Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) was born in Fuquay, North Carolina, and raised in Orangeburg, South Carolina. She studied at Bennett College, trained in medicine and public health at Columbia University, and took classes at the Art Students League before leaving her public health profession in 1977 to pursue art full-time. For much of her artistic career, Buchanan lived in Georgia, first in Macon and then Atlanta, before moving to Athens, where she lived from 1987 to 2010. In her lifetime, Buchanan received major honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and her work is held in leading institutions such as the High Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum, and the Whitney. Major retrospectives include Shack Works and the posthumous exhibitions Ruins and Rituals, I Broke The House, and Weathering. Beverly’s Athens, her first major solo exhibition in the city, runs January 17–March 21, 2026.

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.

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.