Visitors at the Athenaeum gallery viewing work in Kara Walker: Back of Hand during the opening reception for the exhibition on January 13, 2023. Photo courtesy of Sidney Chansamone.

A new exhibition at the Athenaeum of recent works on paper by internationally acclaimed American artist Kara Walker, examining themes such as complicity, racism, misremembered histories, and the violence that undergirds the legacy of the South, is on display through March 25, 2023.

On the afternoon of Saturday January 28th, the University of Georgia’s downtown contemporary art gallery presents a guided tour of Kara Walker: Back of Hand, the first-ever solo exhibition of Walker’s work in Georgia. The conversational tour is open to all and will be led by Athenaeum director and curator Katie Geha.

"Our opening reception for Kara Walker: Back of Hand was a gratifying success for visual art in Georgia, and we want to continue to share this exhibition with the larger community," said Geha. "The first Walker solo exhibition in the state of Georgia, Back of Hand is a museum-level achievement of talent and stature that celebrates this seminal Georgia-raised artist who has made her mark on the art world."

Visitors at the Athenaeum gallery viewing work in Kara Walker: Back of Hand during the opening reception for the exhibition on January 13, 2023. Photo courtesy of Sidney Chansamone.

Walker moved to Stone Mountain from Stockton, CA when she was 13 and received her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at the Atlanta College of Art and Design in 1991 before pursuing an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. By the age of 28, Walker was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, making her one of the youngest recipients of this extraordinary accolade in history.

Currently based in New York, Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. The body of work in this exhibition represents her continued practice in drawing, working in watercolor, gouache, ink and graphite to create a series that calls forth the past at once mythological and real, ancient and contemporary. According to Walker, “I am always reflecting on the state of current events and the overlap of the historical and the mythic.”

Read more about Kara Walker: Back of Hand here. The Athenaeum has free admission and is open Wednesdays - Saturday from noon to 6 PM and for extended hours until 9 PM every third Thursday of the month for the city of Athens's Third Thursdays monthly art event.

Event Details

Athenaeum | 287 W Broad Street, Athens, GA 30601 

Saturday, January 28 | 4 - 5:30 pm

To register | Kara Walker: Back of Hand - Alumni, Donors & Friends - University of Georgia (uga.edu)

Visitors at the Athenaeum gallery viewing work in Kara Walker: Back of Hand during the opening reception for the exhibition on January 13, 2023. Photo courtesy of Sidney Chansamone.

Visitors at the Athenaeum gallery viewing work in Kara Walker: Back of Hand during the opening reception for the exhibition on January 13, 2023. Photo courtesy of Sidney Chansamone.

View of Kara Walker: Back of Hand exhibition wall text at the Athenaeum gallery. Photo courtesy of Jason Thrasher.

Save these dates for additional engagements with Kara Walker: Back of Hand

Friday, January 27 at 6 PM — The Dodd Galleries present the Winter Exhibitions Reception, which celebrates the opening of three new shows, including the Kara Walker stop-motion animation Kara Walker: Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies. This work from 2021 is a 12-minute stop-motion animation that subverts and reframes the visual presentation of modern American myth-making. Walker’s cut-paper silhouettes reenact several of the most gruesome and infamous acts of white supremacist violence in the country’s recent history, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh and the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. Works in this exhibition contain strong imagery and content that may not be suitable for all viewers.

Friday, February 24 at 6 PM — Poet Dawn Lundy will present a reading at the Athenaeum to kick off Troubling Performance, a one-day symposium that considers representations of race in performance in connection to the work of visual artist Kara Walker. Lundy is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh as well as the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, which she co-founded with Terrance Hayes.

Saturday, February 25 — Troubling Performance Symposium at the Athenaeum Gallery, presented in partnership with the Association of Graduate Art Students (AGAS) at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, the UGA Art Library, the UGA Black Artists Alliance, the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the UGA Institute for African American Studies, the UGA Institute for Women's Studies, the Mod Squad, and the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts.