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.  

Seven years ago, Thompson began to make his own paint from powder pigments—gum arabic, ox gall, honey and glycerin—in order to get closer to the deep mystery of materiality.  For Thompson, materials are more than surreal. They are metaphysical objects even beyond their subatomic particles and remain impossibly open and yet furtive to comprehension. In recent years, Thompson, a symbolist by nature, has turned toward the rococo: sugary colors and a promiscuous blending of techniques fulfilling a deep drive to investigate material substance via elaborate structures that awaken his mind and soul through trance-like states. 

He asks, “Where does it end?  How, in God’s name, is there such a thing as ‘things’? From what does its beautiful presence emerge? We are cognitive material ourselves.” This puzzle delights and haunts Thompson, both as a human and an artist. 

Steven Thompson (American, b. 1967 Greenville, SC) holds undergraduate degrees in Literature, Classical Languages and Art from the College of Charleston in SC, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing with Distinction from UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art (1995). Thompson holds a second MFA in Sculpture and Mixed Media from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA (1999), earning a
Chairman’s Merit Scholarship and the Lawrence Shprintz MFA Award in Sculpture.

Thompson taught academic and studio courses at the University of Georgia from 2001-2006, including a term in the University’s Studies Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy. In 2008, he taught a graduate seminar in special topics at Parsons School of Art and Design, The New School in New York. 

Since his debut solo show in New York in 2004 at Kenny Schachter's West Village gallery, conTEMPorary, Mr. Thompson has developed a reputation as a quixotic and visionary artist, a style by turns “intricately detailed, obsessive, devotional and enigmatic”.  His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and venues in the US and abroad, including The Armory International Exhibition and Miami Basel, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Kate Werble Gallery, English Kills Gallery, The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Elliot Templeton Gallery and Springs Projects, among others.        

For more information, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Atheneum: rachel.waldrop@uga.edu and athenaeum.uga.edu Opened in 2021, The Athenaeum is a 5,000 square foot non-collecting contemporary art venue in downtown Athens affiliated with UGA and the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Steven Thompson: Ever loyal, Ever true is supported by UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, The Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Dodd Chair and Athenaeum Support Funds. For support opportunities, contact Grace Mercer, Development Associate: grace.mercer@uga.edu

Image: 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. 

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.”

Clark’s work thereby prompts the questions: What does it look like when our relationship with the built environment is interrupted? How does this affect our understanding of how we occupy space and create a sense of place? How do these interruptions highlight how we then move, claim, perform and gather our bodies within the constructed landscape? How does architecture mark labor, care and ritual?

Krista Clark was born in Burlington, VT and lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She holds an MFA from Georgia State University (2016). She has exhibited work at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, The Studio Museum in Harlem New York and the New Museum in New York. She was the recipient of the Artadia Award and the Working Artist Project Award with MOCA GA in 2018 and was a Hudgens Prize Finalist in 2024. Clark is an Assistant Professor at Emory University.

For more information, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Atheneum: rachel.waldrop@uga.edu and athenaeum.uga.edu Opened in 2021, The Athenaeum is a 5,000 square foot non-collecting contemporary art venue in downtown Athens affiliated with UGA and the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Krista Clark: assembly is supported by UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, The Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Dodd Chair and Athenaeum Support Funds. For support opportunities, contact Grace Mercer, Development Associate: grace.mercer@uga.edu

Image: 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.