Beverly’s Athens Symposium

The Athenaeum and UGA Willson Center for Humanities & Arts present a closing symposium for the spring 2025 exhibition Beverly’s Athens: Beverly Buchanan in Athens, GA with guest curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper and invited keynote speakers Dr. Patricia Ekpo and Bryn Evans. Program details and speaker bios below! Registration link forthcoming.

Symposium concludes at 4 pm with an optional evening film screening and discussion at the Athenaeum from 6-8:30 pm of Beverly Buchanan, Athens, GA, 8 July 1995 with filmmaker, artist, and professor emerita Judith McWillie and co-curators Mo Costello & Katz Tepper.

Symposium Program
Saturday, March 21

9:30–10 am
Arrivals and Registration (Coffee, Pastries)
Dodd Ambassadors, Gallery volunteers

10 am
Welcome & Acknowledgments
Rachel Waldrop, Director, Athenaeum
Symposium Overview
Francis Oliver, Moderator

10:30 am–12:00 pm
Curatorial Walkthrough with curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper

12:00–1:30 pm
Break (Lunch) 

1:30–4:00 pm
Keynote Speakers

1:30–2:15 pm
Bryn Ashley Evans

2:15–2:45 pm
Break

2:45–3:30 pm
Dr. Patricia Ekpo 

3:30–4:00 pm 
Joint Q&A

4:00–6:00 pm
Break (Dinner)

6:00–8:30 pm 
Screening: Beverly Buchanan, Athens, GA, 8 July 1995
Speakers: Judith McWillie Q&A facilitated by Mo Costello & Katz Tepper

Speaker Bios
Ekpo and Evans have contributed new scholarship to Beverly’s Athens, commissioned by the Athenaeum and published by The Georgia Review.

“A Little Shortness of Breath”: The Open Black Body as Southern Landscape by Dr. Patricia Ekpo, 2025
that spirit in spite of / now like it was by Bryn Ashley Evans, 2025

Patricia Ekpo (Ph. D. Yale University), Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Art, Cornell University 
Patricia Ekpo is an assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora Art at Cornell University. She works at the intersections of black critical and feminist theory, art history, and psychoanalysis to interrogate the role of antiblackness in constituting space, body, gender, psyche, and subjectivity. Her work has been published in Parapraxis and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

Bryn Ashley Evans, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University 
Bryn Ashley Evans is a poet from Decatur, Georgia. She received her BA in art history and African American studies at Columbia University and is a PhD candidate at Stanford University, where she studies Southern Black art and performance. Her writing has been published in Burnaway, Studio Magazine, Callaloo, and Frieze.

Judith McWillie, professor emeritus at the Lamar Dodd School of Art
Judith McWillie (b. 1946) was born and raised in Memphis, TN, where she earned her undergraduate degree in painting at Memphis State University, followed by her MFA at Ohio State University. In 1974, she moved to Athens, GA, to teach painting at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. She began recording videos with yard artists in 1984, and donated her vast videography to the Southern Folklife Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011. The author of numerous essays in arts and culture publications including Public Art Review, Visions Art Quarterly, Metropolis, and Artforum, she is coauthor with Grey Gundaker of No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work, winner of the 2007 James Mooney Award of the Southern Anthropological Society. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens; the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, GA; and Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

Mo Costello is an artist, educator, and independent archivist in Athens, GA. 

Katz Tepper is an artist and writer who plays with video, text, and other materials in Chicago, IL. 

Costello and Tepper cocurated the 2026 exhibition Beverly’s Athens: Beverly Buchanan in Athens, Georgia at the University of Georgia’s Athenaeum, with support from the Teiger Foundation. Beverly’s Athens was featured in The Georgia Review Winter 2026 issue, where Costello and Tepper’s curatorial essay “Medical Arts: Disabled Kinship as Methodology” was published alongside essays by Patricia Ekpo and Bryn Ashley Evans. A catalog for Beverly’s Athens is forthcoming from Institute 193, with support from the Graham Foundation. Their forthcoming book Beverly Buchanan, Athens, GA, 8 July 1995 (Soberscove Press, 2026) is a transcription and annotation-based study of Judith McWillie’s 1995 video with Buchanan.

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. 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.