Beverly's Athens

Opening Saturday, Jan 17, 2026
Media and VIP preview: 3-4pm
Public reception: 4-6pm
Closing symposium (presented in partnership with the UGA Willson Center for Humanities & Arts): March 21, 10 am - 4 pm followed by documentary screening from 6 - 8:30 pm, Register here

Press

“Beverly Buchanan: Beverly’s Athens”, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2026

“How Beverly Buchanan Crafted Her Own Economy of Exchange”, Art in America, January 22, 2026

“UGA Gives Athens Artist Beverly Buchanan Her Due”, Flagpole Magazine, January 21, 2026

Exhibition Literature

Art Feature: Beverly Buchanan, The Georgia Review, Winter 2025 Issue (includes writings by co-curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper, along with guest essays by Dr. Patricia Ekpo and Bryn Ashley Evans)

About the Exhibition

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.

Side view of assembled sculpture on white pedestal. Shack-like object is decorated with affixed bottle caps, buttons, a black glove, clothespins, and green plastic, among other objects on red painted side wall and forest green roof. Artwork by Beverly Buchanan on view at the Athenaeum for “Beverly's Athens: Beverly Buchanan in Athens, GA”, Spring 2026. Photo courtesy of Walker Bankson.

Beige paper plate with black marker drawings and graphic text “WILL TALK FOR FOOD” alongside self portrait and hand and fork above plate and mug. Artwork by Beverly Buchanan on view at the Athenaeum for “Beverly's Athens: Beverly Buchanan in Athens, GA”, Spring 2026. Photo courtesy of Walker Bankson.

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.

an exit from between two places

April 11-May 10, 2025

Opening reception: Friday, April 11, 6-8pm
MFA Speaks: Thursday, April 24, 5:30pm

an exit from between two places celebrates the 2025 MFA graduates from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia.

Exhibiting artists include:

Gabby Barnett
Eliza Bentz
Jasmine Best
Sarah Bouchard
Lucas Eytchison
Eleanor Foy
Landon Green
Caitlin La Dolce
Kate Luther
Hayden Maltese

Image: Landon McKinley (American, b. 1997), Sweating, 2024, as part of the series you can only cry but so much (2023-2025), Silver gelatin, walnut, courtesy and © the artist

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.

Sharpening a Screw

April 12 - May 9, 2024

Sharpening a Screw resists easy resolutions. The works on view signal the value of iteration, returning to a thought, a question, or a method to look for the unexpected. Each of the nine MFA students from the Lamar Dodd School of Art use materials as fasteners, presenting a constellation of themes from which to step back and look anew.

Taken together, the artists offer both a gentle sincerity and tongue-in-cheek bite. Where Lindsey Kennedy drills into the pictorial doom of climate dread, Martin Chamberlain and Alejandro Ramirez pull back with a wry grin, presenting witty objects that are convincing yet playful. Kit Rutter illustrates a story of perseverance and care that breaks through paper pulp thickets, while Dylan Lewis crafts a narrative in which sewing and alchemy meet. Yoon Hwang’s drawn and pinched marks imbue clay with all the history that hands collect, as Katie Ford and Ashley Wingo’s sculptural assemblages magnetize traces of memory and identity into form. Lastly, Meredith Emery plays with text in her fantastic and extended examination of the American burying beetle.

The exhibition nods towards the compulsion that often drives these creative processes. The artists are as much compelled by the cultural relevance of their subject matter as they are by the desire to scratch an insatiable itch—to wade through the fog of making until meaning emerges. Viewers are invited to consider the works in the exhibition as meditations in which the artists refine the poetry of their materials, in which the screw is sharpened time and again to see what holds.

Listeners

January 26 - March 23, 2024

Brooklyn-based artist, Fabienne Lasserre presents Listeners, an immersive and responsive installation consisting of a series of sculptures made of clear vinyl spray-painted with translucent gradients of color. The works obstruct, frame and direct vision, passage and movement. They always imply bodies: people who look through, walk around, and peer over. Simultaneously, the inert objects are dynamic as they reflect light and sway slightly when a viewer walks by.

Since the mid-2000s, Fabienne Lasserre’s work has been deeply indebted to feminist thought. She thinks of her early sculptures as bodies envisioned outside of traditional dichotomies such as male/female, self/other, inside/outside. With time, these interests extended to the context surrounding bodies rather than to corporeality itself. Thinking of the body as a locus for political and philosophical metaphors, she makes objects that can enclose or frame a human. In these new works, Lasserre explores form, shape, and color in order to point to the many ways in which movement and location affect our ways of relating to the world and to one another.

The installation will be activated by a commissioned dance by choreographer, Beth Gill and an accompanying sound piece by experimental composer, Jon Moniaci. The new work will premiere at the Athenaeum on March 15 and 16.

This exhibition is supported by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and a Public Impact Grant from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

Paul Pfeiffer: Red Green Blue

August 31 - November 18, 2023

Often located in the heart of a city or campus, the sports stadium has the capacity to fortify national, regional, or community-based models of identity. Inside, the spectator is bombarded with carefully orchestrated stimuli, immersed in a multi-sensory experience intended to incite an emotional response. In Red Green Blue, Paul Pfeiffer edits audio and visual recordings of the UGA Redcoat Marching Band, examining the mechanics of the performance through close-up footage of band members and their directors during and between periods of play.

Pfeiffer lived in Athens, GA and taught at the University of Georgia from 2016 to 2019. While broadly questioning the definition of reality in the age of social media, Pfeiffer also engages the specific circumstances of the Georgia Bulldogs’ stadium. Just beyond the stadium walls is a contested site, a 19th-century cemetery that contains the gravesites of both African-American slaves and Confederate soldiers. The roar of the crowd and the band echo eerily among tombstones, mixing with birdsong. The contrast between these sites introduces a temporal and architectural disparity that recalls the ancient Greek origins of the stadium as a locus of mass ritual, as well as the institutions of segregation enshrined in the monuments of the past.

In Red Green Blue the football players are seen only at moments between play or through the viewfinder of a broadcasting video camera. Thus, Pfeiffer pivots away from the hero in the spotlight, and persuades the viewer to focus instead on the nuanced language of spectacle.

re:(de)construction

April 14 - May 11, 2023

re:(de)construction is an exhibition, a circular and continuous call and response, presenting the work of eleven MFA students who studied at the Lamar Dodd School of Art for the past three years. Starting their program during the height of the pandemic, these artists have witnessed and participated in a deep re-examination of the structures that govern society. Through their various material experiments in video, painting, print, photography, metals, clay, and sound they share a commitment to reconfiguring and reinventing new ways of being in the world.

Many of the works on display take literally the idea of construction, as several of the artists mine materials in their investigation of the built environment. Others display a commitment to the play involved in taking things apart and putting them back together, just absurdly enough to call it art. While still other artists critique constructed expectations surrounding identity, history, and memory both personal and political.

Tearing down and building back up, tearing down and building back up again, once more. Processes that began in individual studios and through collaborative projects, now operate not only within the broader, shared context of the MFA exhibition, but also upon the societal structures these artists reimagine.

Artists in the exhibition include: AJ Aremu, Mickey Boyd, Zahria Cook, J Diamond, Shaunia Grant, Chad Hayward, Huey Lee, Jason Rafferty, Rachel Seburn, Ethan Snow, and Lee Villalobos.