Current Exhibitions
The Lyndon House Arts Center offers rotating contemporary art exhibitions year-round. Please look through the links below to read more about our current exhibitions.
Admission is always free. To stay up to date, sign up for our newsletter.
North Gallery
Shawn Ireland: Arts Center Choice Award Winner
October 30, 2025 – January 3, 2026
Artist Shawn Ireland’s Paris series draws inspiration from the interiors and “moments of pause” found in the still life vignettes of painters such as Fantin-Latour, Manet, Derain, and Matisse. These artists were key figures in the poetic realism movement that emerged in nineteenth-century Paris, presenting everyday objects with emotive theatricality.
Ireland incorporates similarly expressive brushwork into his paintings, paired with a graphic simplicity and rich color palette. His tableaus reveal a tension born of discordant perspectives that play with the picture plane, echoing the approach of self-taught artists like Henri Rousseau and Horace Pippin. The series also prominently features ceramics handmade by Ireland, serving as integral elements within the compositions and uniting his two main artistic pursuits. The result is a compelling synthesis of traditional European still lifes and modernist sensibilities, expressing the joy of discovery inherent in the medium of oil paint itself.
Ireland began exploring oil painting as a Resident Artist at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and continued his studies at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy, as well as through the University of Georgia’s Study Abroad Art Program in Cortona, Italy, with which he worked for over fifteen years. He also works with the University of Georgia’s Classics Maymester Program, Europe: Unearthing the Past, which continues to offer opportunities for discovery and renewal through ancient art influences.
Each year, the Arts Center’s exhibitions team selects one artist from the annual Juried Exhibition whose work shows exceptional promise and deserves broader recognition, inviting them to present a solo show. This year’s awardee, Shawn Ireland, already well-known for his ceramics, captured the selection committee’s attention with his oil painting Night Table.
Lukasiewicz Gallery
FIBER 50: Celebrating 50 Years of the Athens Fibercraft Guild
October 30, 2026 – January 3, 2026
This exhibition of works made by current Athens Fibercraft Guild (AFG) members spans a variety of materials and processes within the art of fiber.
Founded in 1975 by Rhetta Gray, Priscilla Golley, Samira Hazen, Erika Lewis, and Nancy Lukasiewicz, Ester Marshall, and Claudia Wingfield, AFG was the first fiber organization in Athens. Early members included weavers, spinners, dyers, lace makers, and even shepherds. In 1978, the Guild began meeting at the newly established Lyndon House Arts Center, created by the Athens-Clarke County government as a hub for arts and culture.
From the beginning, the Guild has welcomed hobbyists, students, and professionals alike. Today, its members represent an even broader array of fiber art methods. AFG continues to thrive through monthly meetings, guest speakers, demonstrations at local festivals, parties, show-and-tells, and gift exchanges.
The Guild remains a vibrant thread in both the Lyndon House Arts Center and the wider Athens craft community.
The AFG will be hosting a demonstration of various fiber techniques at the Arts Center on November 8, 2025, from 12 PM – 2 PM. Held in conjunction with Family Day Art Workshops, participants will also have the opportunity to make their own craft project to take home.
Lounge Gallery
Public Works: Athens Public Art Behind the Scenes
October 30, 2025 – January 3, 2026
Step behind the scenes of the creative infrastructure that shapes our city. Public Works is a special exhibition showcasing the mockups, engineering drawings, and design proposals behind Athens’ public art installations. From murals to sculptures to interactive works, this collection reveals the careful planning, technical precision, and bold imagination that bring public spaces to life. Celebrate the intersection of art and engineering — and get a closer look at the processes that make public art possible.
Guest curated by Tatiana Veneruso, artist, designer, curator, collector, and Athens-Clarke County Public Art Coordinator.
Join curator Tatiana Veneruso and select artists as they discuss the exhibition on Thursday, December 11, 2025, at 5:30 PM.
Lobby Case
Wonder: Susan Perry
October 2, 2025 – December 6, 2025
Susan Perry’s small-scale sculptures, composed of handmade paper and bamboo, possess a lightness of form and visible armature inspired by traditional Chinese kites. These contemporary works, while not intended to fly high above the earth, still hum with the potential for movement. Evoking a bird’s nest, their bamboo frameworks are delicate and hollow, like the bones of their imagined inhabitants. The sculptures suggest they were assembled from materials gathered on a ramble through nature while simultaneously exhibiting a sophisticated calligraphic elegance. Inspired by the Japanese philosophy wabi-sabi, Perry embraces imperfection and transience as a connection to nature, creating airy objects that both lift and ground the viewer.
Atrium Cases
Plastic Tense: Katie Kameen
October 2, 2025 – January 24, 2026
Katie Kameen collects secondhand plastics and recontextualizes them as art materials that have the potential to communicate aspects of her personal experiences. By combining highly saturated and muted colors into wearable and interactive sculptures, she invites the viewer into her world. The objects retain an element of their history and become part of a new expressive language. Through dynamic compositions, she considers color and shape both as formal and psychological tools. Physical interaction, through holding, wearing, and touching, encourages the viewer to consider their own relationship with plastics and everyday objects. By using familiar utilitarian objects that bring back recollections of the home, Kameen revisits past emotions, creating a kind of self-portraiture that speaks to the connection between consumer culture and domesticity.
West Gallery
Interwoven Narratives: Caul and Response
By Sachi Rome and Tokie Rome-Taylor
October 2, 2025 – January 24, 2026
Interwoven Narratives: Caul and Response is a collaborative exploration by twin sisters Sachi Rome and Tokie Rome-Taylor. Blending photographic realism and abstract expressionism, the exhibition draws on southern folklore of the caul and W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness as entry points into their work.
The caul, a folkloric veil said to protect and connect one to the spiritual realm, becomes a metaphor for identity—both shielding and revealing. Intertwined with Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, it reflects the liminal space Black Americans navigate: seeing themselves through their own eyes while also through the gaze of others.
Through this lens, the artists invite viewers to consider the tensions between inner identity and societal expectations. The caul, as folklore suggests, binds narratives across realms, offering insight and protection while symbolizing the unseen forces that shape lives. Interwoven Narratives: Caul and Response calls us to reflect on these shared cultural spaces and the layered, ongoing story of the African American experience.
Nancy Lukasiewicz Gallery
Carving Out Liminal Pathways Toward Fragmentation
October 2, 2025 – January 24, 2026
This two-person exhibition features the abstract sculptural paintings of Sebastian Garcia Huidobro alongside the brutalist architecture-inspired sculptures of Rachel Lea Seburn. Both artists explore concepts of balance, co-dependency, growth, and weight. Forms stack and lean, fit snuggly together like puzzle pieces, referencing the building blocks of structures minute and grand.
Huidobro’s work, combining soft and hard materials, mimics the forms of microorganisms. He envisions molecules of paint magnified to reveal hidden movements and arrangements. Manipulating foam and fabric, Huidobro creates meticulously upholstered wall-based sculptures. The use of vibrant colors brings a pop sensibility to the organic forms, creating seductive candy pillows that focus the viewer’s attention on shape, line, and surface.
In comparison, Seburn’s sculptures are inspired by Northern Alberta’s sturdy brutalist architecture of resilience. Her sculptures embody angular, jagged, and curved forms crafted from concrete, plexiglass, plaster, wood, and silicone. The neutral hues of solid, opaque building materials are contrasted with vivid transparencies. Seburn’s artistic approach mirrors the principles of autoconstruction, a method rooted in self-reliance, in which individuals build their dwellings using available materials. This framework allows spontaneity and resourcefulness during the design and building process.
Huidobro and Seburn are creating subtly complex works that share a purity of form and sophisticated awareness of space, both occupied and empty. This interplay of presence and absence is a reflection of the equilibrium needed to build visions and worlds larger than ourselves.
Lower & Upper Atrium
Highlighting Contemporary Art in Georgia | Seams to Be: New Approaches to Textile Techniques
Guest Curated by Didi Dunphy
October 2, 2025 – January 24, 2026
Textiles have long been important to the state of Georgia, so it’s no surprise that Georgia artists continue to find inspiration in them. The exhibition “Seams to Be: New Approaches to Textile Techniques,” which will travel to six venues beginning with the Lyndon House Arts Center in Athens on October 2, features 13 Georgia artists who use needle and thread in many different ways. From Adah Bennion’s meticulously beaded chip bags to Cathy Fussell’s “free-motion” quilts inspired by the world around her, each work of art in “Seams to Be” feels imaginative and distinct, reflecting how traditional fiber art techniques can serve as a launch pad for innovation.
Annie Greene’s “yarn paintings” use colorful knitting yarns outlined in black thread to depict narrative scenes based on memories of her life as an African American in the rural South. Victoria Dugger’s multimedia sculptures use elements of body horror, humor and vibrant excess to test the boundary between beauty and the grotesque. Exploring the Black American vernacular experience, Jamele Wright Sr.’s fabric assemblage combines Dutch wax cloth and Georgia red clay to create a conversation about family, tradition and spirituality between Africa and the American South.
“Seams to Be” is the fourth installment of “Highlighting Contemporary Art in Georgia,” a series of traveling exhibitions that happens every three years and aims to discover and cultivate artists from across the state and to make their exciting creations accessible to audiences in metropolitan areas big and small. Organized by the Georgia Museum of Art and independent guest curator Didi Dunphy, “Seams to Be” will travel to six different venues in Georgia.
Exhibiting artists include: Adah Bennion, Annie Green, Cathy Fussell, Eliza Bentz, Honey Pierre, Jaime Bull, Jamele Wright Sr., Jasmine Best, Kate Burke, Kelly Taylor Mitchell, Sonya Yong James, Trish Andersen, and Victoria Dugger.
Join curator Didi Dunphy and select artists as they discuss the exhibition on Thursday, October 16, 2025, at 5:30 PM.
Window Works
Meditations On Perceived Acts of Violence: Michael Reese
Spring 2024 - Spring 2025
This body of work examines the idea of perception, more specifically as it relates to Black Bodies. The work speaks to Reese's understanding of the intellectual and behavioral gesturing that is required of Black folks to successfully control the narrative of perception.