Red Cockerill Gallery

Join us as a volunteer at this year's Taste of Douglasville Festival! There are many different ways to help.

Not only is your service a gift to the community and the CAC, it also guarantees you your very own limited edition, Taste of Douglasville 2026 t-shirt with original artwork by a local artist.

We hope you'll come on out and join us. It's a fun time.

Learn more here: https://artsdouglas.org/taste-of-douglasville/

🎨

"The Giant", 1923.
Credits: N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882–1945)
Oil on Canvas, 182.9 × 152.4 cm.

So graceful!

Staircase designed by Leonardo da Vinci, 1516

Yay Goldie Hawn working towards building a better future for us all. This could help adults too! Check her web site. https://www.mindup.org

The year is 1968. America is watching a blonde woman in a bikini, painted with jokes, stumbling through punchlines on national television. She giggles. She blinks. She plays confusion like a melody. The country decides instantly what she is.

They are catastrophically wrong.

Goldie Hawn was twenty-two, and she had already spent years in ballet studios where discipline isn't optional and self-awareness isn't a luxury. When a magazine editor cornered her that same year, demanding to know if she felt complicit in her own objectification, playing the fool while women marched for equality, Goldie didn't flinch.

She said she was already free. That liberation wasn't something you performed for approval. It lived inside you, or it didn't exist at all.

What the editor missed, what nearly everyone missed, was that Goldie had made a calculation. She understood that being dismissed is one of the few unfakeable advantages in life. That a woman the world finds harmless can move through it without resistance, building things in plain sight that no one thinks to stop.

Within a year, she won an Oscar. She was twenty-three.

By 1980, when studio executives told her a film about female independence wouldn't sell, she produced Private Benjamin herself. It earned three Academy Award nominations and became a cultural touchstone.

But the real work was happening where cameras couldn't follow.

Since the 1970s, Goldie had been studying meditation, neuroscience, and psychology with the intensity most people reserve for survival. She wasn't dabbling. She was asking questions Hollywood didn't care about: Why are children breaking? What does a developing brain actually need? What are we teaching them to fear?

By 2003, she had built the answer.

She founded The Goldie Hawn Foundation and launched MindUP, an evidence-based program created with neuroscientists and educators. Not celebrity charity. Not a wellness brand. A peer-reviewed curriculum teaching children how their brains work, how to regulate fear, how to build resilience when the world gets heavy.

Nine independent studies across four countries confirmed it works. Over 200,000 teachers trained. Millions of children in 48 countries learning to protect their own minds.

Most of them have no idea who she is.

She let the giggle do exactly what she designed it to do. It bought her invisibility. It bought her time. And while the world laughed, she changed it.

Image Credit to Alan Light (Wikimedia Commons) (Restored & Colorized)