Beverly’s Athens Closing Programming

March 20 + 21, schedule TBA

The Athenaeum and UGA Willson Center for Humanities & Arts present closing programming for the spring 2025 exhibition Beverly’s Athens with director Rachel Waldrop, guest curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper, and invited speakers. Details forthcoming.

Accessible entrance is available at the front of the building off of West Broad Street. Accessible parking is located directly behind the Athenaeum in UGA lot W-16 and corresponds to the front entrance on West Broad Street. Please contact Rachel.Waldrop@uga.edu to arrange access through the rear staff entrance. Accessible, gender-neutral restrooms are also available. Descriptive tours for blind and low-vision visitors are available by request and include verbal description of artworks. Please contact Rachel.Waldrop@uga.edu to arrange.

Visiting Artist Lecture | Jamie Isenstein

January 27, 5:30-7 pm

The Lamar Dodd School of Art presents a talk and group discussion with artist Jamie Isenstein at the Athenaeum. Join us for an exploration of Isenstein’s work with Associate Professor of Art History Isabelle Wallace, Athenaeum Director Art Rachel Waldrop, MFA alumna Lauren O’Connor-Korb, and MFA candidate Samuel Horgan.

Speaker Bio
Multi-media artist Jamie Isenstein’s work considers perception, subjectivity and the slippery nature of animate and inanimate existence. In her often humorous work differences between fact and fiction, subject and object and life and death are often blurred. Whether using sculpture, video, performance, painting or photography to convey her intentions, at the heart of Isenstein’s work is a desire to probe the formation of knowledge, how we come to understand our world and what it means to be human today. Isenstein has shown her work nationally and internationally including at The Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Tate Liverpool, UK, PS1, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris and ICA Chattanooga. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Accessible entrance is available at the front of the building off of West Broad Street. Accessible parking is located directly behind the Athenaeum in UGA lot W-16 and corresponds to the front entrance on West Broad Street. Please contact Rachel.Waldrop@uga.edu to arrange access through the rear staff entrance. Accessible, gender-neutral restrooms are also available. Descriptive tours for blind and low-vision visitors are available by request and include verbal description of artworks. Please contact Rachel.Waldrop@uga.edu to arrange.

Exhibition Opening Reception

January 17, 4-6pm

Join us in celebrating the opening of Beverly's Athens, the first major solo exhibition of the artist Beverly Buchanan's work in the city by guest curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper, supported by the Teiger Foundation. Free and open to the public.

Accessible entrance is available at the front of the building off of West Broad Street. Accessible parking is located directly behind the Athenaeum in UGA lot W-16 and corresponds to the front entrance on West Broad Street. Please contact Rachel.Waldrop@uga.edu to arrange access through the rear staff entrance. Accessible, gender-neutral restrooms are also available. Descriptive tours for blind and low-vision visitors are available by request and include verbal description of artworks. Please contact Rachel.Waldrop@uga.edu to arrange.

Intersecting Contemporary Art & Business: A Night with UBS

November 20th, 2025 at 6:00 pm

Join the Athenaeum and UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences for a dynamic evening with two accomplished Private Wealth Advisors and the Head of Art Advisory Americas at UBS, all proud Franklin College alumni. Whether you’re a student exploring future career paths, a professional or patron curious about the crossroads of art, finance, and philanthropy, or simply interested in how individuals can shape the cultural landscape — this conversation is for you!

The Athenaeum and Franklin College of Arts & Sciences are proud to partner with the Innovation District and the Young Collectors Club on this program. The Innovation District is a comprehensive ecosystem of people, programs, and places working together to foster entrepreneurship and the commercialization of ideas at UGA. Young Collectors Club (YCC), founded in 2006 by Mary Stanley Studio, provides education and social networking opportunities for young professionals interested in learning about and collecting contemporary art. YCC members meet at least twice each month for exclusive behind-the-scene sessions with art critics, museum curators, artists, gallery owners, and private collectors.

Panelists

Matthew Newton (New York, NY) Executive Director, Head of Art Advisory Americas, Family Office Solutions, UBS Dual BFA in Art and Art Education, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Franklin College (’04)

R. Mitchell Wickham (Charlotte, NC) Managing Director, Private Wealth Advisor, Wealth Management, UBS BA English, Franklin College (’92)

Barry Young (Houston, TX) Managing Director, Wealth Management, USA Private Wealth Advisor, UBS BA History, Franklin College (’90)

The conversation will explore:
Career pathways that blend art, business, and entrepreneurship
What it really means to collect art today
How anyone — from any field — can become a meaningful supporter of the arts and make a lasting community impact
This event also highlights UBS’s long-standing commitment to contemporary art, including their world-renowned UBS Art Collection — featuring works from the 1960s to today by some of the most influential artists of our time.

Moderated by Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator, Athenaeum & Dodd Galleries, UGA. For more details, visit athenaeum.uga.edu or contact Rachel at rachel.waldrop@uga.edu.

About UBS
UBS has a long history of supporting contemporary art and artists through its renowned corporate art collection, longstanding partnership with Art Basel, and Art Advisory expertise. The advice and guidance we provide is an integral part of the passion for art that we share with clients.
UBS Art Advisory, a service of Family Office Solutions, guides individuals and families toward the principles and best practices to build, maintain and plan for exceptional lasting collections. Through a suite of advisory services related to art collecting, art market due diligence, collection management, strategic planning and art legacy, collectors of significant wealth are equipped with the knowledge and support to set the standard for our generation’s leading collections.

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Natural History: Georgia Review Interdisciplinary Symposium

November 8th, 2025 at 2:00 pm

Continuing its tradition, The Georgia Review will be presenting an interdisciplinary symposium for graduate students from the UGA Creative Writing Program and Lamar Dodd School of Art to showcase their creative work during Spotlight on the Arts. The theme for this year is “Natural History.” As a term “Natural History” relates to curation, classification, and preservation. It focuses on the more-than-human world(s) of a particular region and the ways of life these elicit. In the constellation of “natural” and “history”, one can also hear a question of what would constitute an unnatural history. Taking this phrase as a starting point, Art students Eve Brown, Paul Knopf, Jeanne Marie Martineau, and Larissa Mcpherson along with Creative Writing students Rahad Abir, O-Jeremiah (Oluwatoyosi) Agbaakin, Matthew Moore, and Nik Moore will present their work and how it relates and expands upon this theme.
The event will take place on November 8th at the Athenaeum from 2 to 4:30 pm. Drinks and light refreshments will be provided. This event is free and open to the public.

Speakers

Rahad Abir is a writer from Bangladesh. His debut novel Bengal Hound won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for literary fiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Witness, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into French and Hindi. His short story, “Mr. Moti,” is featured in a secondary school English textbook in Bangladesh, where it is required reading for 9th and 10th graders.

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin is the author of The Sign of the Ram(Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. His poems and reviews are published in Kenyon Review, POETRY Magazine, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowship and support from Good Hart Artist Residency, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Bread Loaf, Tin House; and a Graduate Research Award from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, among other honors. He is currently a doctoral student of Creative Writing and Literature at University of Georgia.

Eve Brown holds a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College where she studied painting, sculpture, poetry and digital media. Brown also received the Ellen Battel Stoeckel Fellowship to study at the Yale/Norfolk Summer Painting Program. She is currently an MFA candidate in sculpture at the University of Georgia, where she was also awarded an additional assistantship for interdisciplinary research in the Arts Collaborative. She is the recipient of the Idea Capital Grant and also of the Nexus Fund Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was awarded a residency at the Maitland Art and History Museum in Maitland, Florida. Brown has shown work at Whitespace Gallery, Georgia Tech, Atlanta Contemporary Art, Swan Coach House and the Gadsden Museum of Art. She currently lives, works and teaches in Atlanta, GA, where she was born.

Paul Knopf is currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia where he was awarded an Osborne Graduate Fellowship. His work has been part of exhibitions in Athens, Berlin, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Kassel, Tokyo, Weimar, and Zella-Mehlis, and it has been published in Class Favourite Magazine, PORT, and blank magazine among others. Before joining the Dodd, he was part of the International Media Architecture Master Studies—a joint program between the University at Buffalo, SUNY (USA) and the Bauhaus-University Weimar (GER). During his time in Buffalo, he was a member of BICA School—a free, collective art school at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. In parallel to his undergraduate studies in architecture and after a semester abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria), he joined the class for Sculpture, Object, Installation of Prof. Björn Dahlem at Bauhaus-University Weimar. He received scholarships from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation) and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

Jeanne Marie Martineau is a French American transdisciplinary artist who weaves various mediums of object making, dream tending, writing, song and sound meditation into a unified peace practice and experiences of artistic self-discovery for others. Through collecting and transforming local and discarded materials like felled tree limbs, wood scraps, plastic bags and packaging, and sounds from the environment, she tells stories of place and highlights the connectedness of all things. Jeanne Marie is currently a second year Master of Fine Arts student at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Larissa McPherson is a metalsmith and jewelry artist from Adairsville, GA, and is currently working on her MFA in Jewelry & Metalsmithing at the University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art. Larissa graduated from the University of West Georgia with a B.S. in Psychology and a minor in studio art. By studying metalsmithing with an old professor and joining the Metal Arts Guild of Georgia in early 2022, Larissa started a path toward pursuing metalsmithing full-time. Her work explores ideas and issues related to the accumulation of microplastics and waste in the environment, specifically within animal bodies. Microplastics are now found in every being, and her work imagines how this might visually appear in the bones animals leave behind.

Matthew Moore is the author of a poetry collection, The Reckoning of Jeanne d’Antietam (University of Nevada Press). He is the translator of Opera Buffa by Tomaž Šalamun (Black Ocean) and Padova by Igo Gruden (Adjunct Press).

Nik Moore is a Kentucky poet, a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Montana, and a doctoral student of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Their poems have appeared in A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (UGA Press), Orion, Poetry Northwest, and EcoTheo, among other journals and anthologies. Nik is the recipient of a Danny Miller Award for Advanced Graduate Study from Northern Kentucky University and was granted a Greta Wrolstad Travel Award from the University of Montana in sponsorship of their study of silence at Trappist monasteries.

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4’33” Research in the Arts Contest

November 17, 4-6pm

An homage to John Cage’s landmark composition of the same name, the 4 Minutes, 33 Seconds Contest highlights University of Georgia student research in the arts. The event offers an opportunity for students to share their creative inquiry with peers, faculty, administrators and alumni throughout the university community. Students present for no longer than four minutes and thirty-three seconds in length. Light refreshments provided. This event is a part of UGA's Spotlight on the Arts Festival.

Beverly's Athens

Opening Saturday, Jan 17, 2026
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm
Public reception: 4-6pm
Closing programming: March 20 + 21, details forthcoming

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’s Athens is organized by The Athenaeum, a non-collecting contemporary art exhibition venue affiliated with the University of Georgia and the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Shacks, Stories and Spirit: Beverly Buchanan’s Art of Home, a concurrent exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, explores how artist Beverly Buchanan uses vernacular Southern architecture—especially the humble “shack”—to evoke memory, community, and resilience, re-imagining structures of home as vibrant embodiments of both personal and collective histories.

Accessible entrance is available at the front of the building off of West Broad Street. Accessible parking is located directly behind the Athenaeum in UGA lot W-16 and corresponds to the front entrance on West Broad Street. Please contact Rachel.Waldrop@uga.edu to arrange access through the rear staff entrance. Accessible, gender-neutral restrooms are also available. Descriptive tours for blind and low-vision visitors are available by request and include verbal description of artworks. Please contact Rachel.Waldrop@uga.edu to arrange.

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.

Steven Thompson: Ever Loyal, Ever True

Sept 3-Nov 21, 2025

Opening Saturday, Sept 13
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm
Public reception: 4-6pm

The Athenaeum presents Ever Loyal, Ever True, an exhibition of recent work by Steven Thompson (American, b. 1967) in our second gallery, concurrent with Krista Clark’s assembly. Both artists share an affinity to pushing the boundaries and definitions of traditional drawing through layering, erasure, and additive means, moving their work towards sculptural abstraction that commands a physical call-and-response.

Seven years ago, Thompson began to make his own paint from powder pigments—gum arabic, ox gall, honey and glycerin—in order to get closer to the deep mystery of materiality. For Thompson, materials are more than surreal. They are metaphysical objects even beyond their subatomic particles and remain impossibly open and yet furtive to comprehension. In recent years, Thompson, a symbolist by nature, has turned toward the rococo: sugary colors and a promiscuous blending of techniques fulfilling a deep drive to investigate material substance via elaborate structures that awaken his mind and soul through trance-like states.

He asks, “Where does it end? How, in God’s name, is there such a thing as ‘things’? From what does its beautiful presence emerge? We are cognitive material ourselves.” This puzzle delights and haunts Thompson, both as a human and an artist.

Steven Thompson. Photo: Copyright H. Cohen, 2025.

Steven Thompson (American, b. 1967 Greenville, SC) holds undergraduate degrees in Literature, Classical Languages and Art from the College of Charleston in SC, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing with Distinction from UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art (1995). Thompson holds a second MFA in Sculpture and Mixed Media from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA (1999), earning a
Chairman’s Merit Scholarship and the Lawrence Shprintz MFA Award in Sculpture.

Thompson taught academic and studio courses at the University of Georgia from 2001-2006, including a term in the University’s Studies Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy. In 2008, he taught a graduate seminar in special topics at Parsons School of Art and Design, The New School in New York.

Since his debut solo show in New York in 2004 at Kenny Schachter's West Village gallery, conTEMPorary, Mr. Thompson has developed a reputation as a quixotic and visionary artist, a style by turns “intricately detailed, obsessive, devotional and enigmatic”. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and venues in the US and abroad, including The Armory International Exhibition and Miami Basel, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Kate Werble Gallery, English Kills Gallery, The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Elliot Templeton Gallery and Springs Projects, among others.

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.

Steven Thompson: Ever loyal, Ever true is supported 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

Image: Steven Thompson (American, b. 1967), Earth, Goddesses and Garlands, 2025, handmade watercolor, pencil and mica on goatskin parchment, 52 x 57 x 6 inches, courtesy and copyright the artist.

Krista Clark: assembly

September 3-November 21, 2025

Opening Saturday, Sept 13
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm
Public reception: 4-6pm

The Athenaeum presents assembly, a site-specific installation of new work by Krista Clark (American, b. 1975) in our main gallery. Clark’s studio practice is informed by the politics and poetics of the urban built environment and pushes the formal artistic boundaries between drawing, sculpture and installation through the lens of abstraction. Clark’s gestures of erasing, overlapping, layering and stacking materialize in two- and three-dimensional forms, which as she says, reveal the “shiftiness between things: interior vs. exterior, place vs. space, and flatness vs. depth.”

Clark’s work thereby prompts the questions: What does it look like when our relationship with the built environment is interrupted? How does this affect our understanding of how we occupy space and create a sense of place? How do these interruptions highlight how we then move, claim, perform and gather our bodies within the constructed landscape? How does architecture mark labor, care and ritual?

Krista Clark was born in Burlington, VT and lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She holds an MFA from Georgia State University (2016). She has exhibited work at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, The Studio Museum in Harlem New York and the New Museum in New York. She was the recipient of the Artadia Award and the Working Artist Project Award with MOCA GA in 2018 and was a Hudgens Prize Finalist in 2024. Clark is an Assistant Professor at Emory University.

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.

Krista Clark: assembly is supported 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

Image: Krista Clark (American, b. 1975), How to Water a Garden, 2024, walnut frame, concrete, shovel, work light, dimensions variable, courtesy and copyright the artist, photo: Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN.

MFA SPEAKS 2025

Thursday, April 24, 2025
5:30pm

Join the ten exhibiting artists for mini gallery artists talks in front of their work!
Free and open to the public.