INTRODUCTION
When Beverly Buchanan (b. 1940, Fuquay, North Carolina; d. 2015, Ann Arbor, Michigan) moved to the college town of Athens, Georgia, in 1987, she had already been living in the state and responding to its charged geography for a decade, first in the post-industrial city of Macon, followed by a stint in Atlanta. In Athens, she transformed the basement of a wooded suburban house in the Forest Heights neighborhood into her studio, the first of three live/work spaces she inhabited in the small city, which she established as her home base for the next twenty-three years. During this pivotal and prolific period of her career, Buchanan gained national recognition for her “shack sculptures,” an iterative series of mimetic miniatures she made from scrap wood and found objects, which paid tribute to Black Southern vernacular architectures. The artworks Buchanan created in her Athens studios were widely exhibited, from her sixteen-year mid-career retrospective Shack Works, which originated at New Jersey’s Montclair Museum of Art in 1994 and toured nine states, to group shows at major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the High Museum in Atlanta, and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. During these years her practice garnered prestigious honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and a College Art Association Achievement Award. Despite receiving wide national acclaim, her work was never featured in a solo institutional exhibition in Athens during her lifetime.
The site-specific exhibition Beverly’s Athens, which will be hosted at the University of Georgia’s Athenaeum gallery from January 16 to March 21, 2026, with several off-site installations throughout the city, situates Buchanan’s expansive practice from this period within the local and lived conditions that shaped her work. The exhibition borrows primarily from Buchanan’s personal social networks, the friends and caregivers who have maintained local collections of her work. While Buchanan’s shack sculptures mostly circulated in galleries and museums, this exhibition foregrounds the wide-ranging “leftover” artworks and fragmentary ephemera that remain in Athens. These remains, including collages, drawings, small-scale sculptures, print multiples, documentary photography, handwritten and typed texts, artist books, and study materials, offer a wealth of contextual and affective information for further understanding the breadth and depth of Buchanan’s practice. Process-oriented and biographical, these materials offer insights and context to enrich present-day study of Buchanan’s work.
Within the intimacy of these archival materials, Buchanan’s voice traces an inextricable connection between her own lived experiences navigating chronic illness in the absence of equitable health care, and her multidisciplinary efforts to study and commemorate Black Southern geography, traditions, and forms. With a generosity of spirit, by turns experimental, rigorous, humorous, mournful, and reverent, Buchanan’s archive demonstrates the artist’s dedication to chronicling personal and collective modes of survival and care, a practice she described in one artist book as “Historical Preservation through Art.” In a 2002 typed artist statement, she narrates her embodied process driving through rural state roads south of Athens to photograph a shack: “Breathing treatment yesterday was a red-letter day. Limping badly, I found my way to rt 83 near Bishop to see a real old house as it was described to me.” In an undated set of handwritten texts jotted on BuSpar pharmaceutical notepad sheets, Buchanan’s descriptions of a gray shack are infused with the mark of medical paraphernalia. Guided by Buchanan’s alternative preservation practices, Beverly’s Athens positions these primary documents as artworks in their own right, foregrounding their material and narrative agency.
Through curatorial selections and commissioned essays, Beverly’s Athens privileges deep readings of these minor works and scraps, within which Buchanan’s self-narration is given primacy. In her essay “ ‘A Little Shortness of Breath’: The Open Black Body as Southern Landscape,” Patricia Ekpo takes up the artist’s uses of personification in the 1991 work Mr. Robert Mathis’ Yellow Root House and Table. Through a close reading of the sculpture’s materiality and Buchanan’s accompanying texts, Ekpo elucidates the interconnected nodes of Black breath and Southern landscape present in Buchanan’s work. Bryn Ashley Evans reads Buchanan’s sprawling archival scraps as a form of poetic and embodied self-captioning in her essay “that spirit in spite of / now like it was.” Focused on the artist’s reproductions documenting and describing a series of shack sculptures that Buchanan intentionally burned, Evans lingers on the notes of urgency and refusal in Buchanan’s language, pairing her literary voice in a speculative kinship with the poetry of Lucille Clifton. Our curatorial essay “Medical Arts: Disabled Kinship as Methodology” (published online in GR2) unfolds as a prolonged dialogic description of Buchanan’s untitled 1992 chair sculpture, a delicate assemblage of cut-up and rearranged pharmacy spatulas bearing a personalized inscription to Buchanan’s pharmacist. That essay ruminates on the complex entanglements that disability brings to the surface, through detailed attention to the spaces and modes in which Buchanan’s works in Athens circulated—the home, the pharmacy, the doctor’s office, the plumber’s office; gifted, bartered, entrusted in the care of friends, and occasionally sold at backyard pop-ups.
This feature ends with Buchanan’s own words. If I Won the Lottery, here transcribed from a handwritten note, expresses Buchanan’s orientation toward abundance, collectivity, and futurity. The text shares Buchanan’s vision for a twenty-four-hour drop-in kitchen “for artists to come by and get meals,” a fully staffed garden area with free seeds open to anyone, and “an ART Hospital” for sick artists to work, play, rest, give each other gifts, and receive ample forms of support. As uncertainties and questions of survival become increasingly widespread in the present, Beverly’s Athens attunes to the gifts of Buchanan’s work and life, to her models of resistance, persistence, and remembrance, and to her vision of a future worth striving toward.
Mo Costello and Katz Tepper, curators
READ PATRICIA EKPO’S ESSAY “A LITTLE SHORTNESS OF BREATH”: THE OPEN BLACK BODY AS SOUTHERN LANDSCAPE
READ BRYN ASHLEY EVANS’ ESSAY THAT SPIRIT IN SPITE OF / NOW LIKE IT WAS
Images © 2025 Beverly Buchanan.
Beverly’s Athens is supported by a 2024 Single Project Grant from the Teiger Foundation—a private foundation devoted exclusively to supporting contemporary art curators.