Beverly's Athens
Jan 16-Mar 21, 2026
Opening Saturday, Jan 17, 2026
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm
Public reception: 4-6pm
Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) lived in Athens, GA, from 1987 to 2010. Beverly’s Athens, the first major solo exhibition of her work in the city, situates Buchanan’s expansive practice from this period within the local and lived conditions that shaped it. The exhibition emphasizes two intertwined threads from Buchanan’s Athens years: her modes of surviving chronic illness in the absence of an equitable healthcare system, and her multidisciplinary efforts to study and commemorate Black Southern geography, traditions, and forms.
Curated by Mo Costello and Katz Tepper, and organized by the Athenaeum, this exhibition draws primarily from the artist’s friends, supporters, and caregivers locally. A rich selection of print media, drawings, texts, photographs, sculptures, autobiographical ephemera and research materials come together with several off-site installations to provide deeper context for the ‘shack’ works for which Buchanan is best known. This site-specific engagement underscores the inextricable connections between care, dependence, and place in Beverly’s Athens.
For more information, contact Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Atheneum: rachel.waldrop@uga.edu and athenaeum.uga.edu Opened in 2021, The Athenaeum is a 5,000 square foot non-collecting contemporary art venue in downtown Athens affiliated with UGA and the Lamar Dodd School of Art.
Beverly’s Athens is supported by a 2024 Single Project Grant from Teiger Foundation—a private foundation devoted exclusively to supporting contemporary art curators. Additional support provided by UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, The Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Dodd Chair and Athenaeum Support Funds. For support opportunities, contact Grace Mercer, Development Associate: grace.mercer@uga.edu
Beverly Buchanan Bio
Beverly Buchanan (American, 1940-2015) was born in Fuquay, North Carolina and raised in Orangeburg, South Carolina on the campus of South Carolina State University, where her father, Walter Buchanan, served as Dean of the School of Agriculture. She studied at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and earned her Master’s degree in public health and parasitology from Columbia University in New York City. In the early 1970s, she left her career in medicine and public health, and studied at the Art Students League in New York with Harlem Renaissance painter Norman Lewis. During this period, she worked as an abstract expressionist painter and began making concrete sculptural works she referred to as ‘frustula’. In 1977, Buchanan returned to the south, living in Macon, GA, where she created site-specific commemorative sculptures, including Ruins and Rituals and Unity Stones, and Marsh Ruins in Brunswick, GA. In the mid-1980s, Buchanan lived in Atlanta and began creating “shacks”, small sculptures which paid tribute to Black Southern vernacular architectures, a practice she continued through the rest of her life. Buchanan moved to Athens, Georgia in 1987 and maintained residence in Athens through 2010, when she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. The winner of numerous honors during her long career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Buchanan’s work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the Studio Museum in Harlem: and the Whitney Museum, among others. Her 16-year mid-career retrospective Shack Works traveled from 1994 to 1996, originating at the Montclair Museum of Art, Montclair, NJ. A posthumous solo retrospective, Ruins and Rituals, curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2016-17 and traveled to Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in 2017. In 2024, the posthumous retrospective Beverly Buchanan: I Broke The House was held at ETH Zurich, and traveled to Fisk University Galleries, Tennessee.
Curator Bios
Mo Costello is an artist and educator drawn to the social life of objects. Costello’s working practice revolves around the maintenance of small-scale, community supported infrastructure for the visual and performing arts. Curatorial and studio-based efforts emerge – and often converge – from within this ongoing commitment to place-based inquiry and infrastructures of care. A recipient of recent residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Denniston Hill, Costello lives in Athens, Georgia.
Katz Tepper (b. 1987, Lake Worth, Florida) is an interdisciplinary artist, independent researcher, and writer based in Chicago. Solo exhibitions include Prairie, Chicago, IL; White Columns, NY; Atlanta Contemporary, GA; Cushionworks, SF; and Laurel Gitlen, NY. Group exhibitions and screenings include the Tang Teaching Museum, NY; Fluentum, Berlin; British Film Institute Southbank, London; and Red Bull Arts, Detroit. Fellowships and residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing, MacDowell, Writer-in-Residence at Writing Space Chicago, and Artist-in-Residence with Luka Carter at DuPage College. Tepper received their BFA from Cooper Union, and their MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Costello and Tepper's curatorial research on Beverly Buchanan’s work received a 2024 Teiger Foundation Single Project Grant for the 2026 exhibition Beverly’s Athens at the University of Georgia’s Athenaeum gallery. The accompanying catalog for Beverly’s Athens, forthcoming with Institute 193, was awarded a 2025 Graham Foundation Grant. Beverly’s Athens is featured in the Georgia Review’s Winter 2025 Issue, where the co-curatorial essay “Medical Arts: Disabled Kinship as Methodology” is published. Costello and Tepper are currently co-editing a book, Beverly Buchanan, Athens, GA, 8 July 1995, forthcoming Spring 2026 with Soberscove Press.
Image: Beverly Buchanan, untitled color photograph, undated. Courtesy Prudence Lopp. Buchanan’s extensive photographic documentation of vernacular architectures throughout Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida often feature recognizable landmarks in the city of Athens, GA such as this row of shotgun houses on Rocksprings Street. While Buchanan is best known for her ‘shack’ sculptures and drawings, this exhibition will provide contextual materials detailing the role of research and lived experience in the works she made from her home-studio.