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 lived in New York City; New Jersey; Macon, GA; Athens, GA; and Ann Arbor, MI. She studied at the Art Students League with Harlem Renaissance painter Norman Lewis. In the 1970s she worked as an abstract expressionist painter. In the late 1970s she moved back to the south where she worked on Ruins and Rituals and Marsh Ruins from 1977-1980. These works, several of which are still visible today, consider the idea of “ruination” and commemorate the history of Southern Black residents. In the mid-1980s Buchanan created a series of “shacks” or makeshift sculptures which paid tribute to the improvised and self-built homes of Black residents in rural Georgia. The winner of numerous honors during her long career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 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. 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.
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. In 2023, Costello organized a house exhibition of the artist Beverly Buchanan. Located a few blocks from Buchanan’s former residence, the exhibition was accompanied by a concurrent installation of Buchanan’s work at her long-term pharmacy. A recipient of recent residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2024) and Denniston Hill (2024), Costello lives in Athens, Georgia.
Katz Tepper’s work as a practicing artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary, White Columns, NY, Cushion Works, SF, and Laurel Gitlen, NY, and has screened at the Tang Museum in Sarasota Springs, the British Film Institute, and Fluentum, Berlin. Their work has been supported by the Wynn Newhouse Award, the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and through residencies at MacDowell and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Tepper’s art writing has been published in Burnaway Magazine and the 2024 Gwangju Biennale guidebook. Tepper served as instructor in foundations and sculpture at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art from 2022 to 2024. Tepper holds a BFA from the Cooper Union (2010) and an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College (2021).
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.