Lamar Dodd School of Art

Ted Whisenhunt: Watermarks, Reading Rivers of Southern Appalachia

Exhibition • August 17, 2026 – September 30, 2026

Ted Whisenhunt is an artist, designer, author, musician, and educator whose work is inspired by the landscapes and cultural traditions of the American South. Originally from Alabama and now based in the mountains of North Georgia, he combines painting, sculpture, drawing, and design to explore themes of place, memory, and regional identity. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the Southeast, including the Huntsville Museum of Art, Georgia State University, Berea College, and the Rymer Gallery. Whisenhunt is the author, illustrator, and designer of Watermarks: Reading Rivers of Southern Appalachia and serves as Professor of Art &...

threshold (true): finding comfort in hidden worlds | Artist commissioned bathroom by Elinor Saragoussi

Exhibition • January 17, 2026 – December 31, 2028

The Athenaeum is excited to host two new projects as additional opportunities to engage with and support contemporary artists in our building and programming. With the prompt to create “the wildest bathrooms in Athens,” the Athenaeum invited two Athens-based artists—Amanda Burk and Elinor Saragoussi—to design, envision, and transform our two ordinary bathroom spaces into artistically inspired installations. Burk’s minimalist room titled Mars: a color study, and Saragoussi’s maximalist installation titled threshold (true): finding comfort in hidden worlds, offer a spectrum between personal approaches while both remaining highly immersive visitor experiences. These commissions will remain on view for the next two years. We are...

Mars: a color study | Artist commissioned bathroom by Amanda Burk MFA ’07

Exhibition • January 17, 2026 – December 31, 2028

The Athenaeum is excited to host two new projects as additional opportunities to engage with and support contemporary artists in our building and programming. With the prompt to create “the wildest bathrooms in Athens,” the Athenaeum invited two Athens-based artists—Amanda Burk and Elinor Saragoussi—to design, envision, and transform our two ordinary bathroom spaces into artistically inspired installations. Burk’s minimalist room titled Mars: a color study, and Saragoussi’s maximalist installation titled threshold (true): finding comfort in hidden worlds, offer a spectrum between personal approaches while both remaining highly immersive visitor experiences. These commissions will remain on view for the next two years. We are...

True Conceal: Katie Hargrave & Meredith Lynn

Exhibition • August 27, 2026 – November 6, 2026

The Dodd Galleries present True Conceal, an exhibition of new work by collaborators Katie Hargrave and Meredith Lynn from their Bad Outdoorsman series. In True Conceal, Hargrave and Lynn use several commercially manufactured camo brand patterns to explore the landscape as it is seen by major outdoor recreation industry professionals. The work Bad Outdoorsmen (Post Production) continues an ongoing investigation into how the “outdoors” is constructed, staged, and consumed. In this installation, two backdrops hang side by side: one printed with a hyper-detailed camouflage pattern, the other a flat, artificial green screen; each suggesting a different kind of illusion. Camouflage promises seamless integration into a “natural” environment, while the green screen signals...

Christy Bush: Continuum

Exhibition • January 23, 2027 – March 20, 2027

Christy Bush (American, b. 1970) is an Athens, Georgia-based artist whose intimate and relational portraiture spans more than three decades of fashion, celebrity, and fine art photography. Bush returned to Athens, GA full time in 2008; this solo presentation at the Athenaeum is her first major exhibition in our city. Continuum highlights the working process and ethos that Bush has pursued for decades—a cyclical response to nature, femininity, community and care. On view will be works ranging from the past few decades as well as archival and ephemeral materials bridging her working practice and travels to her resultant photography. Bush’s...

Megan Ledbetter: The Field (2022-2026)

Exhibition • August 29, 2026 – November 21, 2026

In the Athenaeum’s Gallery 2, Megan Ledbetter presents The Field (2022-2026), a photographic series and growing body of research exploring and recognizing a potter’s field in Red Bank, Tennessee—essentially a dumping ground and derelict municipal cemetery for the poor and dispossessed in operation from 1890-1912 just on the outskirts of Chattanooga. With new research unearthed in 2020 by historian Michael Hitt, Ledbetter began accessing and documenting the sites in 2022. Through generous support from the Current Art Fund (2023-2024), Ledbetter’s The Field combines visual imagery, historical research and ephemera, and community engagement to shine a light on the complex overlapping histories at this...

Erin Johnson: The Measure Is Something Else

Exhibition • August 29, 2026 – March 20, 2027

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 nine 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....

Victoria Dugger: Runner Up | 2026 Margie E. West Alumni Prize Exhibition

Exhibition • August 27, 2026 – November 20, 2026

The Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia are pleased to announce Victoria Dugger as our 2026 Margie E. West Prize recipient. Dugger will be in conversation with Associate Professor Benjamin Britton on Thursday, August 27th in room S151 of the Lamar Dodd School of Art (adjacent to the Margie E. West gallery), in advance of the public reception that evening. Victoria Dugger (American, b. 1991, Columbus, Georgia) holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Lamar Dodd School of Art (2022). Of her time at the Dodd, Dugger says that it “offered a period of focus and development that continues to inform my practice. The West Award provides meaningful support to sustain and expand that work moving forward.” A lifelong resident of Georgia and living in Athens since her completion of her...

Assorted soft sculptures of bold and bright figurines on light blue background.

Quantum Castle

Exhibition • February 5, 2026 – March 20, 2026

The Dodd Galleries present Quantum Castle where fantastical slick ceramic characters serve as playful narrators in a layered, colorful world of texture, light, and sound. There exists a realm beyond the visible—always present, ever shifting. Deep within this imaginal space lies the Quantum Castle where visitors learn of the Time Guardian’s quest and begin a whimsical journey. Made interactive through games, riddles, and activities, artworks engage participants with cross-disciplinary ideas from quantum mechanics, philosophy, world spiritualities, and depth psychology. Inside Quantum Castle each artwork becomes an exploratory site where visitors become participants in the experience rather than observers. The experience is a sensorial place of play and rest that offers relief from institutions and world events. It cultivates presence and connection, empowering visitors to...

Derek Larson: Made in Mexico: The Anti Communist Cartoons of Dibujos Animados S.A.

Exhibition • February 5, 2026 – March 20, 2026

On view in the Dodd 3rd Floor landing are a selection of animated films produced in Mexico City between 1952-1956 by the studio Dibujos Animados S.A. Created with covert support from the United States Information Agency, these cartoons were distributed throughout Latin America as part of a Cold War propaganda effort promoting American capitalism and individualism while opposing collectivist ideology. Produced by Mexican animators using local labor, humor, and visual styles, these films reveal a transnational media operation in which American political messaging was localized and animated for regional audiences. Slapstick comedy, didactic narration, and modernist graphic design frame capitalism...

Beverly’s Athens

Exhibition • January 16, 2026 – March 21, 2026

Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) lived in Athens, GA, from 1987 to 2010. “Beverly’s Athens,” the first major solo exhibition of her work in the city, situates Buchanan’s expansive practice from this period within the local and lived conditions that shaped it. The exhibition emphasizes two intertwined threads from Buchanan’s Athens years: her modes of surviving chronic illness in the absence of an equitable healthcare system, and her multidisciplinary efforts to study and commemorate Black Southern geography, traditions, and forms. Bringing together lesser-known works—small sculptures, drawings, photographs, print multiples, autobiographical ephemera, research materials—alongside examples of her noted ‘shacks’ paired with new archival...

Effy Wang: The Sweetest Meat in This Abattoir

Exhibition • October 9, 2025 – November 14, 2025

Effy Wang: The Sweetest Meat in This Abattoir August 28 - September 26, 2025 Opening: Thursday, October 9, 2025, 5 - 7 pm along with MFA Open Studios in the Main Building and Ceramics Building The Dodd Galleries present a solo exhibition by MFA candidate Effy Wang titled The Sweetest Meat in This Abattoir in our Bridge Gallery. Wang’s exhibition investigates the entanglements between language, identity, and the body, featuring large-scale abstract paintings and hybrid sculptural forms. The vertical canvases resemble bodies hung, organs unraveled, or portals stretching through lived time. Suspended sculptures made of fishhooks, yarn, and handmade paper suggest fragile yet...

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