The Athenaeum presents Erin Johnson: The Measure is Something Else, a mid-career survey of the artist’s work that examines the rough edge of scientific authority where objects of knowledge resist the disciplinary regimes that fix their meaning. Across six bodies of work—videos, photographs, and objects—created over the past twelve years as well as a new 2026-2027 commission,...
The Athenaeum presents Erin Johnson: The Measure is Something Else, a mid-career survey of the artist’s work that examines the rough edge of scientific authority where objects of knowledge resist the disciplinary regimes that fix their meaning. Across six bodies of work—videos, photographs, and objects—created over the past twelve years as well as a new 2026-2027 commission, Johnson lingers in the infrastructures that sustain modernity—archives, libraries, cabinets, classrooms, laboratories, research facilities, and containment sites—documenting unlikely moments of humor and refusal in which subjects such as sexually fluid tomatoes or the immeasurable depth of the sea unsettle the legitimacy of epistemic conventions. The exhibition traces how institutional attempts to codify the world are also barriers to our contact with its immensity and intrinsic contradictions.
Chronologically, The Measure of Something Else begins with a herd of goats and a nomad who follows their unpredictable path, then move through herbarium storage systems to the restricted landscapes of the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site, and then to a Puerto Rican island where monkeys roam a hurricane-ravaged landscape with remnants of a U.S. military presence. In a cinematic language that favors association over argument, Johnson exposes how extractive colonial practices are naturalized by the narratives of science and history. In her film The Ferns (2026), debuting in this exhibition, Johnson documents a scientist’s attempt to halt the closure of Duke University’s iconic 100-year-old herbarium through recourse to a speculative connection between ancient flora and queer embodiment. Pop iconography displaces taxonomy, and a flock of botanical drag queens interpret the ferns against the backdrop of the region’s anti-LGBTQ legislation.
Over the course of the exhibition, Johnson will develop a new artwork and associated programming in collaboration with multiple University of Georgia units filmed on Georgia’s Ossabaw Island with the Ossabaw Island Artist in Residence Program. This new commission will further position the exhibition as a pedagogical site—an architecture in itself—through which power, knowledge, and space are made visible and contestable. In conjunction with the exhibition and to further disseminate Johnson’s work, the Athenaeum will host a public symposium to close the exhibition, featuring a keynote lecture and debut of Johnson’s new work.
Opening Saturday, August 29, 2026
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm
Public reception: 4-6pm
Additional programming
Lunch and learn curator tours
Friday, October 16, 2026, 12 – 1pm | Friday, February 19, 2027, 12 – 1pm
Closing symposium
Saturday, March 20, 2027, 11 am – 4 pm, with Erin Johnson Keynote Lecture with UGA’s Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series & New Commission film debut
Erin Johnson (American, b. 1985) is a New York City–based artist and the undergraduate director of the studio art program at New York University. She holds a Master of Fine Arts and a certificate in new media from the University of California, Berkeley and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She has held residencies at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Hidrante (San Juan), and Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, New York). A 2024 Working Artist Fellow at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), her work has been exhibited at e-flux (New York City), BOAN1942 ARTSPACE(Seoul), BOFFO (Fire Island, New York), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/ Berlin), BIENALSUR (Buenos Aires), MOCA (Toronto), MUNCH (Oslo), Sanatorium (Istanbul), Times Square Arts, Etc. Galerie (Prague), Cinalfama (Lisbon), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, Massachusetts), Billytown (TheHague), Galleria Eugenia Delfini (Rome), and REDCAT (Los Angeles).
Founded in 2021, the Athenaeum is a non-collecting contemporary art exhibition venue affiliated with the University of Georgia and the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Its mission is to support artists, pursue contemporary art and ideas with rigor, and to serve as a flexible space that invites extended looking and encourages critical thinking. We are dedicated to presenting the work of major artists in the field of contemporary art as well as centering under-recognized and emerging artists in the commission of new works and projects.
Erin Johnson: The Measure is Something Else is curated by Rachel Waldrop, Athenaeum, and supported by UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, The Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Dodd Chair and Athenaeum Support Funds. This exhibition is co-produced by the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin. For support opportunities, contact Grace Mercer, Development Associate: grace.mercer@uga.edu.
For more information, including images and press packets, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Athenaeum: rachel.waldrop@uga.edu and athenaeum.uga.edu
Erin Johnson
