Past Exhibitions - Athenaeum

PAST EXHIBITIONS

MERGING LANE ENDS

April 11 - May 9, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday April 11, 4-6pm
MFA Speaks: Thursday April 16, 6pm

MERGING LANE ENDS celebrates the 2026 MFA graduates from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia.

Image: Beverly Buchanan, untitled color photograph, undated. Buchanan’s extensive photographic documentation of vernacular architectures throughout Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida often feature recognizable landmarks in the city of Athens, GA such as this row of shotgun houses on Rocksprings Street. While Buchanan is best known for her ‘shack’ sculptures and drawings, this exhibition will provide contextual materials detailing the role of research and lived experience in the works she made in the studio.

Beverly's Athens

Jan 16-Mar 21, 2026

Opening Saturday, Jan 17, 2026
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm
Public reception: 4-6pm
Closing symposium (presented in partnership with the UGA Willson Center for Humanities & Arts): March 21, 10 am - 4 pm followed by documentary screening from 6 - 8:30 pm

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.

Steven Thompson (American, b. 1967), Earth, Goddesses and Garlands, 2025, handmade watercolor, pencil and mica on goatskin parchment, 52 x 57 x 6 inches, courtesy and copyright the artist.

Steven Thompson: Ever Loyal, Ever True

Sept 3-Nov 22, 2025

Opening Saturday, Sept 13
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm
Public reception: 4-6pm

The Athenaeum presents Ever Loyal, Ever True, an exhibition of recent work by Steven Thompson (American, b. 1967) in our second gallery, concurrent with Krista Clark’s assembly. Both artists share an affinity to pushing the boundaries and definitions of traditional drawing through layering, erasure, and additive means, moving their work towards sculptural abstraction that commands a physical call-and-response.

Krista Clark (American, b. 1975), How to Water a Garden, 2024, walnut frame, concrete, shovel, work light, dimensions variable, courtesy and copyright the artist, photo: Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN.

Krista Clark: assembly

September 3-November 22, 2025

Opening Saturday, Sept 13
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm
Public reception: 4-6pm

The Athenaeum presents assembly, a site-specific installation of new work by Krista Clark (American, b. 1975) in our main gallery. Clark’s studio practice is informed by the politics and poetics of the urban built environment and pushes the formal artistic boundaries between drawing, sculpture and installation through the lens of abstraction. Clark’s gestures of erasing, overlapping, layering and stacking materialize in two- and three-dimensional forms, which as she says, reveal the “shiftiness between things: interior vs. exterior, place vs. space, and flatness vs. depth.”

Image: Landon McKinley (American, b. 1997), Sweating, 2024, as part of the series you can only cry but so much (2023-2025), Silver gelatin, walnut, courtesy and © the artist

an exit from between two places

April 11-May 10, 2025 Opening reception: Friday, April 11, 6-8pmMFA Speaks: Thursday, April 24, 5:30pm an exit from between two places celebrates the 2025 MFA graduates from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. Exhibiting artists include: Gabby BarnettEliza Bentz Jasmine Best Sarah Bouchard Lucas Eytchison Eleanor Foy Landon Green Caitlin La Dolce Kate Luther Hayden Maltese Image: Landon McKinley […]

Matt Keegan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been widely exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art, (NY) earlier this year. He has presented recent solo projects at SculptureCenter (NY) and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts), as well as two-person exhibitions with Kay Rosen at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Grazer Kunstverein (Graz, Austria), in addition to various international group shows. His work is represented in public collections, including MoMA, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, among others. His book, 1996, was published in 2020 by the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). Keegan is a Senior Critic in the Painting and Printmaking Department at Yale University.

Matt Keegan: Realia

January 10 - March 22

Rose Salane is an artist living and working in New York, NY. Solo presentations of Salane’s work have been held at Tank Shanghai, CN (2024); Carlos/Ishikawa, UK (2023); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2021); and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2019). In 2021, her work was featured in the New Museum Triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone, New Museum, NY, and in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. In 2022, she was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Salane completed her MA in Urban Planning at Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, CUNY, and her BFA at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Fission or, Eclipse

Rose Salane is an artist who uses seemingly mundane objects to explicate systems of evaluation, exchange, and organization that shape daily life. In this exhibition, she arranges collected items of disparate origin from personal and bureaucratic archives—the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, the Atlanta History Center, the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services—to better understand historic cycles through an object’s recovery and storage.

LIndsey Kennedy, "A Chaos of Hard Clay", 2024, archival pigment print

Sharpening a Screw

Sharpening a Screw resists easy resolutions. The works on view signal the value of iteration, returning to a thought, a question, or a method to look for the unexpected. Each of the nine MFA students from the Lamar Dodd School of Art use materials as fasteners, presenting a constellation of themes from which to step back and look anew.

Educated at Concordia University in Montreal (B.F.A., 1996) and Columbia University, New York (M.F.A., 2004), Fabienne Lasserre lives and works in Brooklyn NY. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the Director of the interdisciplinary MFA in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. Recent solo projects include Make Room for Space (2018, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY); Les Larmes (2018, Parisian Laundry Gallery, Montreal); and C.Ar.D in città (2015, Palazzo Costa Tretenerro, Piacenza, Italy). Her work was shown in several 2-person exhibits, amongst which The Nervous Hand (2018, 315 Gallery, New York) and Fabienne Lasserre and Annette Wehrhahn (2016, Safe Gallery, New York). Some group exhibits featuring her work have been: Feed the Meter (2017, Ceysson de Bénétière, Luxembourg); Outside the Lines (2013, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX), Saber Desconocer, (2013, Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia), and La Triennale québécoise, (2011, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal). In 2017, she was awarded the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship to produce two outdoor sculptures for the grounds of St-Gaudens National Historic Site in New Hampshire. In 2016-17, she received a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program award. In 2013 and 2014, she was the recipient of two Project Grants to Visual Artists from the Canada Council for the Arts to develop a body of sculptures that were shown in solo shows at Parisian Laundry Gallery, Montreal (Les Approches, 2015) and at Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York (Here Like a Story Like a Picture and a Mirror, 2013).

Listeners

Brooklyn-based artist, Fabienne Lasserre presents Listeners, an immersive and responsive installation consisting of a series of sculptures made of clear vinyl spray-painted with translucent gradients of color. The works obstruct, frame and direct vision, passage and movement. They always imply bodies: people who look through, walk around, and peer over. Simultaneously, the inert objects are dynamic as they reflect light and sway slightly when a viewer walks by.

Paul Pfeiffer (b.1966 Honolulu) has had many one-person exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003 and 2017-18); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2018); and The Athenaeum, Athens, GA (2023). He has presented work in major international exhibitions, most recently the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; M+, Hong Kong; The Guggenheim; Tate Modern; and the Pinault Collection, among many others. The first large-scale retrospective of his work in the U.S. opens at The Geffen Contemporary at LA MOCA in November 2023.

Paul Pfeiffer: Red Green Blue

Often located in the heart of a city or campus, the sports stadium has the capacity to fortify national, regional, or community-based models of identity. Inside, the spectator is bombarded with carefully orchestrated stimuli, immersed in a multi-sensory experience intended to incite an emotional response. In Red Green Blue, Paul Pfeiffer edits audio and visual recordings of the UGA Redcoat Marching Band, examining the mechanics of the performance through close-up footage of band members and their directors during and between periods of play.

AJ Aremu, "You Touch the Immortals", 2023, woodcut prints on fabric, video

re:(de)construction

re:(de)construction is an exhibition, a circular and continuous call and response, presenting the work of eleven MFA students who studied at the Lamar Dodd School of Art for the past three years. Starting their program during the height of the pandemic, these artists have witnessed and participated in a deep re-examination of the structures that govern society. Through their various material experiments in video, painting, print, photography, metals, clay, and sound they share a commitment to reconfiguring and reinventing new ways of being in the world.

New York-based artist Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. Born in Stockton, California in 1969, Walker was raised in Atlanta, Georgia from the age of 13. She studied at the Atlanta College of Art (BFA, 1991) and the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1994). She is the recipient of many awards, notably the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997 and the United States Artists, Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. In 2012, Walker became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2015, she was named the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her work can be found in museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome; and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt.

Kara Walker: Back of Hand

A hand, like a sheet of paper, suggests a verso and a recto, a past and a future closely connected in their reference to one another. This exhibition presents works on paper by the American artist Kara Walker that deal directly in the contradictions of misremembered histories, most pointedly in her career-long representation of the horrors beneath the antebellum South’s genteel facades. In the drawings presented in the gallery, Walker mingles washes of watercolor, gouache, ink and graphite to create a series that calls forth the past at once mythological and real, ancient and contemporary.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/they) was born in East Palo Alto, CA. Rasheed lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has an MA in Secondary Social Studies Education from Stanford University (2008) and a BA in Public Policy from Pomona College (2006). She was an Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa (2006–7). Rasheed’s work has been exhibited nationally at the Brooklyn Museum; the New Museum; MASS MoCA; the Queens Museum; the Bronx Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; the Brooklyn Public Library; and the Brooklyn Historical Society, among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally at NOME; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Kunsthalle Wien; Bétonsalon Centre d'art et de recherche, Paris; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Artspace Peterborough; the 57th Venice Biennial; and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, among others. Her public installations have appeared at Ballroom Marfa; the Brooklyn Museum; For Freedoms x Times Square Art, New York; Public Art Fund, New York; Moody Center for the Arts, Houston; The California Air Resources Board; and several others. Rasheed is the author of three artist’s books: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019), No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019), and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Her writing, including longform essays and interviews, has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts and a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee. For the 2021-2022 school year, she is an adjunct at the School of Visual Arts - MFA Fine Arts (2016–present) and The Cooper Union (2022-present). In 2021, she was a Core Critic at Yale School of Art - MFA Painting and Printmaking as well as a Program Mentor for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s low-residency MFA Program (2021–present). Additionally, for the 2021–22 school year, she is the inaugural Douglass Discovery Arts Fellow at Rutgers University’s Douglass Residential College and Mason Gross School of Arts.

Smooooooooooooooth Operator

Brooklyn-based learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, explores the poetics and politics of machine learning. Having grown up in East Palo Alto, CA, a region that later came to be known as “Silicon Valley”, Rasheed had early access to emerging technologies including adolescent experience with computer coding. This, alongside her syncretic upbringing, a Muslim with formerly Protestant parents who sent her to a Catholic high school, Rasheed was exposed to parallel worlds of religion and computation, both modes of sense-making that relied on prophecy, formula, and close reading.

Rosie Brock "River", 2019, archival Inkjet print, 12" x 12"

Downstream

Downstream opens with a fountain. Created by Luka Carter and placed at the entrance to the courtyard of the Athenaeum, the fountain announces our annual MFA exhibition, featuring nine students connected by their studies at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The fountain, punctuated by a goofy guppy and a friendly alligator made from clay, gushes forth not with water, but instead Gatorade, a urine colored energy drink favored by athletes. It is a similar product featured in Mike Judge’s 2006 dystopian cult classic, Idiocracy. In that film, the energy drink is marketed as a healthy alternative for plants which inevitably leads to a world-wide food shortage. Not unlike Judge’s spoof on the end-of-the-world, the artists in this exhibition grapple with our contemporary condition. At times the work can appear playful, brightly colored, maybe even light. But look closer and each artist, in their own way, examines the fragile vicissitudes of living in America today. Themes that appear throughout the show include our current climate crisis, past trauma, stereotypes related to race, and late-stage capitalism.

Born in 1973 in Syracuse, NY, USA, Lisa Tan lives in Stockholm where she is Professor of Fine Art at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. She works with video, photography, text, installation, and other gestures. Her own experiences of desire, loss and otherness, serve as drivers for explorations into consciousness, the formation of individual subjectivity, and the role that different representations play in shaping a person’s relationship to the world and to others. Her work has recently appeared in exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With), Rotterdam; Tabakalera Center for Contemporary Art, San Sebastian; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the MIT List Center, Cambridge; Kunsthall Trondheim; the 11th Shanghai Biennale. Lisa Tan is represented by Galleri Riis (Oslo). For more, see lisatan.net

Lisa Tan: Dodge and Burn 2017 - 2020 July 4

It begins with a blunder. “I pressed stop instead of record,” writes Lisa Tan, in the script for her new work, Dodge and Burn 2017-2020 July 4. The mishap occurs during the first of three, consecutive attempts to film fireworks on the 4th of July, from the vantage point of a passenger on a commercial airliner destined for Los Angeles International Airport. Through this evasion, she discovers how an image refusing capture reveals far more in its absence.

Trevor Paglen is known for investigating the invisible through the visible, with a wide-reaching approach that spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Paglen has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2019); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2015); Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2015); Protocinema Istanbul (2013); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013); and Vienna Secession (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008, 2010, 2018); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); Tate Modern, London (2010), and numerous other institutions.

Trevor Paglen: Vision After Seeing

Are vision and seeing the same thing? Across a wide range of photographs, videos, and ambitious interstellar projects, Trevor Paglen has explored this essential question as it relates to the long history of technologies that have aided, and perhaps even eclipsed the human eye. These technologies range from the traditional, for example, the fifteenth-century technique of one-point perspective, to the contemporary, as in unmanned drones that record the world from a point-of-view the human eye cannot physically inhabit. Indeed, the limits of human vision are another essential theme for Paglen, who has consistently trained his camera on things that evade detection by the human eye, sometimes deliberately, as in the case of remote military sites and caches of NSA-tapped fiber optic cables, and sometimes by virtue of the eye’s physiological limits, as with the artist’s photographs of satellites whose traces are visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic technologies.

Artists in the exhibition include: Mac Balentine, Matthew J. Brown, Caitlin Adair Daglis, Alex McClay, Katharine Miele, Ciel Rodriguez, and Kelsey Wishik.

Whistling in the Dark

The Lamar Dodd School of Art is pleased to announce the opening of the annual MFA Thesis Exhibition, displaying works by students graduating with their Master of Fine Arts Degree. The exhibition entitled Whistling in the Dark will run from April 12th through May 15th.