Page 50 - Fall 2021

s| ARTSPEAK
Love of art began at early age
Wendy Cooper is an Athens native who worked for Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia early in her career and is now the director of the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation.
By Cyndee Perdue Moore
As a child, art gave life to Wendy Cooper’s imagination. She drew and painted and was fascinated by cameras as she watched her father manually adjust the settings on his Nikon. Those were the early signs that a career in art was on her horizon. That career eventually took her from one coast to the other before bringing her to Oconee County to serve as the new executive director of the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation.
After graduate school and before she officially declared herself an artist, Cooper operated a gallery in Savannah for two years. In this role she discovered that she really enjoyed the business side of art.
Since leaving Athens nearly 13 years ago, Wendy has traveled the world. She spent six weeks in Tunisia working on an excavation of a Roman 1 A.D. cemetery and did a longer stint in higher education as an Associate Professor of Commercial Photography at Southeast Missouri State University. Finally her wanderlust took her to California.
The upside of California was meeting her husband in Santa Barbara. The downsides included mudslides that invaded her kitchen and wildfires that came up to her back deck. Those natural disasters, paired with a longing to return home to be closer to her family of origin weighed heavy in her decision to return to Georgia.
Cooper and her husband recently purchased a home in Monroe. Built in 1897, it is in need of restoration. “I have lived in a lot of old buildings and appreciate the attention to detail and the recycling effort of restoring an older home,” she said.
Her love of restoring older homes is fueled by the unnecessary demolition of her great grandmother’s home in Athens. “I spent a great deal of time there on her porch, swinging or gliding, and also snapping beans, and looking into the goldfish pond,” she reminisced.
That penchant for historic preservation will come in handy in her role at OCAF as the organization has plans to begin a number of renovation and preservation projects on its three historic building campus over the next year.
sCyndee Perdue Moore is an Oconee County resident and the executive director of the University of North Georgia Oconee Campus. PAGE 48 | OCONEE THE MAGAZINE | FALL 2021
Michael Prochaska