Continuing its tradition, The Georgia Review will be presenting an interdisciplinary symposium for graduate students from the UGA Creative Writing Program and Lamar Dodd School of Art to showcase their creative work during Spotlight on the Arts. The theme for this year is “Natural History.”  As a term “Natural History” relates to curation, classification, and preservation.  It focuses on the more-than-human world(s) of a particular region and the ways of life these elicit.  In the constellation of “natural” and “history”, one can also hear a question of what would constitute an unnatural history. Taking this phrase as a starting point, Art students Eve Brown, Paul Knopf, Jeanne Marie Martineau, and Larissa Mcpherson along with Creative Writing students Rahad Abir, O-Jeremiah (Oluwatoyosi) Agbaakin, Matthew Moore, and Nik Moore will present their work and how it relates and expands upon this theme.
The event will take place on November 8th at the Athenaeum from 2 to 4:30 pm. Drinks and light refreshments will be provided. This event is free and open to the public.

Speakers

Rahad Abir is a writer from Bangladesh. His debut novel Bengal Hound won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for literary fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Witness, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into French and Hindi. His short story, “Mr. Moti,” is featured in a secondary school English textbook in Bangladesh, where it is required reading for 9th and 10th graders.


O-Jeremiah Agbaakin is the author of The Sign of the Ram(Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. His poems and reviews are published in Kenyon Review, POETRY Magazine, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowship and support from Good Hart Artist Residency, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Bread Loaf, Tin House; and a Graduate Research Award from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, among other honors. He is currently a doctoral student of Creative Writing and Literature at University of Georgia.


Eve Brown holds a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College where she studied painting, sculpture, poetry and digital media. Brown also received the Ellen Battel Stoeckel Fellowship to study at the Yale/Norfolk Summer Painting Program. She is currently an MFA candidate in sculpture at the University of Georgia, where she was also awarded an additional assistantship for interdisciplinary research in the Arts Collaborative. She is the recipient of the Idea Capital Grant and also of the Nexus Fund Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was awarded a residency at the Maitland Art and History Museum in Maitland, Florida. Brown has shown work at Whitespace Gallery, Georgia Tech, Atlanta Contemporary Art, Swan Coach House and the Gadsden Museum of Art. She currently lives, works and teaches in Atlanta, GA, where she was born.


Paul Knopf is currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia where he was awarded an Osborne Graduate Fellowship. His work has been part of exhibitions in Athens, Berlin, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Kassel, Tokyo, Weimar, and Zella-Mehlis, and it has been published in Class Favourite Magazine, PORT, and blank magazine among others. Before joining the Dodd, he was part of the International Media Architecture Master Studies—a joint program between the University at Buffalo, SUNY (USA) and the Bauhaus-University Weimar (GER). During his time in Buffalo, he was a member of BICA School—a free, collective art school at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. In parallel to his undergraduate studies in architecture and after a semester abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria), he joined the class for Sculpture, Object, Installation of Prof. Björn Dahlem at Bauhaus-University Weimar. He received scholarships from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation) and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).


Jeanne Marie Martineau is a French American transdisciplinary artist who weaves various mediums of object making, dream tending, writing, song and sound meditation into a unified peace practice and experiences of artistic self-discovery for others.  Through collecting and transforming local and discarded materials like felled tree limbs, wood scraps, plastic bags and packaging, and sounds from the environment, she tells stories of place and highlights the connectedness of all things. Jeanne Marie is currently a second year Master of Fine Arts student at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. 


Larissa McPherson is a metalsmith and jewelry artist from Adairsville, GA, and is currently working on her MFA in Jewelry & Metalsmithing at the University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art. Larissa graduated from the University of West Georgia with a B.S. in Psychology and a minor in studio art. By studying metalsmithing with an old professor and joining the Metal Arts Guild of Georgia in early 2022, Larissa started a path toward pursuing metalsmithing full-time. Her work explores ideas and issues related to the accumulation of microplastics and waste in the environment, specifically within animal bodies. Microplastics are now found in every being, and her work imagines how this might visually appear in the bones animals leave behind.


Matthew Moore is the author of a poetry collection, The Reckoning of Jeanne d’Antietam (University of Nevada Press). He is the translator of Opera Buffa by Tomaž Šalamun (Black Ocean) and Padova by Igo Gruden (Adjunct Press).


Nik Moore is a Kentucky poet, a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Montana, and a doctoral student of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Their poems have appeared in A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (UGA Press), Orion, Poetry Northwest, and EcoTheo, among other journals and anthologies. Nik is the recipient of a Danny Miller Award for Advanced Graduate Study from Northern Kentucky University and was granted a Greta Wrolstad Travel Award from the University of Montana in sponsorship of their study of silence at Trappist monasteries.

CAS is a free after-school program for pre/teen students from local middle schools. The first run of the program was hosted in Spring 2022 and included participants from four different middle schools in the Athens area. The Athenaeum aims to host new iterations of the program every spring semester, with the program centering on the work exhibited in the gallery.
 
CAS is led by faculty and students in UGA’s Art Education program. Preservice teachers (undergraduate students who are preparing to become certified art teachers) enrolled in ARED 4060S: Art Education in School, Museum, and Community are mentored by faculty and graduate students to develop the program content and serve as the lead instructors for the 10-week program.
 
In Spring 2022, the program focused on sound and video art in connection with artist Lisa Tan’s installation of Dodge and Burn 2017 - 2020 July 4 in the gallery. Preservice teachers had an opportunity to meet with Lisa Tan and share in dialogue around the work, brainstorming possibilities for using the work as a catalyst for art making with middle school participants.
 
For the duration of the program, UGA students and middle school participants explored experiential and artistic concepts developed in Tan’s work—concepts such as failure, surprise, juxtaposition, multi-sensory experience, and more. Participants engaged in emergent inquiry of these concepts by experimenting with video, sound, narrative, and embodied art practices. Ultimately, the participants created their own works of video and sound art that showcased their unique interests and identities and shared these works in a celebratory film screening during the final session of the program. Beyond these art-focused aspects of the program, there were snacks, games, and outdoor explorations, and loads of fun was had by all!
 
Be on the lookout this fall for information about the Spring 2023 CAS!
 
The 2022 CAS After School Program was supported by a 2021-2022 Willson Center Public Impact Grant