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.

Steven Thompson: Ever Loyal, Ever True

Sept 3-Nov 22, 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 22, 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 Clarke. Photo: Mo Jahangir

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.

Matt Keegan: Realia

January 10 - March 22

The sculptures, collage, and paintings in Matt Keegan’s Realia are informed by a set of 400 double-sided image-based flash cards his mother made between the late 1980s to mid-2000s to teach English to high school and adult ed students. The cards feature cut up images from clothing catalogs, magazines, teacher union mailers, and other printed matter that came into their home. 

In Keegan’s interpretation, the images become part of an associative game of logic, pointing to the endless construction of codes, both symbolic and cultural. A newly commissioned tabletop sculpture, for example, presents familiar objects cast in aqua resin and then painted, drawn, and pigmented in various media to assert the objects’ colors and textures. These colored casts do not form a cohesive narrative and, in this way, prompt reflection on the associative and disjunctive nature of meaning. “Behind every image is another image” the postmodernist historian Douglas Crimp once said, and now Keegan might add, behind every word is another word in a complex and neverending proliferation of meaning.

Yet Keegan’s reflections on the production of meaning are not only wry. In his recent small-scale oil paintings, which recall the size and pictures from his mother’s teaching aids, the hand of the artist – itself, another signifier– is evident. At times clumsy, the representation of a photo of a door knob, a roll of paper towels, or a slide are stripped from their denotative function and acquire something more poignant: the entanglement of all these systems with subjectivity, memory, and meanings not found on flashcards. Thus, the works invite even more speculative readings, an expression of the language of imagination.

Fission or, Eclipse

Rose Salane is an artist who uses seemingly mundane objects to explicate systems of evaluation, exchange, and organization that shape daily life. In this exhibition, she arranges collected items of disparate origin from personal and bureaucratic archives—the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia, the Atlanta History Center, the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services—to better understand historic cycles through an object’s recovery and storage.
 
The works in this exhibition offer an oblique view on tumultuous historical shifts: A series of diary entries describing an eclipse during the last year of the Civil War; a 1947 solicitation letter from Albert Einstein to academic institutions asking for the contribution of funding towards nuclear fission and atomic energy research; a set of decommissioned traffic light lenses suggesting a city grid in disarray. Together these object sets form dynamic intersections across time, war, observation, and power; their narrative contingencies underscoring the politics of the archive. 

Challenging viewers to find commonalities and disjunctions among the exhibition’s many parts, Salane also raises profound questions about the voices and objects charged with telling our histories: Whose thoughts, whether mundane or profound, have been preserved for future generations? What objects, though silent, speak on our behalf, and whose job is the work of their translation? Salane’s exhibition, a translation in its own right, is also a careful curation that uses the methods of the archive to put its limitations and potential on display.

A Reading with Author Kristal Brent Zook

July 30th, 6:00pm

Join The Georgia Review and UGA’s MFA program in Narrative Media Writing for a special event with author Kristal Brent Zook.
For more than twenty years, Dr. Kristal Brent Zook has reported on social issues such as health, education, culture, politics, race, gender, and the environment. She is an award-winning journalist and author of four books, including The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, a coming-of-age story about being biracial in America, searching for her missing white father, and finding one’s authentic identity. In 2023, it was chosen as a favorite book by Vanity Fair, BET, PEOPLE, Ms., and The Root, and received praise in The New York Times Book Review and Kirkus. A former contributor to the Washington Post and ESSENCE, Dr. Zook’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, LIFE, and The Guardian, among other outlets. She is currently working on an in-depth essay about the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre of 1921 for The Georgia Review. Dr. Zook is a professor of journalism at Hofstra University in New York.  
UGA’s low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction, part of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, is designed for students who want to develop their research, reporting, and writing skills to take on topics of national and global importance. Students explore long-form storytelling in research-based narratives that rise to the level of literature. Many of them are mid-career journalists and other industry professionals who want to elevate their careers and write a book. This program paves the way for nonfiction writers to use their talents and skills to engage the world.Learn more here

Athens Art Book Fair

June 22, 11am - 4pm


The Athens Art Book Fair was established to spotlight the critical relationship between contemporary art and publishing with a regional focus on the Southeast. The second annual Athens Art Book Fair will showcase a variety of works on paper produced by dozens of artists and presses. This event is free to the public. Join us to explore a wide variety of techniques and subject matter on display and connect with artists and publishers!

Please note that this event is affiliated with the annual arts and music festival AthFest, which will attract considerable traffic in the area. Plan your visit and parking accordingly.

The Athens Art Book Fair is presented by the University of Georgia Art Library, the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and the UGA Printmaking Students Association.

Haute Fashion Show: Jewelry Box

April 29, 6pm

Get ready for a night of bejeweled glamour and style at The Athenaeum! Join us for an unforgettable night of dazzling fashions 
 showcasing the intersection of fashion and jewelry. Witness stunning designs on the runway and be inspired by the creativity of Haute's talented creatives. Don't miss out on this exclusive opportunity to experience the magic of the JEWELRY BOX. See you there!

Purchase tickets here.

Haute Creatives Collective is a women led student organization that focuses on creating a space for POC and LGBT+ creatives looking to enhance their artistic portfolios for a career in creative industries.  Haute’s goal is to support our creative’s talent development and to provide a dynamic and safe space for collaboration; through shoots, shows, and service projects.

MFA Speaks

April 24, 6pm

Join us for short artist talks by our graduating MFA students.