PAST EVENTS
A Reading with Author Kristal Brent Zook

July 30th, 6:00pm

Join The Georgia Review and UGA’s MFA program in Narrative Media Writing for a special event with author Kristal Brent Zook.
For more than twenty years, Dr. Kristal Brent Zook has reported on social issues such as health, education, culture, politics, race, gender, and the environment. She is an award-winning journalist and author of four books, including The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, a coming-of-age story about being biracial in America, searching for her missing white father, and finding one’s authentic identity. In 2023, it was chosen as a favorite book by Vanity Fair, BET, PEOPLE, Ms., and The Root, and received praise in The New York Times Book Review and Kirkus. A former contributor to the Washington Post and ESSENCE, Dr. Zook’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, LIFE, and The Guardian, among other outlets. She is currently working on an in-depth essay about the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre of 1921 for The Georgia Review. Dr. Zook is a professor of journalism at Hofstra University in New York.  
UGA’s low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction, part of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, is designed for students who want to develop their research, reporting, and writing skills to take on topics of national and global importance. Students explore long-form storytelling in research-based narratives that rise to the level of literature. Many of them are mid-career journalists and other industry professionals who want to elevate their careers and write a book. This program paves the way for nonfiction writers to use their talents and skills to engage the world.Learn more here

Athens Art Book Fair

June 22, 11am - 4pm


The Athens Art Book Fair was established to spotlight the critical relationship between contemporary art and publishing with a regional focus on the Southeast. The second annual Athens Art Book Fair will showcase a variety of works on paper produced by dozens of artists and presses. This event is free to the public. Join us to explore a wide variety of techniques and subject matter on display and connect with artists and publishers!

Please note that this event is affiliated with the annual arts and music festival AthFest, which will attract considerable traffic in the area. Plan your visit and parking accordingly.

The Athens Art Book Fair is presented by the University of Georgia Art Library, the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and the UGA Printmaking Students Association.

Haute Fashion Show: Jewelry Box

April 29, 6pm

Get ready for a night of bejeweled glamour and style at The Athenaeum! Join us for an unforgettable night of dazzling fashions 
 showcasing the intersection of fashion and jewelry. Witness stunning designs on the runway and be inspired by the creativity of Haute's talented creatives. Don't miss out on this exclusive opportunity to experience the magic of the JEWELRY BOX. See you there!

Purchase tickets here.

Haute Creatives Collective is a women led student organization that focuses on creating a space for POC and LGBT+ creatives looking to enhance their artistic portfolios for a career in creative industries.  Haute’s goal is to support our creative’s talent development and to provide a dynamic and safe space for collaboration; through shoots, shows, and service projects.

MFA Speaks

April 24, 6pm

Join us for short artist talks by our graduating MFA students.

Artist Talk & Book Signing

April 13, 4pm

Lamar Dodd School of Art alumni Clay Jordan, Brittainy Lauback, and Tatum Shaw will present on their recent photography books published by Atlanta's Fall Line Press. Join us at the Athenaeum on Saturday, April 13 at 4pm as they discuss their monographs and participate in a roundtable discussion led by Director of the Athenaeum, Dr. Katie Geha. A book signing will follow the event. Writer Amy Bonnaffons will read from her essay featured in Lauback's monograph "Infinite Bonheur."

Clay Maxwell Jordan is a photographer who has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. He is a 2019 MacDowell fellow and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Perpetual Care is his second monograph with Fall Line Press; his first book, Nothing’s Coming Soon, was published in 2019.  www.claymaxwelljordan.com

Brittainy Lauback is an artist and photography educator living and working in Houston, Texas. She received her BFA from the University of New Mexico in 2003 and her MFA from the University of Georgia in 2014. Lauback’s latest group exhibitions include Reckonings and Reflections at the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; Looking Male at the Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus, and the LaGrange Museum of Art; and New Southern Photography at the Ogden Museum of Art, New Orleans. Her first monograph titled Infinite Bonheur published by Fall Line Press was published this year.

Tatum Shaw is a photographer based in both Portland, OR and Atlanta, GA. With his background as an advertising creative, Shaw combines his conceptual skills with a photographer’s eye to create crafted worlds exploring a mix of anxiety and nostalgia. 

MFA Exhibition Opening Reception

April 12, 6-8pm

Join us in celebrating our graduating MFA students with our annual MFA Exhibition.

A Night at the Athenaeum

March 16, 5pm

Join us for a spring evening of contemporary dance, colorful sculpture, and catered bites and drinks by Athens pop-up restaurant Mouth Feel. The exhibition Fabienne Lasserre: Listeners will be activated by a commissioned dance by award-winning choreographer Beth Gill and an accompanying sound piece by experimental composer Jon Moniaci. Meet a diverse group of artists and chat with Lamar Dodd School of Art students who benefit directly from the programming and community partnerships hosted by the Athenaeum. Details on the Fundraising Event:

March 16, 2024
5 - 7:30 pm
Athenaeum
287 W Broad St. Athens, GA 30605
Tickets: $350

Register here

5:00: Welcome Drinks
5:30: Beth Gill & Jon Moniaci Performance
6:00: Bites and Drinks
7:00: Hear from Katie Geha, Director the Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries
7:15: Private tour of Listeners by artist Fabienne Lasserre

Artist Biographies
Fabienne Lasserre, educated at Concordia University in Montreal (B.F.A., 1996) and Columbia University, New York (M.F.A., 2004), 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). 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).

Beth Gill is an award-winning choreographer based in New York City since 2005. Her multidisciplinary works are captivating, cinematic timescapes, the product of long-term collaborations with celebrated artists. Gill is the proud recipient of the Herb Alpert, Doris Duke Impact, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and two “Bessie” awards. She has produced eight commissioned evening-length works met with critical acclaim. She has toured nationally and internationally and has been honored with (among others): Guggenheim Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project grant, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Artist in Residence.

Jon Moniaci is a composer, performer, and computer programmer. Interested in improvisation and live electro-acoustic performance, he has collaborated extensively with dance and performance makers. A frequent collaborator of choreographer Beth Gill, his score for her dance Electric Midwife received a 2011 Bessie New York Dance and Performance Award. He has also worked with Chase Granoff, Andrew Dinwiddie, Jeff Larson, Peter Kerlin, Anna Sperber, Marissa Perel, Alex Escalante, Mark Jarecke, Dean Moss, and Peter Jacobs. He plays music with Stephen Rush and Chris Peck in their project Crystal Mooncone.

Support for the Athenaeum's multifaceted programming and exemplary exhibitions comes directly from private philanthropy. Your ticket to Night at the Athenaeum will provide vital support for this multidisciplinary student lab and community incubator. If you are unable to join us but have an interest in giving to the Athenaeum, please donate below.

Beth Gill & Jon Moniaci Performance

March 15, 7pm


The exhibition Fabienne Lasserre: Listeners will be activated by a commissioned dance by choreographer, Beth Gill and an accompanying sound piece by experimental composer, Jon Moniaci. The new work will premiere at the Athenaeum with a free public performance on March 15 at 7pm.

Beth Gill is an award-winning choreographer based in New York City since 2005. Her multidisciplinary works are captivating, cinematic timescapes, the product of long-term collaborations with celebrated artists. Gill is the proud recipient of the Herb Alpert, Doris Duke Impact, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and two “Bessie” awards. She has produced eight commissioned evening-length works met with critical acclaim. She has toured nationally and internationally and has been honored with (among others): Guggenheim Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project grant, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Artist in Residence.
Jon Moniaci is a composer, performer, and computer programmer. Interested in improvisation and live electro-acoustic performance, he has collaborated extensively with dance and performance makers. A frequent collaborator of choreographer Beth Gill, his score for her dance Electric Midwife received a 2011 Bessie New York Dance and Performance Award. He has also worked with Chase Granoff, Andrew Dinwiddie, Jeff Larson, Peter Kerlin, Anna Sperber, Marissa Perel, Alex Escalante, Mark Jarecke, Dean Moss, and Peter Jacobs. He plays music with Stephen Rush and Chris Peck in their project Crystal Mooncone.

Diann Blakely Visiting Author: Elizabeth Willis

February 8, 6pm

The Creative Writing Program welcomes Elizabeth Willis, the first visiting poet in the 2024 Blakely Program, with gratitude to the Diann Blakely Visiting Poet Fund.

Currently serving as Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book is Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her other books of poetry include Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), recipient of the PEN New England/L. L. Winship Prize for Poetry; Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006); Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003); The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995); and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). She also writes about contemporary poetry and has edited a volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa Press, 2008).
A recent Guggenheim fellow, she has held residencies at Brown University, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Centre International de Poésie, Marseille.  Her poetry has been translated into French, Dutch, Polish, and Slovak.

Exhibition Opening Reception

January 26, 6-8pm

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Join us in celebrating the opening of Fabienne Lasserre: Listeners, an immersive and responsive sculptural installation. Free and open to the public.

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Artist Lecture

January 25, 5:30pm

Lamar Dodd School of Art, S150

Join us for an artist lecture by Fabienne Lasserre at the Lamar Dodd School in Art in Auditorium S150. The artist will discuss her practice and the work on display in her exhibition at the Athenaeum Listeners. 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).

Dance Party!!

December 7, 9pm-midnight

Join us for an end-of-the-semester dance party! The party is organized by Dodd Graduate students and we invite graduate students from across campus to join us for one last night of revelry!

Research in the Arts Contest

November 14, 4-6pm

An homage to John Cage's landmark composition of the same name, the 4 Minutes, 33 Seconds Contest highlights University of Georgia student research in the arts. The event offers an opportunity for students to win prizes and to share their creative inquiry with peers, faculty, administrators and alumni throughout the university community. The competition is open to any graduate student or undergraduate student working on an advanced project, who is conducting research related to the literary, visual, or performing arts or artists. This year's competition is coordinated by Katie Geha, director of the School of Art Galleries in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and Gerald Ma, Editor-in-Chief of the The Georgia Review. The 4 Minutes, 33 Seconds Contest is part of UGA's annual Spotlight on the Arts festival.

Jurors for this years' competition:
Tracey Johnson, Assistant Professor, History and African American Studies
Neil Lyall, Associate Dean of Franklin College
Rodrigo Martini Paula, Assistant Professor in the English Department

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Spotlight x Spotlight Ecologies // Graduate Student Symposium

November 12, 2pm

This interdisciplinary symposium showcases creative work with ecological themes from graduate students in UGA’s Creative Writing Program and Lamar Dodd School of Art. A brief Q&A session and light refreshments will follow the panel presentations. This event is free and open to the public.  The event is coordinated by Zachary Anderson and Sarah Shermyen.
 
Schedule of Events: 
Opening remarks: Zachary Anderson 
Panel 1: Larissa McPherson and Christina Wood 
Panel 2: Caitlin La Dolce and Hannah V Warren 
Break for light refreshments 
Panel 3: Adah Bennion and Sayantika Mandal 
Q&A session 

Lecture: Alessandra Raengo

October 23, 6pm

Paul Pfeiffer’s Red Green Blue establishes a previously unseen figure/ground relation within the spectacle of college sports and traditional understandings of how “game time” is constituted, maintained, and supported by a host of other labor formations and technologies of spectacle.

To further investigate these interventions, Alessandra Raengo will locate Red Green Blue alongside two recent works: Josh Begley’s Concussion Protocol (2018), a montage—mostly in reverse, and in slow and accelerated motion—of all the concussions reported during the 2017-2018 NFL season, and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park (2017), a self-described “flicker film,” shot in an all-Black voting precinct during the 2016 general election.

Dr. Alessandra Raengo is Georgia State University Distinguished Professor of Moving Image Studies, the Founding Editor-in-Chief of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (at Duke University Press) and founder of the liquid blackness research group that initiated the journal in 2013. She is the author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and of Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (Bloomsbury Press, 2016). She has published widely on the visual arts and filmmaking of the Black diaspora, racial capitalism, and modes of black “liquidity” in the contemporary arts. Her work has appeared in Camera ObscuraDiscourse, AdaptationThe World Picture JournalBlack Camera, The Black Scholar, Flash Art, Refract, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and several anthologies, including the award-wining collections LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black American Cinema (2015)and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (2021). She is the recipient of a Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship at CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Art, National Gallery of Art) and a Terra Foundation of American Art Grant for the upcoming liquid blackness Symposium: “Music Video as Black Art: Claiming the B-Side,” Sept. 21-23, 2023 at Georgia State University.

Book Signing: Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens

October 11, 4pm

Join us for a book signing with artists Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens. Their book Assuming the Ecosexual Position is the story of the artistic collaboration between the originators of the ecosex movement, their diverse communities, and the Earth. In 2008, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality. Assuming the Ecosexual Position describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory.

"Tuned to the more than human, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have married widely and well, mating with the airs, waters, and places of Earth, inviting their companions into profligate kinning for earthly survival. They have taken me on their ecosexual journeys, rolling around with them on their theoretical and performative ground to get sufficiently soiled to be brave enough to join the old whore and the hillbilly in their radical practices of joy, love, and rage. Read this book, revel in its wacky seriousness, risk its call to transformative art and life."
— Donna Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been life partners and 50/50 collaborators on multimedia projects since 2002. They are authors of the Ecosex Manifesto and producers of the award-winning film Goodbye Gauley Mountain and Water Makes Us Wet, a documentary feature that premiered at documenta 14 and screened at MoMA in New York. Sprinkle is a former sex worker with a PhD in human sexuality. Stephens holds a PhD in performance studies and is founding director of E.A.R.T.H. Lab at University of California at Santa Cruz.

Curator Tour

October 8, 4pm

Join us for a tour led by Dr. Katie Geha, the director of the Athenaeum and the curator of Paul Pfeiffer: Red Green Blue. After viewing the 30 minute video, Geha will lead a conversation about the exhibition discussing the development of the show, Pfeiffer's continued engagement with UGA, and examining major themes presented. The talk will be followed by light snacks and refreshments.

In Conversation: Paul Pfeiffer

September 28, 6pm

This conversation begins with the premiere of Art21's new Extended Play short film, which focuses on Red Green Blue and the artist's time at UGA. 

Contemporary video artist Paul Pfeiffer discusses his recent exhibition at the Athenaeum, Red Green Blue with media scholar, Dr. Phillip Auslander; Assistant Director of Bands and Director of Athletic Bands at the University of Georgia, Brett Bawcum; and contemporary art historian, Dr. Isabelle Wallace.

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.

Dr. Philip Auslander is interested in the performance of gender identity, the relationship between performance and media, and the documentation of performance. He has published eight books, the most recent of which are the third edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, 2023), In Concert: Performing Musical Persona (University of Michigan, 2021) and Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (University of Michigan 2018). Auslander is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.

Brett Bawcum is Assistant Director of Bands and Director of Athletic Bands at the University of Georgia. He shares responsibility for design, instruction, and administration of the Redcoat Marching Band and serves as its primary drill-writer. He also directs the Basketball and Volleyball Pep Bands, conducts various concert bands, and teaches courses in a variety of areas including Instrumentation/Arranging and Marching Band Techniques. His conducting, arranging, and/or performing work can also be found on commercial recordings by such artists as Band of Horses, Half Dozen Brass Band, and Modern Skirts. He has also served as producer, associate producer, or editor for seven recordings on the Mark, Summitt, and Naxos labels.

Dr. Isabelle Loring Wallace currently serves as Associate Director of Research and Graduate Studies at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Her research focuses on a wide range of objects and images, ranging from mid-twentieth-century American painting to early twenty-first-century photography, video, and installation. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Christian Jankowski, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Paul Pfeiffer, and the co-editor of three anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Ashgate/Routledge 2011); Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility, co-edited with Nora Wendl (Ashgate/Routledge 2013); Ventriloquism, Performance and Contemporary Art, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Routledge 2023). In addition, Professor Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis.


Paul Pfeiffer: Red Green Blue Opening Reception

August 31, 2023

Join us in celebrating Paul Pfeiffer's Red Green Blue, an immersive video installation featuring the UGA Redcoat Marching Band. Members of the band will perform at 8pm.

New York-based artist, Paul Pfeiffer lived in Athens and taught at the University of Georgia from 2016 to 2019. His courses at the Lamar Dodd School of Art focused on media, spectacle, and the stadium as a broadcast studio. Pfeiffer first collaborated with the Redcoat Marching Band in 2019 in conjunction with the prestigious performance festival, Performa. A key element in Pfeiffer’s ambitious project, fifty Redcoat members—who normally perform during the breaks in play at UGA’s Sanford Stadium, home of the Georgia Bulldogs football team—performed live at the Apollo Theater, recreating a two-and-a-half-hour musical score from a typical college football game, using both front and back of house of the theatre as their performance space. Simultaneously, the rest of the 400 strong band performed the exact same musical score inside the empty Sanford Stadium in Athens, Georgia, which was live streamed into the Apollo, contrasting the architectures of stadium and theater. As Pfeiffer explained:  
"Sanford Stadium was a central object of study during my time at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. It was the focus of an extended classroom experiment in which a group of students, faculty, staff, and myself explored the stadium in its capacity as a massive broadcast studio and home to one of America’s most popular mass rituals. In this context, I was particularly drawn to the UGA Redcoat Band and its role as the live soundtrack and musical generator of crowd affect during the games."

Athens Art Book, Print & Zine Fair

June 24, 10am-6pm


The Lamar Dodd School of Art is pleased to announce the inaugural Athens Art Book, Print & Zine Fair on Saturday, June 24th at the Athenaeum in downtown Athens, Georgia, which will be presented alongside AthFest, an annual free, three-day festival that celebrates Athens’s vibrant creative culture, featuring local and regional musicians and visual artists. 

Established as a means of acknowledging the critical relationship between contemporary art and publishing with a regional focus on the Southeast, the Athens Art Book, Print & Zine Fair provides a space for publishers and artists to share their work and for the Athens art book community to grow and flourish. 

The Athens Art Book, Print & Zine Fair is presented by the University of Georgia Art Library, the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and the UGA Printmaking Student Association.



Reading: Southern Post-Colonial Emerging Writers

June 22, 7pm

With support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Georgia Review published a special issue titled “SoPoCo” (Southern Post-Colonial) in Spring 2022. This project celebrates the voices, history, and cultures of diasporic communities that have established themselves in the American Southeast since the late twentieth century. As part of this effort, The Georgia Review offered their SoPoCo Emerging Writer Fellowship, which granted not only publication in this issue and a $1,500 honorarium, but also a month-long writing residency in Georgia. The three winners, Aria Curtis, Sadia Hassan, and Tanya Rey will be publicly sharing work at the Athenaeum.

Aria Curtis is an Iranian-American writer from Atlanta. She holds an MFA from Arizona State University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry ReviewThe OffingThe Shallow EndsYemassee, and elsewhere. According to GR associate poetry editor Soham Patel, “Aria Curtis’s poems offer a sinuous interrogation of hair as decoration, as vehicle, as loss, as touch. Poignant and courageous, her work’s sensual engagement ‘pulls the tide,’ working to remind us how the body acts as witness and conduit of the bio-cultural.”

Sadia Hassan is a poet and prose writer from Clarkston, Georgia. Her chapbook Enumerationwas published in 2020 by Akashic Press and the African Poetry Book Fund. Hassan has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Mesa Refuge. Winner of the 2020 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award and 2019 finalist for the Krause Essay Prize, Hassan currently writes and teaches in Oxford, Mississippi, where she is pursuing her MFA at the University of Mississippi. More of her work can be found in the Academy of American Poets’ poets.org, Boston ReviewLongreads, and elsewhere. Patel writes that “‘Indian Creek’ considers the cultural expressions of adolescence. Set against the background of Clarkston, Georgia, Sadia Hassan’s entry offers a striking and complex coming-of-age story that deftly evokes the generational responses a family has to sexual evolution through the various lenses that refract it.”

Tanya Rey is a queer Cuban-American writer who was born and raised in Miami, Florida. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Granta, The Sun, Roads & Kingdoms, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Catapult, among othersShe holds an MFA in fiction from New York University and has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, San Francisco Writers Grotto, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, UCross, Blue Mountain Center, I-Park, Anderson Center, and others. An early draft of her novel-in-progress was selected as a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and an excerpt was shortlisted for the 2020 Disquiet Literary Prize. She lives in Oakland, California. Says associate prose editor Doug Carlson, “From Miami to New York to the Apalachee Correctional Institute, Rey’s characters—drawn with compassion, humor, and wisdom—spiral through scenes both poignant and powerful, told in a voice at once nuanced and direct.”

re:(de)construction Exhibition Opening Reception

April 14, 6-8pm

Join us as we celebrate our graduating class of MFA students in their final thesis exhibition. Artists in the exhibition include: AJ Aremu, Mickey Boyd, Zahria Cook, J Diamond, Shaunia Grant, Chad Hayward, Huey Lee, Jason Rafferty, Rachel Seburn, Ethan Snow, and Lee Villalobos.

Haute Fashion Show: The Capitol

April 28, 6-8:30pm

This fashion show examines economic crisis in relation to the ways in which we live our daily lives. The show will explore themes of wealth disparity through the lens of fashion. Our designers and stylists will showcase garments that represent the stark economic divide plaguing our society today. From opulence and an abundance of wealth displayed through lavish extravagant outfits to the struggles of the less fortunate shown in dystopian and bleak workwear, The Capitol mines our current moment to better understand contemporary trends in fashion.

Doors open at 6pm. Show starts at 7pm.
Tickets: $5 presale, $10 at door
insta: @hauteuga
tictock: @hauteuga

Screen Time: Ed Pavlić

March 17, 12:30pm

The humanities faculty at UGA are piloting a new series on campus featuring accessible talks about TV shows: Screen Time with Your Humanities Professors. The series highlights the sorts of questions and analytical modes that are characteristic of humanistic thinking, while making connections through mutual interests in pop culture. It's an a.v.-club-slash-humanities spin on UGA’s motto, Et docere et rerum exquirere causas. Talks are about 30 minutes long, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. Free lunch, students of all majors welcome.

What's so special about the music of Atlanta, Insecure, I May Destroy You, and Queen Sono?
In the 1950s James Baldwin wrote that "it is only in his music that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story." Back then, Baldwin held that Black musical textures signaled a story "which no American is prepared to hear." In film and television for the decades that followed, a wide gap yawned, at times howled, between the music and the characters. Midway in the 2010s, however, the gap between music and filmic elements narrowed. In this talk, Professor Ed Pavlić will highlight how Black characters and Black music weave together in unprecedented closeness in four recent series whose nuance and complexity rivals, and at times surpasses, that of our best contemporary writing.

Ed Pavlić is Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies and affiliated faculty in Creative Writing. He teaches classes mainly in modern and contemporary African American and American poetry, fiction, film and music as well as courses in creative writing.

Reading: Joseph Geha

March 20, 6pm

Join us for a reading and book signing with University of Georgia Press author, Joseph Geha. Immigrant children first speak the language of their mothers, and in Toledo, Ohio’s Little Syria neighborhood where Joseph Geha grew up, the first place he would go to find his mother would be the kitchen. Many of today’s immigrants use Skype to keep in touch with folks back in the old country but in those “radio days” of old before the luxuries of hot running water or freezers, much less refrigeration, blenders, or microwaves, the kitchen was where an immigrant mother usually had to be, snapping peas or rolling grape leaves while she waited for the dough to rise. There, Geha’s mother took special pride in the traditional Syro-Lebanese food she cooked, such as stuffed eggplant, lentil soup, kibbeh with tahini sauce, shish barak, and fragrant sesame cookies.

As much a memoir as a cookbook, Kitchen Arabic illustrates the journey of Geha’s early years in America and his family’s struggle to learn the language and ways of a new world. A compilation of family recipes and of the stories that came with them, it deftly blends culture with cuisine. In her kitchen, Geha’s mother took special pride in the Arabic dishes she cooked, cherishing that aspect of her heritage that, unlike language, has changed very little over time and distance. With this book, Geha shares how the food of his heritage sustained his family throughout that cultural journey, speaking to them—in a language that needs no translation—of joy and comfort and love.

JOSEPH GEHA is professor emeritus of creative writing at Iowa State University. He is the author of Through and Through: Toledo Stories and Lebanese Blonde. He lives in Ames, Iowa.

This event is sponsored by the University of Georgia Press.

Troubling Performance

February 25, 9am - 6pm

Link to register for webinar

This one-day symposium will consider representations of race in performance in connection to the work of visual artist Kara Walker, whose exhibition “Back of Hand” will be on display at the Athenaeum. Taking Walker as a departure point, invited speakers will address themes related to satire, stereotypes, social justice, and identity. The Keynote Speaker is Kirsten Pai Buick, professor of art history, University of New Mexico. Speakers include: Cheryl Finley, Inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College; Paul Pfeiffer, visual artist; and Isaiah Wooden, assistant professor of theater, Swarthmore.

Schedule of Symposium
9:00am: Light breakfast
9:20am: Opening remarks by Katie Geha, Director and Chief Curator of the Athenaeum
9:30am: Isaiah Wooden, “Troubling Representations, Holding Histories, and The Stage”
10:30am: Paul Pfeiffer, “Red, Green, Blue” 
11:30am: Cheryl Finley, “ Kara Walker: Art as Social Justice"
 
12:30 - 2:00: Break for Lunch
 
2:30pm: Kirsten Pai Buick, “Selling the Substance to Support the Shadow: Kara Walker’s Images of Black Children”
4:00pm: Round Table led by Khalid Long, Assistant Professor Theater and Institute for African American Studies, UGA
5:00pm: Wine & cheese


This symposium is sponsored by AGAS, the Art Library, the Black Artist Alliance, The Georgia Review, the Hargrett Library, the Institute for African American Studies, the Institute for Women's Studies, the Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop, and the Willson Center for Humanities.

Poetry Reading: Dawn Lundy Martin

February 24, 6pm

To kick off our "Troubling Performance" symposium, join us for a poetry reading by Dawn Lundy Martin,  the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh as well as the director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, which she co-founded with Terrance Hayes. Her books include A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (UGA Press, 2007), which won the Cave Canem Prize; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat, 2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; and, most recently, Good Stock / Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. She wrote the libretto for the video opera Good Stock on the Dimension Floor, which was mounted at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among other places. Her essays have appeared in venues like The New Yorkern+1, and boundary 2. Her memoir, When a Person Goes Missing, will be published by Pantheon Books.

This event is sponsored by The Georgia Review.

Screen Time: Mi-Ryong Shim

January 20, 12:30pm

The humanities faculty at UGA are piloting a new series on campus featuring accessible talks about TV shows: Screen Time with Your Humanities Professors. The series highlights the sorts of questions and analytical modes that are characteristic of humanistic thinking, while making connections through mutual interests in pop culture. It's an a.v.-club-slash-humanities spin on UGA’s motto, Et docere et rerum exquirere causas. Talks are about 30 minutes long, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. Free lunch, students of all majors welcome.

How did Crash Landing on You glamorize North Korea?
In the global hit South Korean drama Crash Landing on You, a South Korean heiress finds her true love after a paragliding accident drops her in North Korea. In this talk, Professor Mi-Ryong Shim explores how South Korean romantic dramas appeal to their audiences through the mode of overindulgence and how Crash Landing on You manages to stage the pleasures of visual and melodramatic excess even in the unlikeliest of settings. This event is part of Screen Time with Your Humanities Professors, a series that investigates pop culture in surprising and revealing ways.

Mi-Ryong Shim is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies. She’s an expert on Korean literature, film, and visual culture and teaches a wide range of courses at UGA related to Korea and East Asia.

Curator Led Tour

January 28, 4pm

Join us for a tour led by Dr. Katie Geha, the director of the Athenaeum and the curator of Kara Walker: Back of Hand. Geha will lead a conversational tour of the exhibition discussing the development of the show and examining major themes presented. The talk will be followed by light snacks and refreshments.

Opening Reception

January 13, 6-8pm

Join us in celebrating the exhibition "Kara Walker: Back of Hand," the first solo exhibition to be held in Georgia of the work of this internationally renowned artist. The exhibition displays a series of new works on paper by Kara Walker that examine themes such as complicity, racism, misremembered histories, and the violence that undergirds the legacy of the South. Walker moved to Stone Mountain from Stockton, CA when she was 13 and attended college at the Atlanta College of Art and Design. The exhibition will be on display from January 13th to March 23rd.

Currently based in New York, Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. The body of work in this exhibition represents her continued practice in drawing, working in watercolor, gouache, ink and graphite to create a series that calls forth the past at once mythological and real, ancient and contemporary. According to Walker, “I am always reflecting on the state of current events and the overlap of the historical and the mythic.”

Walker draws from a variety of influences in this recent work, recalling the political sketches of Goya, the caricatures of Daumier, and the “exotic” spectacle presented in the paintings of Gaugin. Two suites of work on display from her on-going series Book of Hours, started during the pandemic, have multivalent references that stem from medieval illuminated manuscripts to the actual time Walker spent creating the work to the uncanny, out-of-time sensation many of us endured during the early months of the pandemic. 

The practice of drawing for Walker is a hopeful, grounding activity. “Sitting down to make an intimate drawing is a conversation, a way of listening to what’s grumbling inside my body,” Walker explains, “and an attempt to transmit, nonverbally, an experience of being.” Two very large scale almost mural-like drawings, The Ballad of How We Got Here and Feast of Famine both completed in 2021 and shown for the first time, present a new direction for Walker. Through a tangle of scrawled texts that fill the large paper, cut paper figures affixed to the ground seemingly dance and whirl across the page. Through the chaos of words, Walker indicates to the viewer that history and its attendant interpretations are anything but neat. Instead, Walker presents history without moral or as she explains, “To demand exactitude in the pursuit of a historical truth is to go where no mind can venture and return whole.”

ONE NIGHT ONLY

November 18, 6pm

Come one, come all. Don your paper caps and join us in the parking lot behind the Athenaeum for ONE NIGHT ONLY, an old-time revival of objects, words, sounds, and movements that can’t be contained beneath a roof. The church doors have been torn asunder, the museum decorations dragged into the streets. Only the carnivalesque remains. This “syncretic pageantry of a ritualistic sort” aims to conjoin “the sacred with the profane,” boasting temporary galleries in the beds of pickup trucks, art installations on the asphalt, and poetry readings in the dark along with improvised music and dance. Graduate students from UGA’s various arts programs as well as artists from the wider Athens community will rejoice in ephemera for ONE NIGHT ONLY. Be there with bells on or bust. Refreshments provided.

Artwork by: Mickey Boyd, Katie Ford, Kate Luther, Carley Rickles, Tim Root, Rachel Seburn, Ashley Wingo
Readings by: Maxime Berclaz, Kara Krewer, Abhijit Sarmah
Church Service by: Ahndhi Sticha, Nathan Dixon
Music by: Dog Bytes

Screen Time: Casie LeGette

November 11, 12:30pm

The humanities faculty at UGA are piloting a new series on campus featuring accessible talks about TV shows: Screen Time with Your Humanities Professors. The series highlights the sorts of questions and analytical modes that are characteristic of humanistic thinking, while making connections through mutual interests in pop culture. It's an a.v.-club-slash-humanities spin on UGA’s motto, Et docere et rerum exquirere causas. Talks are about 30 minutes long, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. Free lunch, students of all majors welcome.

Why is Everybody Bingeing Bridgerton?

When Season 1 of Bridgerton debuted in December 2020, it became the most-watched English-language series on Netflix ever — and when Season 2 premiered in March 2022, the show broke its own record. In this talk, Professor Casie LeGette will think about some reasons for the show’s huge popularity, paying particular attention to the way it made a "fan-fiction" version of Regency England available and accessible to non-white viewers.

Casie LeGette is Associate Professor of English at UGA. She’s a specialist in Romantic Literature, and her courses range from Jane Austen to poetry to British literature across the Empire.

An Afternoon with UGA's Jazz Ensemble

November 9, 12:45

Join us for an afternoon concert with UGA's Jazz Ensemble. The Jazz Quintet is made up of members of the advanced Jazz Ensemble as well as Jazz Combo. They will be performing pieces from composers of the past and present, including swing and latin jazz styles. The instrumentation is a traditional format including piano, acoustic bass, drums, and two tenor saxophonists. These student musicians play regularly at events both on and off campus.

Marylyn Tan Reading

November 1, 6pm

In 2020, Marylyn Tan's debut volume shocked Singapore's literary world by winning the country's premier English-language poetry prize, making its then twenty-seven-year-old author the first woman to ever win the award. Moreover, it is not a polite book. It is an instruction book, a grimoire, a call to insurrection to wrest power back from the social structures that serve to restrict, control, and distribute it among those few privileged above the disenfranchised. Whether through occult practices or coding, curses or lyric expression, word and image, these poems make a poetic call to arms.

"The monsters fought by the witch in GAZE BACK are the hoarders of power and the proclaimers of acceptability and order. But this collection is really for the monsters that fight alongside her: the vilified women and girls made grotesque in their rebellious femininity, the true readers of her grimoire. Tan waves her tongue like a wand, ensnares her demons, and finally banishes them from the closing lines of her poems. Those looking for desperation and hopelessness in the face of adversity will find nothing in this collection; those looking for magic and a fierce kind of loving will find everything.”—Singapore Review of Books
 

“Marylyn Tan is an essential badass! Here is a voice for the audience of outcasts, an extraordinary poetry where the endangered body can find true solidarity. With an uncompromising lens on the human condition with sexts and symbols of moons and gender, resulting in unforgettable poems of deviance propelling culture forward.”
—CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

“This is an eviscerating, deliciously sacrilegious poetry that enacts, transgressing parameters of comfort and convention, its own agency for freedom within a post-gender, non-essentialist, even post-verbal, perspective, while also re-empowering what it means to be feminine and queer.”
 —Cyril Wong, author ofThe Lover’s Inventory

GAZE BACK is eloquent confrontation – it challenges the ways in which society polices gender, and the boundaries by which many define poetry. Tan’s gaze is not just a reciprocal look. It is a forceful glare, an unapologetic gape, an accusing stare. It is a refusal to break eye contact.”
—Tania de Rozario, author of And The Walls Come Crumbling Down &Tender Delirium

Queer, female, and Chinese, Marylyn Tan is a linguistics graduate, poet, and artist who has been performing and disappointing since 2014. Her work trades in the conventionally vulgar, radically pleasurable, and unsanctioned, striving to emancipate and restore the alienated, endangered body. Tan is the poetry reader for Singapore Unbound, founder of multidisciplinary arts collective DIS/CONTENT (hellodiscontent.carrd.com), and can be found in her habitat at instagr.am/marylyn.orificial or facebook.com/mrylyn. She lives in Singapore.

This event is co-sponsored by UGA Press, The Georgia Review and the Willson Center for the Arts & Humanities.

Doreen Baingana Reading

October 26, 6pm

Doreen Baingana is a Ugandan writer and arts manager. Her short story collection, Tropical Fish, won a Grace Paley Prize and a Commonwealth Prize, and she has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize three times. Her other awards include fellowships to the Rockefeller Bellagio Residency, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, La Porte Peinte residency, the Hambidge Center, a Tebere Arts Playwright residency, a Miles Morland Scholarship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant. Baingana has also published two children’s books as well as stories and essays in many journals including Agni, Callaloo, Chelsea, Glimmer Train, The Caravan, Chimurenga, Kwani?, Ibua, Evergreen Review and The Georgia Review. She has adapted her stories for the stage, which have been performed in Uganda and Germany. 

Baingana has an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park, worked at Voice of America radio and as managing editor of Storymoja Africa, a Kenyan publisher, and was chairperson of FEMRITE: the Uganda Women Writers Association. She has led creative writing workshops for two decades in various forums across Africa. She is based in Entebbe, Uganda.

This event is co-sponsored by the UGA English Department, The Georgia Review, and the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts.

An Evening with Burnaway

October 21, 6pm

For this in person event, Jasmine Amussen, the editor of Atlanta's digital art magazine, Burnaway, will read from a selection of recent Athens focused stories. In addition, Amussen will give a short presentation  on how to pitch to the magazine — and what kind of work catches the editor's attention, what doesn’t, along with additional information about programs, workshops, internships, Mood Rings and other ways to get involved with the magazine. The presentation and reading will be followed by a Q&A with Jasmine Amussen and Program & Mood Ring Coordinator Emily Lllamazales.

Burnaway is an Atlanta-based, non-profit magazine of contemporary art and criticism from the American South,  published online weekly and in print annually. Through its editorial program and cultivation of emerging arts writers and journalists, Burnaway connects the region’s diverse creative communities and develops exchange between Southern art, and the national and international art audiences.

Read More

Performative Lecture: GANGWAY

October 12, 6pm

In GANGWAY, Athens-based artist, Keith Wilson, presents a live documentary performance about a 106-year-old San Francisco gay bar. Before its closure in 2018, The Gangway was the site of police raids, queer community organizing, early AIDS activism, and general joy-making. Combining archival material, 3D models and performance, this immersive piece explores new models for experiencing lost places and the creation of future narratives.

Keith Wilson is a filmmaker and artist based in Athens, Georgia whose work has screened at Sundance, the Berlinale, the U.S. National Gallery of Art, documenta14, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is currently a Creative Producing Fellow with the Sundance Institute for the feature documentary I Didn’t See You There, which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. His short film The Tree screened at MoMA's 2019 Doc Fortnight program, DOC NYC, and was exhibited as a storefront installation at Artist Television Access in San Francisco. He was the producer, director of photography and editor of Water Makes Us Wet, a documentary feature directed by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens that premiered at documenta14 in Kassel, Germany. Keith was the director of photography and producer of INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR., which premiered at Sundance and was released theatrically by Strand Releasing. He is a member-owner of New Day Films, a 40 year-old documentary distribution cooperative.

Wilson was a 2019 Monroe Fellow at Tulane University's New Orleans Center for the Gulf South for The Most Beautiful Beach, a photography project on the architecture of Panama City Beach, Florida. In addition to solo shows in Austin, Texas and Berkeley, California, his artist book Every Building on Burnet [burn-it] Road was exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery and the Brandhorst Museum. His photography books See I Saw (2014) and Hyde Park Apartments (2010) are published by Publication Studio, and, with Shannon O'Malley, he is the co-creator and editor of Gay Men Draw Vaginas. Wilson currently teaches in the Entertainment & Media Studies Department at the University of Georgia, has an MFA in film production from the Radio-TV-Film Department at UT-Austin, and grew up on a cul-de-sac in suburban Atlanta.

Douglas Kearney: An Experimental Dialogue

September 27, 6pm

Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and librettist who has published seven books that bridge thematic concerns such as politics, African-American culture, masks, the Trickster figure, and contemporary music. His most recent book, Sho (Wave Books, 2021), was the winner for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, the 2022 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, the poems in this collection are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular strategies, while examining histories and current events through the lyric, brand new dances, and other performances.

Kearney is also the author of Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), which was awarded the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, and the silver medal for the California Book Award in Poetry. BOMB says Buck Studies “remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” Kearney describes the non-traditional layout of his poems as “performative typography.” On the relationship between his poetry and politics, he notes: “For me, the political is a part of how I see the world. My art making doesn’t begin without realizing who I am and what it means for me to be writing a poem and not doing something else.” Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), is a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection. In it, Kearney writes, “If my writing makes a mess of things, it’s not to flee understanding, but to map (mis-)understanding as a verb.” Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014), Kearney’s third poetry collection, examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009) is a National Poetry Series selection, which “flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity and book learning.” Someone Took They Tongues (Subito Press, 2016) collects several of Kearney’s libretti, including one written in a counterfeit Afro-diasporic language. He was the guest editor for the 2015 Best American Experimental Writing.

Kearney has received a Whiting Writer’s Award and the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, and was named a Notable New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America, He has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem and The Rauschenberg Foundation. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review, and anthologies, including Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the SkyBest American PoetryBest American Experimental Writing, and What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Poets in America.

A Howard University and CalArts alum, Kearney is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of Creative Writing/English at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives in St. Paul with his family.

This program is co-sponsored by the UGA English Department, The Georgia Review, and the Willson Center for Humanities and Art.

Screen Time: Cody Marrs

September 23, 12:30pm

The humanities faculty at UGA are piloting a new series on campus featuring accessible talks about TV shows: Screen Time with Your Humanities Professors. The series highlights the sorts of questions and analytical modes that are characteristic of humanistic thinking, while making connections through mutual interests in pop culture. It's an a.v.-club-slash-humanities spin on UGA’s motto, Et docere et rerum exquirere causas. Talks are about 30 minutes long, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. Free lunch, students of all majors welcome.

Why Did the Ending of Game of Thrones Suck?

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that the final season, and especially the final episode, of Game of Thrones was terrible. But why? In this talk, Professor Cody Marrs will contrast GoT (and analogues like Lost and Killing Eve) with shows that concluded successfully (like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos), to explore why certain endings are satisfying — or not. 

Cody Marrs is Professor of English at UGA. He’s a specialist in American literature, and recently he has taught classes on writers such as Mark Twain and Herman Melville, as well as courses on "Literature and Philosophy" and “The Great American Novel.”

Kameelah Janan Rasheed Artist Lecture & Exhibition Opening Reception

September 1, 6pm-9pm

Join us for an artist lecture by Brooklyn-based learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed followed by an exhibition reception celebrating her new installation Smooooooooooooooth Operator.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed presents a new exhibition that examines the poetics and power of machine learning. She questions computation, the role of the reader, and ritual in Smooooooooooooooth Operator which considers the menace of smoothness. We know what a smooth thing is; we’ve run our hand over a surface without noticeable projections or interruptions. Smoothing as a practice shows up in music via quantization and again in image processing via filters. Both are procedures of standardization and forced patterning by disregarding dirty data (or noise) in the service of fulfilling the audience’s expectations. Smooth viewing is easy viewing because the brain doesn’t have to second guess what it is looking at. Smooth images, smooth text make smooth, speed readers.

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 was 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 was the inaugural Douglass Discovery Arts Fellow at Rutgers University’s Douglass Residential College and Mason Gross School of Arts.

This program is supported by the Lamar Dodd School of Arts Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series and by the 2021 Presidential Interdisciplinary Seed Grant Program,


Poetry Reading with Elizabeth Hughey & Monica Fambrough

April 28, 6pm

Birmingham-based poet Elizabeth Hughey will read from her new poetry collection, White Bull. Composed entirely of words taken from the letters and public statements of the notorious segregationist Bull Connor, the poems in White Bull use language that was wielded in violence and oppression to reckon with the present moment. Hughey is the co-founder and Programming Director of the Desert Island Supply Co. (DISCO), a literary arts center in Birmingham, Alabama, 

Hughey will be joined by poet Monica Fambrough, whose most recent chapbook Blue Transfer was published by Oversound in 2020. A University of Georgia graduate, she is the author of Softcover (Natural History Press) and works for the Georgia Senate Democratic Caucus.

Elizabeth Hughey is the author of Sunday Houses the Sunday House (University of Iowa Press), and Guest Host (The National Poetry Review Press). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is the co-founder and Programming Director of the Desert Island Supply Co. (DISCO), a literary arts center in Birmingham, Alabama, where she lives with her husband, Chip Brantley, and their two sons. 

Monica Fambrough is the author of the poetry collection Softcover (Natural History Press) and a chapbook, Blue Transfer (Oversound). Her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, anthologized by the Everyman series, and translated for release in Germany by Sukultur. She is Communications Director for the Georgia Senate Democratic Caucus and lives in Marietta, Georgia.

What Comes Next? A Panel Discussion for Graduate Students About Working in Art

April 25, 6pm


The Black Artist Alliance invites Veronica Kessenich, the Executive Director of Atlanta Contemporary to moderate a panel discussion with four individuals working in the field of contemporary art; artist Yanique Norman, artist Hasani Sahlehe, printmaker and educator Chloe Alexander, and curator Daricia Mia DeMarr. The discussion, intended for current graduate students, will engage many practical topics in navigating a career once one graduates. Panelists will discuss career paths, the ways in which their specific fields intersect with one another, and how students can engage the communities they are a part of in school and beyond. 

Downstream Opening Reception

April 15, 6pm-8pm


Join us as we celebrate our graduating class of MFA students in their final thesis exhibition. Artists in the exhibition include: Rosie Brock, Luka Carter, Casey Connelly, Victoria Dugger, Isys Hennigar, Matthew Hoban, Craig Howarth, Forrest Lawson, and Annie Simpson.








Alumni Lecture: Andy Battaglia

April 14, 6pm

UGA alum Andy Battaglia (class of '97) will talk about his path from Athens to New York, where he has been writing about art and culture for more than 20 years. Currently the executive editor of ARTnews and Art in America, he has written for publications starting with the Red & Black and Flagpole and continuing through to FriezeArtforum, the Paris Review, the Onion A.V. Club, the Wall Street JournalPitchfork, the Guardian, and many others. Among the artists and thinkers he has engaged are Matthew Barney, Kevin Beasley, Carol Bove, Fred Moten, La Monte Young, Robert Wilson, Morton Subotnick, Michael Stipe, Alanna Heiss, and others. With a special interest in music and sound, he has also worked as an organizer and curator for Unsound, a project devoted to music and sound-art that presents concerts, discussions, and presentations in Krakow, Poland, as well as New York and points beyond. 
 
The talk will touch on the ups and down of a life lived through journalism, different approaches to reporting and criticism, and ways that coverage of art in its many forms has evolved and changed. 

Misplacement: A Symposium

April 1 - April 2

The School of Art, in conjunction with the Georgia Review, is hosting a two-day interdisciplinary conference organized around the theme of misplacement. Visual artists and leading scholars in the fields of art history, literature, media studies, race, and queer theory will present their research at the newly opened Athenaeum. Events will include an exhibition, keynote address, and lectures.

This event is supported by the School of Art, the Georgia Review, the Athenaeum, the Willson Center and a State-of-the-Art Conference Grant from the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost.


Friday, April 1st

3:00 pm           
Coffee & Chit-Chat

3:15 pm            
Welcome Remarks, Isabelle Loring Wallace & Gerald Maa

3:30 pm          
What We Bring Home //  Lisa Tan // Talk + Q&A

4:30 pm             
Black Absence, Black Uprising: Visual Poetry // Courtney Faye Taylor, author of Concentrate // Reading + Q&A

5:30 pm               
Stifters Dinge Performance // Marc Perroud // Screening + Food
 
Saturday, April 2nd

10:30 am         
Coffee & Chit-Chat

11:00 am         
Threshold of Confinement: Art, Museums, and Prisons // Nicole Fleetwood, James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University. // Talk + Q&A

12:00 noon            
Lost and Found Objects: Heiner Goebbels’ “Stifters Dinge” // Martin Harries, Professor of English, University of California, Irvine // Talk + Q&A

1:00 pm               
Lunch Break

3:00 pm           
The Town of Babylon: Fiction meets public health in a queer, coming-of-age tale // Alejandro Varela, MPH, author of The Town of Babylon // Reading + Q&A

4:00 pm               
Assisted Non Fiction // Jill Magid, Conceptual Artist and Writer // Keynote Shouky Shaheen Lecture

5:00 pm           
Roundtable + Concluding Remarks + Wine


Global Georgia Conversation: Ed Pavlić, Christine Cuomo & Cynthia Wallace

March 31, 7pm

"Outward: The Radical Legacies of Adrienne Rich - A Conversation with Ed Pavlić, Christine Cuomo & Cynthia Wallace" is presented as part of the Global Georgia Initiative public events series of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, in partnership with the department of English, the Creative Writing Program, and the Institute for Women's Studies.

Ed Pavlić's book, Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes was published in 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press. In it, Pavlić considers Rich’s entire oeuvre to argue that her most profound contribution in poems is her emphasis on not only what goes on “within us” but also what goes on “between us.” He shows how Rich’s most radical work depicts our lives—from the public to the intimate—in shared space rather than in owned privacy.

Pavlić is Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American studies, and affiliated faculty in creative writing, at UGA. His 13 published and forthcoming books range across (and at times between) genres: poetry, non-fiction, critical studies, and a novel.

Christine Cuomo is professor of philosophy and women's studies at UGA, and an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, the Institute for African-American Studies, the Institute for Native American Studies, and the UGA Initiative for Climate and Society.

Cynthia R. Wallace is associate professor and head of the department of English at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, where she teaches and writes at the intersections of gender, race, religion, and politics in contemporary literature. Her book Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering was published by Columbia University Press in 2016.


Lecture: Nathan Brown

March 21, 4:30pm

Field and Fragment: The Future of the Romantic Compositions from Basquiat to Beethoven

In the last two years of his life, Jean-Michel Basquiat began to include frequent allusions to Beethoven's Eroica symphony in his paintings and drawings, including in his late masterpiece, Pegasus (1987). This lecture focuses on these citations as a major thematic feature of Basquiat's late work, his mourning for Andy Warhol, and his reflexive engagement with his own signifying strategies. Addressing genre and differential repetition as formal mediations of ambiguous signs, not only in the context of Basquiat's compositions but also with respect to the rise of the symphony as a form, the lecture concludes by considering the relevance of the Haitian Revolution to Basquiat's reception of Beethoven's symphony and the cancelled homage to Napoleon on its original title page.

Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, Montreal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of three books: The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science and Materialist Poetics (2017), Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (2021), and Baudelaire's Shadow: An Essay on Poetic Determination (2022). He is also the translator of a new edition of Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil (2021).

Rest Notes: On Sleep and Black Contemporary Art

March 2, 6pm

Josie Hodson will discuss Black contemporary artists exploring the space of Black sleep, subverting its biopolitical regulation and the lethal expectation of perpetual industry. Artists such as Jennifer Packer, Noah Davis, and House/Full of Blackwomen show us the ways that visual representations of Black sleep can constitute quiet gestures of fugitivity and interiority in a culture that celebrates endurance over rest. Hodson will discuss projects bound by an ethos of collectivity, arguing that the project of transforming the social and political conditions that reproduce Black sleeplessness cannot be pursued in isolation.
 
Josie Roland Hodson is a PhD student in History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University, where her interdisciplinary research focuses on Black diaspora aesthetics and notions of Black sociality. Previously, she has worked at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Most recently, her article "Rest Notes: On Black Sleep Aesthetics” appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of October. 

Alumni Artist Lecture: Zipporah Camille Thompson

February 21, 4pm

The Black Artists Alliance host Zipporah Camille Thompson (MFA 2015) as a visiting artist on February 21, 2022. Thompson is a ceramist, weaver, sculptor, and activist based in Atlanta, Georgia- land of the Muskogee. A native Carolinian, Thompson explores alchemical transformations through clay and textiles, examining marginalized bodies and eliciting social change through her work. Sculpted shapeshifters and hybrid landscapes investigate otherness.

Zipporah Camille Thompson (she.her.hers) is a ceramist, weaver, sculptor, and activist based in Atlanta, Georgia-land of the Muskogee. A native Carolinian, Thompson explores alchemical transformations through clay + textiles, examining marginalized bodies and eliciting social change through her work. Sculpted shapeshifters and hybrid landscapes investigate otherness. 

She received her MFA from the University of Georgia and her BFA from the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and shown in spaces, nationally and internationally. Zipporah Camille Thompson is a 2021 MOCA GA Working Artist Project Fellow, a 2020 Artadia Atlanta Awardee, a Watershed Zenobia Scholarship Award grantee, an NCECA Multicultural Fellow, and an Idea Capital Travel Grant recipient. Thompson is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, GA. She is a history addict, roller-skater, and lover of unicorns, zombies, the moon, tarot, and all things fantasy. 

Jack Davis Lecture: The Black School

February 16, 6pm

Members of the Black School Design Studio, Joseph Cuillier and Kacy George, will discuss their design process and their work in creating the identity and website for the Athenaeum.

The Black School: Studio is an art and design firm that trains youth in paid apprenticeships to execute client work for third party organizations with the long-term intention of self-sustaining TBS programing. Their initial host and client was the Bronx Museum of Art’s anti-gun violence program, with whom they are returning for a second year. This engagement offers the opportunity to provide professional artistic training and paid work to TBS Alumni and selected youth of the community the museum serves in exchange for quality, community center graphic design services.

Joseph Cuillier (b. 1988, New Orleans, LA) is a multidisciplinary artist who explores abstraction as technology, language in space, and the history of Black radical pedagogies through social practice, installation, textile art, and design. Cuillier's installations use fashion and architecture to render bodies in space and bodies in action in an attempt to bridge gaps between living and form. Currently based in Harlem, NYC where he achieved an MFA from Pratt Institute and is currently a faculty member at Parsons and Pratt. Cuillier's work has been exhibited, collected, and presented at New Museum, MoMA Library, Bauhaus Dessau, Bronx Museum of Art, Wallach Gallery at Columbia University, Schafler Gallery at Pratt Institute, among others. Cuillier has been an artist-in-residence/fellow at Sweet Water Foundation courtesy of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Ideas City NOLA, Antenna, New Museum, The Laundromat Project, and A Blade of Grass.

Kacy George believes that data and a clear voice supplements effective communication. He leverages his aptitude for creative thinking, software learning, and client objectives to present fruitful solutions. George has years of experience providing quality design, marketing, and administrative support in a variety of professional settings and has worked at organizations such as Whitney Museum of American Art, Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, Nova XR Media, The Laundromat Project, The City College of New York, and The Black School.

Performative Lecture: Burning

February 3, 6pm


Atlanta-based artist and writer Courtney McCellan will present "Burning" a performative lecture that weaves personal narrative, research about stress, American mythology around progress, and the work of Eadweard Muybridge. Through the study and manipulation of Muybridge’s animal locomotion images, McClellan will address how Muybridge’s work more than 100 years ago staged film and the personal computer, and in doing so, impacted nearly all aspects of contemporary life. Additionally, she will consider how movement and the creative process combat burnout.
 
Courtney McClellan is an artist and writer from Greensboro, NC. She served as the 2013-2014 Fountainhead Fellow in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and the 2016-2018 Sculpture Fellow at the University of Georgia. She was a 2017-2018 SMFA at Tufts Traveling Fellow; a 2019-2020 Working Artist Project Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia; and the 2019-2020 Roman J. Witt Artist in Residence at the University of Michigan. McClellan’s work has been shown at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, NY; the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, MI; and the Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, GA. Her practice has been supported by residences at McDowell, Yaddo, the Hambidge Center, and Wassaic Projects, and her work has been written about in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Burnaway. She is a contributor at Art Papers. Most recently, she was named the 2021 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
 
Image Credit: Running for Running: After Eadweard Muybridge, Courtney McClellan, 2021.


Lisa Tan lecture

January 12, 6pm via Zoom



Register Here
Lisa Tan is an American artist and educator based in Stockholm, Sweden. She works with video, photography, text, installation, and other gestures. Her own experiences of desire, loss and otherness are drivers for explorations into consciousness, the formation of individual subjectivity, and the role that representation plays in shaping a person’s relationship to the world and to others. Writing figures largely in her work, and she regularly draws from literature, literary theory, and the history of photography. 

She received a MFA from the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, where she lived for several years, before relocating to New York. In the years following, she pursued her art and exhibition-making, while also working a day job at an interior architecture firm. In 2010, she was accepted to the practice-based PhD program at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. This, along with a partner based in Stockholm, is what eventually brought her to Sweden.

MIT List Center (Cambridge), Kunsthall Trondheim, ICA Philadelphia, Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Tabakalera International Center for Contemporary Culture (San Sebastian), Contemporary Art Gallery CAG (Vancouver), and Artists Space (New York). Tan’s work was presented in the 11th Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA) (2021), osloBIENNALEN First Edition (2019-2020), ever elusive, Transmediale festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017), Why Not Ask Again?, the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), Surround Audience, the Triennial exhibition at the New Museum (2015). Her artist book Sunsets, Notes From Underground, and Waves, is published by and available at Archive Books, Berlin. 

For more, see lisatan.net 

This lecture is supported by a Willson Center Distinguished Visiting Artist Grant.

FlucT

November 12, 7:00 pm

FlucT is the collaborative work of Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile. Creating original soundscapes linking a manipulated pop music psychosis with violently intimate dance, their compositions become projections aimed at exposing authorities of control in the United States capital culture.

Established in 2010, Lauren and Mirabile create duets, video installation, original scores, sculpture, and choreography. They have performed and exhibited at the Guggenheim, The Broad Museum, Miami Art Basel, SIGNAL, Queens Museum and Andrea Rosen Gallery. Their large-scale choreographed productions have included a multiplicity of performing artists, dancers, non-dancers and technicians (‘is it god or am i dog’, UpwardFacingControlTableTop’ and ‘Bigger Than You’) and they frequently collaborate with musicians including SOPHIE and PicturePlane, as well as founded Otion Front Studio, a performance and dance space in Brooklyn, New York. Their work has been reviewed by Art in America, The New York Times, The Fader, and Cura Magazine, among others.

This event is in-person at the Athenaeum (287 West Broad Street)

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Everyday Creativity: A Community Conversation

November 12, 10:00am - 3:00pm

The Torrance Center presents a mini-conference event, “Everyday Creativity: A Community Conversation," focused on the unique benefits of everyday creativity. Join the conversation—artists, scholars, and entrepreneurs from the local and regional community will share their insights on the whys and hows of the practice of everyday creativity. This event is free and open to the public.

Featured speakers:
Cal Clements attended art school at UGA in the mid-1980s before going on to study comparative literature and other pursuits. In “What Works for Me—Abhyasa in Clay,” attendees will pinch clay, look at slides, think of happy memories, and talk about maintaining inspiration in a world gone mad. Additionally, Clements will introduce concepts that help him in his studio practice.

HyunJoo Oh is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Schools of Industrial Design and Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. In “Creative Learning Through Expressive Making,” Oh will present her teaching and research projects that engage a broad range of designers from the K-12 community to university students for their learning through exploratory and expressive making processes.

Jason Matherly lives in Athens, Georgia, and divides his time between family, art, and working as coordinator of the University of Georgia’s Curriculum Materials Library. In “Margin-Work: Creating Spaces for Creative Practice Speaker,” Matherly will discuss ways he has cultivated and maintained a strong artistic practice by finding creative opportunities in the “margins” of everyday life. 

Serra Jaggar has been at the forefront of the modern craft movement since opening her first handmade-only shop in 2002. In “When Your Hobby Becomes Your Career: How Creative Entrepreneurship Became the American Dream,” Jaggar will explore how the modern-day craft renaissance and personal aesthetics combined with the American entrepreneurial spirit to create an explosion of creatives in the business sector. 

Unseen Skies
Directed by Yaara Bou Melhme, 2021,
98 minutes

October 23, 12:00 pm

At Ciné / 234 West Hancock

Contemporary artist Trevor Paglen is known for his political and mind-blowing art pieces on global mass surveillance, data collection, and artificial intelligence. This visually stunning and immersive film follows Paglen as he travels through the desolate Nevada desert while discussing the motivation for his latest and most audacious project: launching a satellite into orbit. Stunning cinematography, trippy computer graphics, and a percussive score imbue this compelling documentary with an ethereal tone that perfectly captures the provocative and breathtaking beauty of Paglen’s work.

AI, Ethics, and Aesthetics

October 20, 5:30 pm

A consortium of faculty from the University of Georgia will interrogate the relationship between artificial intelligence, aesthetics, and ethics. The discussion will focus largely on the possibility that AI, most notably in the form of machine-learning recommender systems, causes unintended aesthetic harm by degrading our aesthetic capacities and biasing our aesthetic choices. Panelists include Anna Abraham, Educational Psychology; David Saltz, Theater and Film Studies;  Aaron Meskin, Philosophy and AI; Rosanna Smith, Marketing; and Isabelle Wallace, School of Art. 

This event is in-person and at the Athenaeum (287 West Broad Street)

Anna Abraham, Ph.D. is the E. Paul Torrance Professor at the Department of Educational Psychology and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development at UGA's Mary Frances Early College of Education. She is a psychologist and neuroscientist who investigates the cognitive and brain mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition, and mental state reasoning. She is the author of numerous publications including the book, The Neuroscience of Creativity (2018, Cambridge University Press), and the edited multidisciplinary volume, The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (2020).

Aaron Meskin is the head of the Philosophy Department at UGA. Prior to this role, he was a Professor of Philosophical Aesthetics at the University of Leeds in Leeds, England. And from 1999-2005 I taught at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The primary focus of his research is in the fields of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. He has published extensively on aesthetic testimony, authorship, the definition of art, emotional responses to fiction, the epistemology of photography, style, and the philosophical questions raised by the arts of comics, dance, short stories, theatre, and videogames. 

David Saltz is Head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, and Executive Director of Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE). His primary research focuses have been performance philosophy and the interaction between live performance and digital media. He was Principal Investigator of Virtual Vaudeville, a large-scale research project funded by the National Science Foundation to simulate a nineteenth-century vaudeville performance on the computer. He established the Interactive Performance Laboratory at UGA, has directed a series of productions incorporating real-time interactive digital media, and has created interactive sculptural installations that have been exhibited nationally. He is co-author (with Sarah Bay-Cheng and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck) of Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (University of Michigan Press, 2015), co-editor (with David Krasner) of the book Staging Philosophy: Intersections between Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and books.

Rosanna K. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on understanding how the concept of authenticity is used in marketing and consumer contexts. Currently, her research primarily focuses on the intersection between authenticity and aesthetics. Her work has been featured in both top marketing and psychology journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Isabelle Loring Wallace is Interim Co-Director of the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, as well as Associate Professor of Contemporary Art. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle and Paul Pfeiffer, and the co-editor of two anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennifer Hirsh (Routledge, 2016) and Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility co-edited with Nora Wendl (Routledge, 2016). Professor Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon, 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis. Simultaneously, she is working on a new project that considers recurring intersections between new media art and assorted Judeo-Christian themes.

Anthony Cross: The Ethics of Meme Culture

October 13, 7:00 pm

The omnipresence of the internet in the twenty-first century has brought with it an explosion of new forms of vernacular culture, the most significant of which is the internet meme. Meme culture is participatory, ephemeral, and anonymous, yet it offers important new opportunities for aesthetic expression. This talk focuses on the ethical significance of meme culture. In particular, I'll argue that a chief value of internet memes lies in their ability to facilitate the formation and expression of communities with shared values; memes are the cultural glue that binds our internet communities together. At the same time, memes' ability to go viral—and to quickly spread beyond the communities in which they originated—raises some difficult ethical questions: Who owns a meme? What should we do about memes that turn racist or memes which encourage hate? Can meme culture be the subject of problematic cultural appropriation? Along the way, I'll also discuss the nature and ontology of memes, the recent development of NFT sales of memes, and the relationships between meme culture and more traditional forms of vernacular culture.

Anthony Cross is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University. His primary research interests are in aesthetics and ethics; his published research focuses on the normative significance of relationships with artworks and other cultural objects. He has written about the aesthetics of internet culture for Aesthetics for Birds and has recently authored a chapter on the ethics of internet culture and new media for the Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art.

This lecture is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Aesthetics in the Expanded Field Research Group at the University of Georgia.

Lisa Saltzman

October 7, 5:30 pm

There is a piece by Paul Klee, the Angelus Novus, of 1920. That it is known and known not as the “new angel” but as “the angel of history,” is largely thanks to the work of the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who, having conjured the image in prose in the posthumously published, influential essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” anchored it in our collective imaginations.   For no one saw more of the picture than Benjamin. Soon after acquiring the Angelus from Klee’s Munich dealer in 1921, the little work on paper became one of Benjamin’s most precious of possessions.  So cherished was Klee’s Angelus that Benjamin mounted it above his writing desk in Berlin. Later, it was among the few belongings, beyond his own unfinished manuscripts, that he took with him in his battered briefcase when fleeing Nazi Germany. And in 1940, it was among the few items that he entrusted to a friend for safekeeping as he prepared to flee Paris, fearing that he might not survive the exilic existence into which the Third Reich had propelled him.

Klee’s Angelus is now safely housed in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, after a long journey that began in Paris, where Benjamin entrusted the picture to Georges Bataille, who bequeathed it to Theodor Adorno, who sent it to Gershom Scholem, in what was then still Palestine, whose widow donated it to the museum in 1987.  Few have since seen the actual picture, as it is too delicate to be on view. That said, by total chance, Lisa Saltzman, Professor, and Chair of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, got to see Klee’s Angelus several years ago.  And all that emerged from that encounter inspired her to embark on a new project, one which begins with mining the stories we have inherited, and the stories we continue to tell, about Klee’s fragile little picture. Saltzman’s talk at The Athenaeum will take us into those stories.  And, in so doing, it will also provide a glimpse of the larger project inspired by that serendipitous encounter with Klee’s little picture, also featured in a photograph by Trevor Paglen, currently on view in his exhibition "Vision After Seeing" at the Athenaeum. 

Lisa Saltzman is a Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. She received her BA from Princeton in 1988 and her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1994.  She has received fellowships from the DAAD, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, the Clark Art Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation.   

At Bryn Mawr, she teaches courses in modern and contemporary art and, from 2003-2009, served as the Director of the Center for Visual Culture.  Saltzman is the author of Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and is the co-editor, with Eric Rosenberg, of Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (University Press of New England, 2006).

A Subjective Response to Emerging Technologies: a Conversation with Siebren Versteeg

September 27th, 5:30pm

New York-based digital artist, Siebren Versteeg, will discuss his work in relation to new technologies and contemporary art. From the origins of the web, to Web 2.0, to NFTs and blockchain, Versteeg's practice continues to respond and meddle with the burgeoning media forms that reshape our connections to art, value, and truth. He will address this work as it relates to ongoing interests in algorithmic computation, painterly abstraction, and doom scrolling.

Siebren Versteeg was born in 1971 in New Haven, CT. He received his MFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Bitforms, New York, NY; Minnesota Street Projects, San Francisco, CA; Art Vault, Santa Fe, NM; Sharjah Art Foundation, Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Andrew Racfacz, Chicago, IL. His work is included in several collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Marguilies Collection at the WAREhOUSE, Miami; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.; Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and the Guggenheim, New York, NY. 

Trevor Paglen in Conversation with Marni Shindelman & Dr. Isabelle Wallace

September 20th, 5:30pm

Trevor Paglen acted as the 2019-2020 Dodd Professorial Chair at UGA, a short-term appointment of high distinction intended to honor artists of international standing who have achieved an extraordinary record of the exhibition. Artists selected for this position teach and work at the Dodd and hold the rank of full professor. While in residence at the Dodd, Paglen co-taught Human Geography with Associate Professor in Photography, Marni Shindelman, and Vision: a Prismatic Approach with Interim Co-Director of the Lamar Dodd School of Art and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, Dr. Isabelle Wallace. In this conversation, Paglen, Shindelman, and Wallace will discuss the themes integral to these courses--migration crisis, environmental pollution, classical myths, surveillance, and machine vision--and the ways in which they inform their individual research. 

Marni Shindelman’s practice investigates the data tracks we amass through networked communication. Her work ties the invisible to actual sites, anchoring the ephemeral in photographs. Her latest work Restore the Night Sky looks at the influence privatized immigration detention centers have on the rural landscapes they inhabit. As part of the collaborative team Larson & Shindelman, since 2007, their work has been shown at the Denver Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Portland Art Museum.  Solo exhibitions include the George Eastman Museum, the Orlando Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery, and the Contemporary Arts Center Las Vegas.  Numerous publications have featured their work including Wired, The Picture Show from NPR, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the British Journal of Photography. They have been artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Light Work, and CEC ArtsLink in St. Petersburg, Russia. Shindelman received her MFA from the University of Florida and her Bachelor of Philosophy from Miami University.  She is an Associate Professor at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia.

Isabelle Loring Wallace is Interim Co-Director of the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, as well as Associate Professor of Contemporary Art. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle and Paul Pfeiffer, and the co-editor of two anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennifer Hirsh (Routledge, 2016) and Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility co-edited with Nora Wendl (Routledge, 2016). Professor Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon, 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis. Simultaneously, she is working on a new project that considers recurring intersections between new media art and assorted Judeo-Christian themes.

ATHENAEUM
287 W Broad St
Athens, GA 30605, U.S.A 
University of Georgia
Lamar Dodd School of Art
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