Bridge, 1883—1950.”

The exhibition included 40 paintings, watercolors, works on paper and photographs, all depictions inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge.

“When it opened, the Brooklyn Bridge was a phenomenon, and many commemorative objects featuring the bridge were produced,” Gillespie said. “Other museums have shown the wide variety of these objects, but we decided to focus on the aesthetic portion alone.”

Gillespie chose works of art created between the completion of the bridge in 1883 and the mid-20th century to show how artistic representations of it changed over time, even as it symbolized modernity for different generations.

[naviga:h3]Saxonburg to Athens[/naviga:h3]

It might seem strange for a Georgia College campus to host an exhibition on a structure so tied to New York City and the founder of Saxonburg, John A. Roebling. who designed and built the bridge, and is credited with inventing the steel wire rope without which the bridge would not stand.

However, descendants of Roebling lived in Athens for many years and were supporters of the community and the university.

Portraits of Roebling's son and daughter-in-law, Ferdinand William Roebling and Margaret Allison Roebling, are prominently displayed in the museum's permanent collection galleries.

Ferdinand Roebling was the brother and business associate of Washington Roebling, who took over and completed construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when their father died in the midst of construction. Ferdinand Roebling was a board director of Otis Elevator, a major customer of Roebling steel rope.

<h3>America's bridge</h3>But the connections go even deeper and farther than that.“In its stature among New York's most distinctive architectural landmarks, the Brooklyn Bridge is, in truth, America's bridge. As such, its span figuratively reaches to Georgia, to Nebraska, to Texas, and, especially, to California,” said William Underwood Eiland, UGA Museum director. “It is both symbol and reality of our shared national development and identity.“Artists recognized that character early in its existence and commemorated its role as the link between urban and rural America, between the political and financial lives of the still new nation as well as between its ofttimes competitive agricultural and industrial sectors, so manifest in the Reconstruction era.”Roebling is said to have studied and sketched the stone Renaissance cathedrals of Europe as inspiration for the twin, Gothic-arched towers that support the bridge. As Roebling's masterpiece was influenced by the craft of his predecessors, so too has his bridge inspired art and artists coming after him, Gillespie said.“Icon of Modernism” included artworks by painters Joseph Stella, John Marin, Yun Gee, Georgia O'Keeffe and Reginald Marsh and photographers Edward Steichen, Walker Evans, Weegee and Consuelo Kanaga.Four works in the exhibition came from the museum's own collection, but the remainder were on loan from museums, corporate collections and private collections across the country.

This work is titled “Study for Wheels: Industrial New York,” byYun Gee, an American artist who was born in China.