Artwork by MFA student Larissa McPherson.

The Lamar Dodd School of Art presents a round of four new exhibitions in the third-floor Dodd Galleries featuring recent works curated by the UGA Black Artists Alliance, MFA students, alumni and 2025 visiting artist Aaron Coleman. The opening reception for the exhibitions will be held on Friday February 7 from 6-8 pm and is free and open to the public.

From affirmations of Black expression to the inextricability of plastic and animal bodies in the contemporary era, COLORS, Aaron S. Coleman: Prints and Collages 2013-2025, Larissa McPherson: Speculative Adornment, and Mickey Oscar Boyd: Wall Works promise varied explorations in jewelry and metalwork, sculpture, printmaking, and more. These exhibitions will be on view through March 21, 2025. Read about the individual exhibitions below.

 Artwork by MFA student Jaelyn Hill, YAYA.

COLORS in the Suite Gallery

In celebration of Black History Month, the Black Artists Alliance (BAA) presents COLORS: a dynamic and powerful collection of artwork that boldly confront the stark white landscape of racial and social realities by artists Broderick Flanigan, Erin Hall, Jabria Anala, Jaelyn Hill, Jamila Reeves-Miller, Kayla Hall, Kennedie Owens, Samaya Porter, Shana Jackson, and Winston Lovelace.

As diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, along with other vital social causes, face increasing challenges and censorship in a politically charged climate, Blackness continues to persist, resist, and assert itself. Some works in this exhibition celebrate Black joy and existence, while others delve into the complexities of identity, personhood, and the Black body. Together they convey the rich, multifaceted nature of the Black experience—both its triumphs and its struggles—and echo the enduring legacies fought against erasure, displacement, and discrimination. 

Through vibrant expressive works, COLORS communicates memory, recognition, and the strength of community. This exhibition underscores the importance of Black visibility and reaffirms the power of Black expression, creativity, and representation in a world that has historically sought to minimize it. The exhibition is not just a celebration of art; it is a statement of resilience and an invitation for dialogue surrounding the history of Blackness in both the broader world and within the University of Georgia and Athens communities.  

Artwork by 2025 Lamar Dodd School of Art Visiting Artist Aaron Coleman.

Aaron S. Coleman: Prints and Collages 2013-2025 in the Lupin Foundation Gallery

Aaron S. Coleman (American, b. 1985) presents a selection of prints and collages from the past twelve years of his practice: an ongoing scrutinization of historical and contemporary systems of racial and class-based suppression in the US. In this work, Coleman seamlessly blends the language of comics/coloring books, horror vacui and classical depictions of the figure into luminous images which confront viewers with uncomfortable truths and salient reminders of the ongoing strain of ongoing hierarchical systems—systems which damage our communities and undermine our culture. 

Coleman’s studio practice comprises many processes and forms that address how mundane and seemingly neutral artifacts can embody the complex and pervasive history of race/racism and class/classicism in the United States. Found objects and materials are juxtaposed with contrary or jarring images, releasing uncomfortable truths and suppressed stories that are both personal and political. Coleman states that his creative production is “grounded in a critical analysis of authoritarian systems of information, control, and power, focusing on how religion, science and anthropology contribute to and sustain race- and class-based oppression.”

Coleman is the Kenneth E. Tyler Endowed Chair at Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Dodd Galleries thank Jon Swindler, Professor of Art, UGA, for the organization of this exhibition. 

Larissa McPherson: Speculative Adornment in the Bridge Gallery

Plastic has become an unwitting colonizer of the natural body and ecosystem. Throughout time, humans have extracted fossil fuels to create plastic materials. Over time, these man-made materials break down and migrate microscopically. Through their abandonment, an act of our human carelessness, plastics on a microscopic level have started to act of their own accord and seek reunion with the earth in any way possible, unknowingly causing pain and discord in the lives of animals. This crisis has spared no species. 

In the bones of animals, discarded waste and microplastic fragments have begun to accumulate, fusing with calcium in strange and unprecedented ways. The waste reaches the animal's internal systems and breaks into small parts, taking up room in tissues and the cavities between bones. As the fragments break down, they layer as brightly colored film across the surface of bones and accumulate inside bone structures. Peculiar rough outgrowths, sprouting from the surface of skeletal structures, has been witnessed: looking internally, these formations resemble 3D-printed netting or lattice, alluding to synthetic structures under the surface of the plastic. Some mimic the shapes of existing bones— replicas of ribs or vertebrae fused awkwardly to their originals—while others were entirely unrecognizable and bizarre. Rib cages became forests of brittle, lattice-like growths, and skulls bore porous ridges that extruded waste and microscopic remnants of plastic material.

Humans, who created these consequences, are also not immune to them; we are afflicted physiologically as well. Plastics follow within the body and all around us. How far can this transformation go? Is there a tipping point where organisms can no longer sustain life with plastic-infused bodies? Is this a new phase of evolution—one dictated not by nature, but by humanity’s waste?

McPherson is a metalsmith and jewelry artist from Adairsville, GA. She is a current MFA candidate working in Jewelry & Metalsmithing at the University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art. Larissa holds a BS in Psychology from the University of West Georgia with a minor in Studio Art.

Artwork by Mickey Oscar Boyd

Mickey Oscar Boyd: Wall Works in the Plaza Gallery

After a recent trip to the Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo, Norway, Boyd became fascinated with the vernacular folk architecture of the region. For his atrium commission, Boyd wanted to use contemporary materials to create an architectural form referencing the Norwegian lofts he experienced.

These materials are the same materials used in building contemporary residential structures: dimensional lumber, drywall, insulation, found doors and windows. With these materials, Boyd makes “constructions” that respond to the contemporary home as the constructed object it is, while allowing for more reflection and distortion whereby they become more representative of the bizarre and arbitrary economic systems that allow for their existence. Like a dream, the relationship between construction object and constructed object becomes distorted, and the temporal moment a more ambiguous balance between simultaneously coalescing and being destroyed.

Boyd holds an MFA from UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art (2023) and holds a BFA in Sculpture and Printmaking from Metropolitan State University of Denver, in Denver, Colorado.