Arts & Sciences

Mixed with the Gothic tinge of southern milieu as well as a profound dedication to the classics, the arts and science culture at the university is deep and storied. Scholars such as Lamar Dodd and Hugh Hodgson made UGA a focal point of arts and music across the world, and their legacies are embodied in the programs created in their names.

Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries

Promoting contemporary art as a catalyst for education.

The Lamar Dodd School of Art produces rotating exhibitions in its Visual Arts Building that challenge contemporary perceptions of the making of art, and provide a framework for intellectual and creative inquiry.

Established and emerging artists, designers, critics and curators of national and international stature are invited to showcase their work, setting them in direct dialogue with university and local audiences.

The state of the art facilities is the first building since 1963 designed specifically for the technical needs of diverse studio art programs.

In addition to art studios, the building provides several multi-media lecture halls and classrooms for Art History and Art Education courses and conferences, as well as the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series.

Georgia Museum of Natural History

A study in research, from anthropology to zooarchaeology.

For many decades, UGA maintained a number of natural history collections under the aegis of various academic departments. In 1978, the university recognized these collections as the Museum of Natural History, and in 1999, the Georgia General Assembly recognized it as the official state museum of natural history. The museum is the repository for the preservation and study of the tangible evidence of history, culture and natural heritage of the state of Georgia and its people.

Many of the collections contain unique historical records of locations and species, some of which are now destroyed, extinct, rare or endangered. Collections in archaeology, entomology, botany, geology, herpetology, ichthyology, invertebrates, mammalogy, mycology, ornithology, and zooarchaeology exceed 5 million objects.

Giant Sloth

Witness the last moments of a prehistoric giant.

It’s not what you’d expect in the lobby of the Boyd Graduate Studies Research Center, but there it is: The skeleton of a giant North American sloth trying to escape the death grip of a Georgia salt marsh.

Measuring about 13 feet in length and weighing between 2,500 and 3,000 pounds, the skeleton (bottom left) is the first of a prehistoric animal ever put together in Georgia and only the fourth North American ground sloth known to have been mounted anywhere. The bones were discovered in 1970 during the construction of Interstate 95 near Brunswick and excavated by university students. One of the students, Albert Brantley, an undergraduate in geology at the time, was chosen to reconstruct and mount the skeleton. He simulated a marsh to recreate the death scene, as the skeleton’s two back feet and one front hand are invisible in the mud while one hand grasps for freedom.

About 350 bones from three giant sloths were found at the Brunswick site but many were duplicates or were unusable. Brantley did not have all 208 bones necessary for one complete skeleton, so he had to make about 45 percent of the mounted skeleton’s bones from plaster of paris or fiberglass.

Georgia Museum of Art

Where Asian art rooms with southern decor and images of the Renaissance meet.

Reopened in early 2011 following a massive expansion, the Georgia Museum of Art (above) serves as both an academic museum and the official art museum of Georgia, a role it’s held since it was first opened in 1948, when it was in the basement of an old library on the north campus. GMOA occupies a contemporary building on the university’s east campus.

There, 79,000 square feet house more than 8,000 objects in the museum’s permanent collection – which consists of American paintings, primarily 19th and 20th century; American, European, and Asian works on paper; the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance paintings; and growing collections of southern decorative arts and Asian art.

Initially the museum’s founder, Alfred Heber Holbrook, donated a collection of 100 American paintings which included works by luminaries such as William Merritt Chase, Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Winslow Homer and Theodore Robinson. Holbrook, who began a personal quest to learn about the world of art after his retirement at the age of 70, took a trip to Athens in the 1940s and met Lamar Dodd, head of the university’s art department. The two began a friendship, sharing a joint vision of enriching the visual arts environment in Georgia. Holbrook, clad in a knee-length pink artist’s smock with pipe in hand, attended art classes and GMOA was founded in 1945.

Performing Arts Center

Two stages are set for the world’s best to perform.

Adjacent to the Georgia Museum of Art, the Performing Arts Center houses two impressive concert halls – Hugh Hodgson Concert Hall and Ramsey Concert Hall – that host some of the finest national and international performers.

The Hugh Hodgson Concert Hall is the larger of the two, seating 1,100 in festival-style seating (seats surround the stage). Its superb acoustics complement solo artists as well as chamber ensembles and full symphony orchestras. In the past the hall has welcomed orchestras from Atlanta and Moscow, dancers from the Ukraine, as well as accomplished brass and bluegrass bands. The Ramsey Concert Hall seats 360 and hosts a concert series of new artists for recitals in an intimate setting.