For Rachel Waldrop, director and curator of the Athenaeum and Dodd Galleries, contemporary art is not meant to be intimidating.
The downtown Athens art gallery, which opened in 2021, is free and open to the public. Waldrop hopes students and Athens residents see the space as a cultural resource they can visit, whether they consider themselves “art people” or not.
That idea was on display on Sept. 24, as a group of invited media toured the Athenaeum and the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Lamar Dodd School of Art, getting a look at current exhibitions and spaces where students create their work.
At the Athenaeum, media viewed “The Measure Is Something Else,” an exhibition of nine key artworks by video artist Erin Johnson. The exhibition will remain on display through Mar. 20, 2027. One of Johnson’s pieces focuses on the monkeys of Cayo Santiago, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico, home to a long-running rhesus macaque research colony. Waldrop explained that Johnson wanted the monkeys to speak for themselves, rather than having people speak for them.
Media also stopped at Gallery 2, where “The Field” by Megan Ledbetter is on display through Nov. 21, 2026. The photographic series explores a potter’s field in Red Bank, Tennessee, used as a municipal cemetery for poor and dispossessed people from 1890 to 1912.
The group then moved on to Lamar Dodd for a closer look at the work of UGA art students, alumni, and faculty. One of the galleries featured “Runner Up,” a solo exhibition by Athens artist Victoria Dugger, the 2026 Margie E. West Prize recipient.
Dugger completed her MFA in Studio Art at UGA in 2022 and continues to live and work in Athens. Her work uses exaggerated and fantastical imagery to explore Black girlhood, disability, femininity, and desire through the lens of the Southern Gothic. The exhibition incorporates materials and imagery, including gingham, glitter, and bows. Dugger’s exhibition is on display through Nov. 20, 2026.
The tour also gave media a peek at Lamar Dodd’s weaving facilities, where students are learning both traditional techniques and ways to develop their own designs into finished fabric pieces.
Joseph Peragine, the director and professor of art at Lamar Dodd, described the approach as a balance between learning from the history of the craft and creating something new.
“We’re still looking at the past but using that to then look forward into the future and what’s to come,” Peragine said.
In one of the graduate studios, MFA student Phoebe-Agnès Sinclair was packaging one of her oil paintings.
Sinclair is in her final year of the program, and when asked if she was sad to be nearing the end, she laughed.
“I’m freaking excited! I feel like I’ve been well prepared for what’s next,” said Sinclair.
From students learning traditional weaving techniques to graduate students developing their own work in the studio, the tour offered a glimpse into the work happening behind the exhibitions.
Waldrop hopes the Athenaeum can be another place where students and Athens residents engage with that work. The Athenaeum had a slow start due to its opening during the COVID-19 pandemic. Waldrop is working to get more people through the gallery’s doors.
For her, that means making the Athenaeum feel like a place people can simply walk into, look around and engage with art on their own terms.
“I want students to come and use this space as a cultural resource,” Waldrop said.
