Erin Johnson: The Measure Is Something Else
August 29, 2026 - March 20, 2027
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 | Erin Johnson Keynote Lecture with UGA’s Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series
The Measure is Something Else is the first survey of artist Erin Johnson, spanning nine key artworks made between 2011-2026. Known for films and installations that examine the entanglements of ecology, scientific inquiry, and nationalism as well as forms of speculative storytelling and queer worldmaking, Johnson has over the past fifteen years developed a distinctive body of work that explores the institutions through which knowledge is produced and maintained.
Inhabiting the infrastructures that sustain modernity—archives, libraries, classrooms, laboratories, museums, and scientific research sites—Johnson attends to moments where systems of classification encounter ambiguity, contradiction, or forms of life that exceed categorization. Her works often begin with highly specific subjects including feral dogs or monkeys, botanical collections, and architectural sites, but unfold through narrative storytelling into broader meditations on memory, power, and resistance.
The exhibition takes its title from one of Rachel Carson’s final letters to her lover Dorothy Freeman. Reflecting on her impending mortality using the life cycle of a monarch butterfly, Carson wrote: “For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know.” Johnson similarly approaches the world with an attentiveness to uncertainty and unknowability, asking how systems designed to classify and contain knowledge can also obscure the immensity and complexity of the worlds they seek to describe.
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, Austin, where it will travel Sept 2027-March 2028.
For more information, including images and press packets, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Athenaeum at rachel.waldrop@uga.edu