January 23 - March 20, 2027

Opening Saturday, January 23, 2027 
Media and VIP preview: 4-5pm 
Public reception: 5-7pm 

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 distinctive Southern sensibility informed projects ranging from fashion editorials for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to documenting family, friends, and cultural figures. Her notable series Soundtrack to Nothing, Jackson, and Familiar each explore themes of adolescence, intimacy, and memory, cementing her place as a vital voice in contemporary Southern photography.

Christy Bush came of age in the Atlanta punk rock scene before pursuing photography at the University of Georgia. Immersed in Athens’ legendary creative and music community, she began documenting its dynamic culture in the early 1990s. She earned her BFA in Photography from UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art in 1993 before relocating to New York City, where she lived and worked for fifteen years. There, she developed a prestigious client roster that included W, Interview, and Harper’s Bazaar, refining the direct and intimate style that has defined her photographs ever since.

Bush’s first monograph, Familiar: 30 Years of Photographs (Bitter Southerner Press, 2022), features a foreword by R.E.M.’s frontman Michael Stipe and brings together her life’s work in fashion, music, and portraiture. The book, which weaves 35mm and medium format negatives with Polaroids and digital photographs, received acclaim in Women’s Wear Daily, The Guardian, and Aesthetica. In addition to her fine art practice, Bush continues to collaborate with musicians, actors, and cultural figures, creating portraits of Jason Isbell (Bitter Southerner), Molly Ringwald (Australia's Lovewant Magazine), Maya Hawke (London's Puss Puss Magazine), and Michael Shannon (London’s Luncheon Magazine). 

Christy Bush has been exhibited internationally in New York, Atlanta, Savannah, San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, and Tokyo. Her work is also represented in numerous private collections. At Jackson Fine Art, her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions, most recently Familiar in 2022, which highlighted her decades-long practice of blending fashion, celebrity, and Southern identity through photography.

Christy Bush: Continuum 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 Lynh Tran, Associate Director of Development lynh.tran@uga.edu

For more information, including images and press packets, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Athenaeum at rachel.waldrop@uga.edu

August 29 - November 21, 2026

Opening Saturday, August 29, 2026 
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm 
Public reception: 4-6pm 

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 abandoned burial ground. 

Ledbetter’s large-format photographs document the few remaining burial markers, forged over a century ago, which lay vulnerable upon the ground, referencing an unseen realm beneath the surface. Her lush, black-and-white photographs serve as meditations on the relentless force of seasonal change upon this deeply damaged landscape. They elevate quiet moments of growth, destruction, and rebirth, alluding to the unnoticed decades and the intentional abandonment of the place, while also reflecting upon human fragility and spiritual transcendence. The work harnesses topographical challenges to mirror the historical narrative, exploring dynamic relationships between ecology, history, and cultural deathways. While Ledbetter continues to photograph this ever-changing and dynamic landscape, her focus has shifted toward research and discovery alongside the Nelson Byrd Woltz and Trust for Public Land teams, integrating her work into the 2026 Cultural Landscape Synthesis Report. As a neighbor and member of the Red Bank community herself, Ledbetter’s commitment to engage with The Field will continue to grow and evolve until the project is fully realized.

Megan Ledbetter (American, b. 1980) is an artist and educator based in Red Bank, Tennessee, whose lens-based work explores personal, cultural, and historical narratives tied to place.  She holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2011), a BFA from East Tennessee State University (2008), and a BA from Auburn University (2002).  She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013 and was awarded a Resident Artist Fellowship from Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 2014. 

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.  
 
The Field 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 Lynh Tran, Associate Director of Development lynh.tran@uga.edu

For more information, including images and press packets, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Athenaeum at rachel.waldrop@uga.edu

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