Spotlight on the Arts is the University of Georgia’s monthlong festival celebrating the literary, visual and performing arts. Organized by the UGA Arts Council, the festival aims to showcase student and faculty achievements while engaging both campus and the wider Athens community. This November, the Georgia Museum of Art will join over a dozen UGA units in hosting a variety of events that range from artist talks, exhibitions and performances to poetry readings, lectures and theater productions.
In addition to multiple special events, the Georgia Museum of Art will continue to host its regular programming over the course of the festival: Tour at Two (November 4 and November 25), Family Day: The Science of Art (November 7), Toddler Tuesday: Art in Nature (November 10), Artful Conversation: “Minnehaha” (November 11), Student Zine-Making Night (November 12), Creative Aging Art Workshop (November 17), Curator Talk: “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone” (November 18), Third Thursday (November 19), Yoga in the Galleries (November 19), Drawing in the Galleries: Edmonia Lewis (November 19), Sunday Afternoon Tour (November 22) and Student Perspectives talks (November 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 17 and 21).
Check out our event recommendations below and explore the full list of Spotlight on the Arts programming for even more educational and entertaining experiences.
Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture with Bob Dilworth and guests Ben F. Jones, Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims
November 3, 5:30 p.m. • Room S151, Lamar Dodd School of Art • Free • Event link
“Cornucopia: Ties That Bind” brings together the works of renowned artists of color, including Sam Gilliam, Francisco Amighetti, Manuel Mendive, Kevin Cole and Francisco Loza. Curated by Lamar Dodd School of Art professor Joe Norman, the exhibition explores themes of social justice, cultural identity, environmental change and the enduring resilience of communities across the globe. The exhibition will close with a panel discussion featuring exhibiting artists Ben F. Jones and Bob Dilworth, co-moderated by art historian Leslie King Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims, former curator of contemporary and modern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sponsored by the Lamar Dodd School of Art
Lecture: Kirsten Buick, “Who Is Responsible for Remembering? Three 19th-Century Case Studies @ Visuality and Forgetting”
November 5, 5:30 p.m. • Georgia Museum of Art • Free • Event link
Kirsten Pai Buick is a professor of art history at the University of New Mexico, where she has taught since 2001. Buick specializes in American art, focusing her research on African American art, the impact of race and gender on the history of art, representations of the American landscape and the history of women as patrons and collectors of the arts. She has advanced scholarship of the work of numerous African American artists through publications, including the first book-length examination of the life and career of Edmonia Lewis. In a cultural climate where we are being actively encouraged to forget or mis-remember, this lecture argues that forgetting can be constitutive of visuality itself — that we must forget as the very condition of seeing. What does the slave narrative of James Williams mask, for example? What of Edmonia Lewis’ sculpture “Forever Free” or John Gast’s painting “American Progress”? Turning on the central question of “who is responsible for remembering,” each work resists illegibility by withholding the unspeakable and the unspoken. This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone.”
Sponsored by the Georgia Museum of Art
Fall 2026 Dodd Market
November 6, noon – 6 p.m. • Atrium and courtyard, Lamar Dodd School of Art • Free • Event link
Organized by the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Dodd Ambassadors, the annual Dodd Market is a student-run event featuring over 100 vendors, a food truck and live music. The market’s mission is to provide valuable selling experience to art students and to engage the UGA and Athens community. Keep an eye out for bleach design shirts by Elyse Kaplan, jewelry by Akweley Gibson, henna by Harshitha Ganesan and Navya Jain, prints by Tori Lehman and children’s books by Michele Presley.
Sponsored by the Lamar Dodd School of Art and the UGA Parents Leadership Council
Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone | Panel Discussions: Research, Materiality and the Archive
November 6, 1 – 3:45 p.m. • Georgia Museum of Art • Free • Event link
How do we reconstruct the history of an artist when the traditional archives are silent? How does the historical narrative come together to engage new audiences and give new insights into the work of artists from previous eras like Edmonia Lewis? In conjunction with the landmark exhibition “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,” the Georgia Museum of Art will present two panel discussions centering on the methodologies used to reconstruct the life and legacy of this artist whose personal and professional archive remains fragmentary. This program pulls back the curtain on the years of detective work, technical analysis and digital innovation that brought this exhibition to life. We will explore how 21st-century tools, technology and interdisciplinary research can illuminate Lewis’s 19th-century mastery of sculpture. In “Navigating Archival Absence: Research, Recovery, and Curatorial Practice” (1 p.m.), co-curators Shawnya Harris and Jeffrey Richmond-Moll will be joined by Melissa Ragain, associate professor of art history at Montana State University and contributor to the “Said in Stone” catalogue, to discuss the practical and philosophical challenges of building an exhibition from a scattered record, exploring how curators reconcile missing details with material evidence. In “Science of the Stone: 21st-Century Tools and 19th-Century Marble” (2:30 p.m.), Richmond-Moll and objects conservator Amy Jones Abbe will explore how the various technologies used during the research for this exhibition shed new light on Lewis’ overarching artistic contribution and the physical nature of her sculpture.
Sponsored by the Georgia Museum of Art
Artist Talk: Joseph Walsh
November 9, 5:30 p.m. • Georgia Museum of Art • Free • Event link
Joseph Walsh is an Irish designer and maker whose work reflects his passion for expression through material and form. From monumental scale sculptures to one-of-a-kind site-specific commissions, every piece within his body of work reveals an intuitive relationship with making, a sympathetic use of materials and an expressive engagement with form. Walsh was born in County Cork on the south coast of Ireland, where he established his own studio and workshop in 1999 and remains based today.
Sponsored by the Georgia Museum of Art, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Lamar Dodd School of Art
Art History Faculty Lecture with Nell Andrew: “The Puppet in the Avant-Garde Imagination”
November 10, 5:30 p.m. • Room N100, Lamar Dodd School of Art • Free • Event link
Nell Andrew teaches courses in European and Latin American modern art, modernism and the historical avant-garde, dance history and early film. She is the author of “Moving Modernism: The Urge to Abstraction in Painting, Dance, Cinema,” which recovers performances, methods and aesthetic influences for avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period in Europe to demonstrate the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde’s development of abstraction. Her most current research addresses the avant-garde’s playful and political mobilization of puppets, marionettes, dolls and masks in interwar Europe.
Sponsored by the Lamar Dodd School of Art
Film Screening and Panel Discussion: “A Thousand Rivulets Run”
November 11, 6 – 8 p.m. • Mahler Hall, UGA Center for Continuing Education and Hotel • Free • Event link
Join filmmaker Sam Ghioto, researchers and conservation experts for a screening of “A Thousand Rivulets Run,” a documentary exploring the people, places and conservation efforts that helped shape Georgia’s coastline. The film follows Ghioto, a St. Simons Island resident, as he grapples with the decline of his father’s health and becomes immersed in the stories behind the protection of Georgia’s salt marshes and barrier islands. Following the screening, a panel discussion will examine the environmental, historical and policy issues featured in the film. The film was funded by UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant’s 2024 Artists, Writers, and Scholars Program.
Sponsored by UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant
Screening and Conversation: “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse”
November 11, 7:45 p.m. • Ciné • Free • Event link
From his early art for the countercultural underground comix movement to his acclaimed graphic novel “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s legacy in the comic arts world continues to grow and has inspired many of today’s beloved cartoonists. This film explores Spiegelman’s career and how his life story inspired his groundbreaking work, even in the face of looming censorship. The film is part of the WNET Group’s Holocaust Days of Remembrance, exploring antisemitism through the history and personal stories of the Holocaust and their impact on Jewish life and culture. The screening will be preceded by a short introduction by Jake Short, associate professor of history, and followed with a Q&A with producer Philip Dolin and editor Molly Bernstein.
Sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the department of history and the department of Germanic and Slavic studies
UGA Presents: Keb’ Mo’
November 12, 7:30 p.m. • Hodgson Concert Hall, UGA Performing Arts Center • $65 – 107 • Event Link
With five Grammys, 14 Blues Foundation Awards and a career spanning nearly five decades, Keb’ Mo’ remains a driving force in modern roots music. He spent years honing his craft behind the scenes before his acclaimed 1994 debut introduced his genre-bending sound to the world. Since then, he’s topped charts, collaborated with legends and performed on the world’s biggest stages. His UGA Presents debut showcases Keb’s versatility as a performer who continues to shape the sound of contemporary blues.
Sponsored by the UGA Performing Arts Center
Lecture: Dwayne Tomah, “The Doctrine of Discovery”
November 17, 4:30 p.m. • Georgia Museum of Art • Free • Event Link
Join UGA’s Institute of Native American Studies for a talk on the Doctrine of Discovery and its lasting implications for Native Americans, tribal sovereignty, “in trust” reserve land and land title in the United States by Passamaquoddy language keeper Dwayne Tomah. He is a storyteller, cultural preservationist, youngest fluent speaker of Passamaquoddy language and director of the Sipayik Museum at Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation in Washington County, Maine. Tomah will present a closer look at a 500-year-old concept that facilitated European land seizures and domination of the Indigenous people of what is now the United States. That is the Doctrine of Discovery, the legal and religious concept established by papal decrees in 1493 and 1494 and applied for centuries by European monarchs to justify Christian conquest of non-Christian people and lands.
Sponsored by the Georgia Museum of Art, the UGA Institute of Native American Studies, Carl and Sally Gable Distinguished Professor of History James F. Brooks and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts
20 Exhibitions on Campus
“Erin Johnson: The Measure Is Something Else” at the Athenaeum (through March 20)
“Megan Ledbetter: The Field (2022 – 2026)” at the Athenaeum (through November 21)
“A-Division: The Dark House Experiment” at the Athenaeum (opening in November, TBA)
“Antiques” at the Charles and Lynne Knapp Performing Arts Center’s Lobby Gallery (through January 2027)
“The Mighty Oyster” at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education and Hotel (through November 30)
“Of Timber and Titanium: A Photographic Exploration of Natural and Industrial Intersections with Georgia’s Coastal Ecosystems” at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education and Hotel (open November 12 – 13)
“Edmonia Lewis: Said In Stone” at the Georgia Museum of Art (through January 3)
“Looking Through a Sewn Sky: Rachel Hayes” at the Georgia Museum of Art (through July 30)
Museum Studies Pop-Up Exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art (open November 19, 5 p.m., through November 21)
“Blake Jacobsen: Through Service We Grow” at the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Mills Family Gallery (through November 6)
“Cornucopia: Ties That Bind” at the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Lupin Foundation Gallery (through November 6)
“I hope this finds you well” at the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Bridge Gallery (through November 6)
“True Conceal: Katie Hargrave & Meredith Lynn” at Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Plaza Gallery (through November 6)
“Victoria Dugger: Runner Up | 2026 Margie E. West Alumni Prize Exhibition” at the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Margie E. West Gallery (through November 20)
“Cross Section: 2 x 4” at the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s C-U-B-E Gallery (through December 10)
2026 Fall BFA Exit Show at the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s Dodd Galleries (open November 20 – December 4)
“Seeking Intrinsic Essence, Whatever Direction: The Photography of Nancy Ellison” at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library (through December 23)
“Game. Set. Match: The History of UGA Women’s Tennis” at the Rotunda Gallery, UGA Special Collections Library (through April)
“Beyond the ’96 Games: Atlanta’s Olympic Legacy” at the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies (through December)
“Don Chambers: How to Vanish” at the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts (opens November 12)
Authored by:
Jessica Smith
