About this Event
Join Us at The Athenaeum!
The Athenaeum is a downtown center for contemporary art in affiliation with UGA and the Lamar Dodd School of Art.
The mission of the Athenaeum is to support artists, pursue contemporary art and ideas with rigor; to serve as a flexible space that invites extended looking and encourages critical thinking.
We are dedicated to presenting the work of major artists in the field of contemporary art as well as centering under-recognized and emerging artists in the commission of new works and projects.
Free parking is available directly behind the Athenaeum in UGA lot W-16. Pull into the driveway off of Broad Street and take your first left into the parking lot. Ask our gallery attendant for a daily parking pass. Parking in lot W16 is also available at an hourly rate via Parkmobile app, zone #20125.
Agenda
Erin Johnson: The Measure Is Something Else
Host: Erin Johnson
Info: “Erin Johnson: The Measure Is Something Else” is a mid-career survey of the artist’s work that examines the rough edge of scientific authority where objects of knowledge resist the disciplinary regimes that fix their meaning. Across nine bodies of work—videos, photographs, and objects—created over the past twelve years as well as a new 2026-2027 commission, Johnson lingers in the infrastructures that sustain modernity—archives, libraries, cabinets, classrooms, laboratories, research facilities, and containment sites—documenting unlikely moments of humor and refusal in which subjects such as sexually fluid tomatoes or the immeasurable depth of the sea unsettle the legitimacy of epistemic conventions. The exhibition traces how institutional attempts to codify the world are also barriers to our contact with its immensity and intrinsic contradictions.
Megan Ledbetter: The Field (2022-2026)
Host: Megan Ledbetter
Info: Megan Ledbetter presents “The Field (2022-2026),” a photographic series and growing body of research exploring and recognizing a potter’s field in Red Bank, Tennessee—essentially a dumping ground and derelict municipal cemetery for the poor and dispossessed in operation from 1890-1912 just on the outskirts of Chattanooga.
With new research unearthed in 2020 by historian Michael Hitt, Ledbetter began accessing and documenting the sites in 2022. Through generous support from the Current Art Fund (2023-2024), Ledbetter’s The Field combines visual imagery, historical research and ephemera, and community engagement to shine a light on the complex overlapping histories at this abandoned burial ground.
Event venue & nearby stays
287 W Broad St, 287 West Broad Street, Athens, United States
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