Cover image: Victoria Dugger. It Ain’t That Deep, 2021. Gouache, sequins, glitter on panel, 36" x 52”

2022 MFA graduate of the Lamar Dodd School of Art Victoria Dugger has been selected as an exhibiting artist for New Worlds: Georgia Women to Watch, a highly-competitive exhibition that will be presented by the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Georgia Committee at the Atlanta Contemporary in 2023.

Dugger recently showed work at the Athenaeum gallery in spring 2022 for the MFA thesis exhibition Downstream. In the exhibition catalogue for Downstream, art history graduate student Lacy Hamilton described Dugger's sincere yet playful mixed media work as straddling themes and dialectics of “normality and othering, visibility and invisibility, abundance and atrophy,” arguing that while “disarmingly cute, her work is simultaneously confrontational.”

New Worlds: Georgia Women to Watch

Opening in January 2023, the exhibition New Worlds: Georgia Women to Watch unites five emerging Georgia women artists contemplating a strange and uncertain future. In a moment of dramatic cultural, political and environmental tumult, New Worlds: Georgia Women to Watch offers an opportunity to speculate on what our shared destinies might hold. The exhibition, organized by the Georgia Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, examines how our societal conditions have impacted artists’ visions for the future or inspired them to create alternative realities. When women artists envision a different world, how does that look?

New Worlds is co-curated by Melissa Messina and Sierra King and will be presented at Atlanta Contemporary January 27-June 4, 2023. One artist will be chosen from the Georgia exhibition for an exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. slated for spring 2024.

From left to right: Namwon Choi, Shanequa Gay, Marianna Dixon Williams and Victoria Dugger (center). Not pictured: Anila Agha. Image courtesy of Sierra King/@sierrachasity

Exhibition Dates

January 28 - June 4, 2023

Opening Reception

Saturday, January 28, 2023, 11 am - 6 pm

Artist Talk

Saturday, January 28, 2023, 12 pm - 2 pm

Women to Watch Exhibition Series

The Women to Watch exhibition is a highly-competitive exhibition held approximately every three years. A Georgia-based curator is invited to select a group of five Georgia women artists whose work fits within the exhibition’s theme. The program is designed to increase the visibility of, and critical response to, promising women artists. Additionally, the program seeks to incorporate high quality art professionals into the committees’ activities. Women to Watch is an exhibition program that features underrepresented and emerging women artists. The previous Women to Watch exhibition in 2020 was curated by the High Museum of Art’s Wieland family curator of modern and contemporary art, Michael Rooks.

Artist Biography

Victoria Dugger (b.1991) was born in Columbus, Georgia. She attended Columbus State University where she received her BFA in Drawing and Painting. Dugger received her MFA from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings South Edition, Burnaway, and Flagpole Magazine as well as various other publications. In June 2021 she had her New York debut solo show Out of Body, at Sargent’s Daughters gallery. She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters gallery in New York.