The Art School

Chapter 2 focuses on the band Pylon. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the University of Georgia’s (UGA) art school introduced suburban and small-town Georgia kids—like members of Pylon—to the possibilities of a creative life. If drag pushed some people in Athens to dress up and perform, art school taught people to make things. These young students who loved punk music were inspired to experiment with music-making and learned about the rise of performance in their art classes. Pylon may have started as performance art, but the band did more than any other local group to transform a network of gay and queer artists and their friends into a real bohemia. Pylon expanded the B-52’s’ fusion of pop art ideas and performance art practices. Around the same time, the UGA’s art school and art professors had an experimental curriculum that blurred the boundaries of art and life. Learning took place both within and outside of the classroom, with art professors modelling alternative ways to live to their students. Yet many of the few women in the art program experienced sexism. In the art crowd, sexuality and gender did not map easily onto conventional dichotomies.