Visiting Artist Lecture | Aidan Koch

Speaker Name: Aidan Koch
Speaker’s Website: Artist Website
Department: Department
University or Organization: University

Banner image: Artwork by Aidan Koch. Courtesy of the artist.

The Lamar Dodd School of Art welcomes artist and graphic novelist Aidan Koch (b. 1988, Seattle) for the first Visiting Artist Lecture of the 2025-2026 season. Associate Director of Research and Graduate Studies and UGA Art Librarian Lindsey Reynolds has curated Mountain Tongue, a solo exhibition of Koch’s work, which will be on view in the Lupin Gallery of the Dodd Galleries from August 28 – November 14. Koch will be in Athens and at the Dodd for several days hand drawing the opening sequence from her short story Man Made Lake as a wall work that will activate the exhibition in the Lupin Gallery.

About the artist

Aidan Koch (b. 1988, Seattle) is an artist and graphic novelist who lives and works in the Mojave Desert on unceded Serrano land. Koch’s solo exhibition Mountain Tongue will open at the Dodd Galleries on August 28. Koch’s work uses modes of ecological story-telling to explore loving and fraught relationships between humans, non-human animals, and landscapes. She is the author of several graphic novels including Xeric Award winning, The Blonde Woman (2012), After Nothing Comes (2016) and Spiral and Other Stories (2024); with short works featured in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Best American Comics 2014, and MoMA PS1 GNY Series. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, South Bend Museum of Art and Queens University, Belfast, among others. Koch’s ongoing projects— Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations and Environmental Comics—act as pedagogical and collaborative extensions of her ecological inquiries.

Aidan Koch, Excerpt from Stone Blue Sky, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

Visiting Artists and Scholars Series

At the Dodd, teaching and research are supplemented by the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program, which brings a wide range of extraordinary practitioners to campus. While in Athens, they give lectures, lead workshops, and participate in community activities. Always free and open to the public, these Tuesday evening lectures are an integral part of the culture at the School of Art and are an essential facet of education in the fields of art, design, art history, and art education. Lectures by visiting artists and scholars are supplemented by faculty research lectures from both within the Dodd and faculty across UGA whose interdisciplinary research is arts related. Thanks to generous support from donors, the School of Art offers additional named lectures like the Jack Davis Lecture in Illustration and Design, attracting experts in the field to campus for student enrichment and free public programs.

Aidan Koch: Mountain Tongue is supported by UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Lupin Gallery Endowment. For support opportunities, contact Grace Mercer, Development Associate at grace.mercer@uga.edu