A Conversation with the Curators of Beverly’s Athens
On the occasion of the exhibition Beverly’s Athens, which runs from January 16 to March 21, 2026 at University of Georgia’s Athenaeum gallery, co-curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper recorded a conversation about their curatorial method. They edited their dialogue for clarity. The conversation begins with a focus on a single artwork, which is featured on the front cover of The Georgia Review 79, no. 4 (Winter 2025).
_____
Katz Tepper (KT): Throughout Beverly Buchanan’s archive we find traces narrating medicalization: texts, self-portraits drawn in the hospital, handwritten notes and sketches on pharmaceutical notepads, recorded interviews, and this untitled chair sculpture from 1992. These artworks and ephemera have registered as deeply familiar to us, informed by our own experiences living with chronic illness, and have felt important to platform in relation to her more widely known works.
Though Buchanan never exhibited this piece in her lifetime, we gravitated toward this specific chair sculpture and how directly it is marked by the medical, locating it as a key to contextualize this period of her work. When we first encountered this sculpture, we felt a kind of instant recognition with its form and material charge. You could say we experienced disabled kinship with the object itself, as though we were seeing a portrait of a friend.
Mo Costello (MC): And that recognition, or disabled kinship, has been shared and magnified between us, constituting a method of sorts. We’ve experimented with description as a way of staying with, or attuning to, a single work. This prolonged attention often feels intimate. A kind of affection or touch. I’m curious about beginning this conversation, similarly, in description?
KT: We’re looking at a small sculpture, approximately six inches tall, that takes the form of a chair. Its primary material is plastic, it’s assembled from yellow compounding pharmaceutical spatulas that are used by specialty pharmacies for preparing customized medications. The yellow is possibly discolored from age. Its plasticness is distinct in terms of materiality. So much of Buchanan’s more well-known sculptural work is lumber or cement or tabby.1
MC: On the back of the chair’s legs, shoulders, arms, we read: “medical arts pharmacy,” in all caps. Followed by “Hospital Beds.Wheelchairs” and then “548-5227,” a phone number without an area code. In the absence of additional information, one infers that Medical Arts is a local business, not a chain, and that the compounding spatulas circulate within a smaller network in which the area code is already assumed.
KT: It looks like there are three of these found objects, the compounding pharmacy spatulas, that were cut up and then reassembled, as we see the printed text a total of three times as well as remnants of the three handles. Its construction feels in concert with mending, patchworking, made out of scraps. Though we understand some of what the “whole” object may have looked like as compounding spatula in its original form, Buchanan managed to cut this very symmetrical, industrially produced object in such a way that nothing about it feels regulated anymore. Each cut manages to emphasize the parts of that object that were inherently rounded or the somehow friendlier parts of its silhouette. The inset holes for hanging are a kind of tactile invitation.
The other materials look like some kind of super glue, or hot glue, and then a single, small wooden dowel. You might imagine it’s a toothpick, but it doesn’t have a taper like a toothpick would. I’m really interested in the dowel—it’s structural and feels slightly cyborgian, interrupting and at the same time congealing the material logic.
MC: The dowel reads like a brace or a support of some kind and I begin to see the sculpture as a being that requires a brace. Or requires touch—if we are to understand the dowel, the brace, as a kind of touch, a holding. Though a chair is a form that holds, this chair suggests at the same time its own need to be held. The sides of the sculpture register as arms and legs, and the flat bases resemble feet. It has a figurative quality.
KT: It’s very creaturely. The arms are one of the main components that make it quite unrealistic as a chair. If it were scaled up, it wouldn’t be a very usable chair and would be an extremely unsturdy object. It looks as though the body meant to lean in the chair has already melded with the furniture. Maybe that’s the cyborgian bit. It’s not just the negative space of a body that a chair implies, this chair absorbed its sitter and has now blended the two.
MC: I read in the construction a compulsion to bind, to assemble, to break and remake. The glue is applied in excess, with urgency, and in the absence of precision. We see, we hear, we feel, the glue dripping down the plastic. And its character—its posture, its attitude, its slouch, its lean—is born of that urgency. On the chair’s back left leg, an inscription, hand-written in fading ball-point pen, reads:
To: Debbie and Andy
Beverly Buchanan
January 1992
Debbie and Andy are the owners of Hawthorne Drugs, formerly Medical Arts Pharmacy. Gifted by Buchanan to them in ’92, the sculpture remains in their personal collection. Anecdotally, we’ve come to learn that Andy and Debbie acquired Medical Arts in the 1980s from the previous owners, after Andy had worked there for several years as head pharmacist. They eventually relocated the business to Hawthorne Avenue, where they renamed it accordingly.
KT: The specific medical space it refers to is one we know intimately—it’s the pharmacy where we have been filling our medications, getting our vaccines, all the different ways this specific pharmacy has a deeply consequential embodied register in our lives. Coincidentally, we both chose Hawthorne Drugs as our pharmacy years before we ever knew that Buchanan had been going there! Hawthorne Drugs was Buchanan’s pharmacy from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, when she left her full-time residence in Athens, splitting her time between Ann Arbor and Athens until she permanently moved away in 2010. I personally started going to Hawthorne’s in 2016 to source compounded thyroid medication. Chronic illness necessitates constant adjustments to dosages and ingredients, which is also a kind of incessant “remaking.”
MC: We’ve now observed several different miniature chair sculptures, made by Buchanan, in local collections in Athens. We understand the chair as an inherently disabled form in and of itself, an object that provides support and the potential for rest.
KT: We’ve also encountered a miniature bed sculpture, another disabled signal, in the collection of Lisa Tuttle. These miniature furniture works related to but were less well-known than Buchanan’s shack sculptures, miniature dwellings that she was able to work on sitting down. These small sculptures marked a shift from the physically demanding cement works she’d been making through the seventies and early eighties. We’ve hypothesized that Buchanan’s turn to domestic subject matter and her process working in a domestic studio at a desk-top scale were also informed by disability. But this is the only sculpture we’ve come across that is made primarily from pharmaceutical materials—a direct signifier.
MC: Our encounter with this specific chair sculpture, in fall 2023, was preceded by an invitation into Debbie and Andy’s home. The chair was arranged on a shelf amongst Buchanan’s drawings and other small sculptures, all gifts with personalized inscriptions to Andy and Debbie. Encountering Buchanan’s works on display in people’s homes has been a consistent aspect of our research process, which has focused on the local collections of people Buchanan had relationships with while living in Athens. The majority of the works that remain in local collections are distinct from Buchanan’s more widely known shack sculptures, which primarily circulated in galleries and museums. As opposed to the home, the pharmacy, the doctor’s office, the plumber’s office, among friends, among caretakers. Gifted, bartered, and occasionally sold at backyard pop-ups, far removed from the world of galleries and museums.
KT: These alternative sites illuminate a sense of how Buchanan lived in Athens. She spent significant time at Hawthorne Drugs, where she filled medications, socialized, ate lunch at the adjoining soda foundation, and occasionally sourced materials for her sculptures. As she wrote in her 1993 text Sassafras and Yellow Root Tea, “My pharmacy is a social, friendly place where you can eat lunch while waiting for your arthritis medicine.”
MC: Debbie explained that she initially gave Buchanan the compounding spatulas because she had a feeling that Buchanan might be able to use them in the studio. The sculpture contains this exchange—its before. As well as its after, in that the spatulas were eventually returned to Debbie in their current form. There’s a troubling of, and resistance to, a privileged or somehow autonomous sphere in which art is conceived as separate from lived experience. In this case, the pharmacy is a site of active making and remaking—it’s a creative place.
KT: There’s a sense of play that disrupts the status quo of the pharmacy. To play with medicine, to make art out of medicine, is inherently subversive. I’m interested in the simultaneity of tonalities that the chair sculpture carries. The original object is intimidating in its authority as a medical tool. Medicine writ large is a site of both care and harm for most disabled people, people of color, women, and queer and trans people—its capacity for harm is amplified for folks at the intersections of these positionalities. The medical system has actively oppressed, rendered other and deviant, experimented on, and neglected marginalized people. Crip art often operates at that edge of violence and care and plays with it, flips it, scrambles it, remakes it out of itself. Buchanan’s reassembling of the pharmacy spatulas fits those gestures.
MC: Mmm, yes. Scrambling and assembling are useful terms in that they carry neither the language of resolve nor healing. There’s an implied precarity, an implied ongoingness. And we feel the chair’s precarity in this provisionality, its temporariness. Its instability!
KT: There’s a palpable fragility in this sculpture. Its joints are delicate and could snap apart. There’s nothing traditionally precious regarding craftsmanship in its construction, which is not to say there isn’t tenderness. It requires a soft touch to handle it. But there’s gusto to its moves—a makeshift logic. The moments of cutting the pharmacy spatulas apart, and then merging them with the scrap dowel, a “whatever works” approach.
MC: Which is also resourceful. The “whatever works” approach applies to survival, and we see this in the spatula chair and its life as an object. Survival is a word encountered repeatedly in Buchanan’s writing. A line from her 1990 text SHACK SOUTH: Inside & Out reads, “Things, therefore, are reminders of what it took to survive.”
KT: It’s an artwork that embodies the simultaneities of trauma and abundance and precarity, in the entirety of its form, how it came to be, and the life it still lives on its shelf, which is also endlessly complex and inseparable from these qualities. The chair as an object that a body depends on for support—this is also mirrored in Buchanan’s relationship with Andy and Debbie, a kind of dependence on them that entailed a lot of mutual and reciprocally communicated affection. And still, a very punctuated dependence. Buchanan’s inscriptions on her gifts to Andy and Debbie repeat the sentiments, “To my pharmacist, who I love very much.” Or, “Thanks for your help and support, assistance and hugs. All are appreciated and needed.”
MC: Oral histories we’ve collected make clear that Andy and Debbie, as well as some of Buchanan’s doctors, went out of their way to work around Buchanan’s lousy health insurance and ensure she could access at least some of the care she needed. They waived fees, delivered refills to her home—these actions far exceed the standard roles. A lot of crip art is also invested in revaluing dependency, not as lack, but as possibility, beauty, an inevitable truth worth structuring worlds around.
KT: As opposed to the current world order built around false notions of autonomy and the ensuing erasure, violence, theft, and neglect required to invisibilize dependencies, to uphold the facades of individualism.
MC: We speak about complex dependency a lot in this process. The vulnerability is not symmetrical. It’s vulnerable to be sick in an ableist society. It’s vulnerable to be Black in an anti-Black society. And to need help, to not be able to survive without medications and pharmacies and insurance, to be reliant on them and entangled in hostile systems, in a kind of constant mediation and negotiation around survival. The medications will bring severe side effects, will in fact cause whole new diagnoses, but there’s a lack of better options and a desperate need for relief of symptoms. Especially when Buchanan had to hustle constantly to make ends meet and was rarely afforded the opportunity to rest.
KT: These complex social dependencies feel most punctuated around race, given the acutely structuring force of anti-Blackness in shaping Southern geographies, resource distribution, and healthcare access. We understand the major threads of Buchanan’s work to be thematically concerned with commemorating Black spaces and forms that persist despite erasure and segregation, with a particular attunement to architecture and landscape—from her abstract paintings and sculptures in the 1970s distilling urban surfaces in New York and New Jersey, to her environmental sculptures installed site-specifically throughout Georgia, to her sculptures, photographs, and drawings of vernacular housing that were the focus of her Athens period. Throughout this research process, we’ve been struck to encounter Buchanan’s work mostly in the homes and businesses of white people, some of whom are committed to anti-racist critical discourse and action, some of whom are not. And some may be engaging anti-racist practice without having language for it, or, most often, having contradictory practices. A sense of discordance has often accompanied our research process, as we’ve attempted to navigate the charged geographies Buchanan’s work both contends with and lives within.
MC: We understand that there’s a danger in mythologizing these artworks, conditions, and relationships marked by dependency, a risk of rendering them idyllic, in overly emphasizing the hospitable within the necessarily inhospitable. While we’ve grounded our methods in disabled kinship, in forms of recognition made possible from our converging lived experiences sharing a pharmacy in Athens, making art through and with chronic illness, we’ve also had to account for our racialized differences from Buchanan, for our own whiteness. Working with Buchanan’s archive posthumously, we’ve tried to be attentive to the specificities of how her work circulated in Athens, without presuming that we are positioned to fully answer or explain these dynamics. Our curatorial role is simultaneously speculative and interpretative. From our own subject positions, we’ve attempted to bring critical and detailed observation to the artworks, ephemera, artist statements, and other texts from Buchanan’s Athens years. Simultaneously, we’ve tried to locate these within the specificity of their surroundings.
KT: In this process of finding Buchanan’s works in Athens, many of the spaces we’ve moved through have been suburban neighborhoods. As is common with American suburban geography, acute within but by no means relegated to the U.S. South, there are implied hostilities spatially, in the sense of upholding white space and white property. Buchanan spent a lot of time moving between the urban, suburban, and rural areas of Athens and its surrounding counties. Her archive, distributed amongst her friends and caretakers, is also marked by records of the violence that she confronted as she moved through rural Georgia to make her work. In a grant statement from around 1996, she narrated, with her characteristic humor, the threat of white supremacist terrorism that she navigated driving in rural Georgia: “Roaming around alone down here in Georgia is no fun when highway isolation can lead to ‘termination’ by not friendly ‘rovers’ (white men looking for souls to harm—shall we say).” A particularly charged collage features her self-portrait in front of a Confederate flag drawn with marker. A roll of photos from a 1994 trip to coastal Georgia includes repeating images of a Confederate flag hanging off a balcony, which she photographed from the road, seemingly inside the car, at multiple distances.
MC: The structure we’ve settled on for our research and curation is multifarious in an effort to maintain the complexity—the irresolution—of the scrap, the fragment. As Buchanan wrote, “The surviving fragments are the inspiration for most of these sculptures.” This process, in combination with privileging Buchanan’s own words, has led us to the specific materials we’ve gathered for the exhibition, giving them space to maintain their own narrative and material agency. The materiality of the fragment always suggests conflict—there is no form, and no process, without conflict. How do we stay with, dwell in, these various tensions?
KT: I’m thinking of Tina Campt’s formulation of “tense” in Listening to Images, where she writes, “To me it is crucial to think about futurity through a notion of ‘tense.’ What is the ‘tense’ of a black feminist future? It is a tense of anteriority, a tense relationship to an idea of possibility that is neither innocent nor naive. Nor is it necessarily heroic or intentional. It is often humble and strategic, subtle and discriminating. It is devious and exacting. It’s not always loud and demanding. It is frequently quiet and opportunistic, dogged and disruptive.”2
How does the quiet presence of Buchanan’s work disrupt the spaces it inhabits? How does its presence function as rupture? Just as we’ve described the chair’s assembly in relation to “the cut,” how do we follow the logic of the “cut” in hosting a site-specific exhibition at the University of Georgia, where these tensions are most extreme? We felt it was important for there to be a major exhibition of Buchanan’s work in Athens, as she has never had a solo, institutional, presentation here despite being a major artist who maintained a residence here for twenty-three years. Yet, the University of Georgia is also a complex site to locate this work within.
MC: One could argue that segregation and anti-Blackness in Athens are most articulated by the University of Georgia, a flagship state institution with a majority white student population and a Black student population that falls dramatically short of the state’s demographics. The University used enslaved labor before emancipation, denied entry to Black students until 1961, and is actively fighting against present-day demands to recognize and redress the Black residents the University forcibly displaced from Athens’ Linnentown neighborhood through “urban renewal” in the 1960s.
Spending time with the primary documents uncovered by the activists spearheading the efforts for recognition and redress brought us directly back to Buchanan’s work. The homes that the University destroyed in Linnentown are the very same disappearing vernacular architectures, in this case, shotgun houses, that Buchanan devoted much of her practice to documenting and creating tributes to. A practice she’s tellingly referred to as “Historical Preservation through Art.”
KT: Buchanan assembled a selection of her photographs of disappearing architectures into an artist book she entitled SURVIVORS. One photograph in this book, the row of shotgun houses on South Rocksprings Street, does the heavy lifting of connecting some of these threads. It depicts the shotgun houses that still stand on a block in central Athens, not far from the university campus, now surrounded by affluent housing and new construction. Buchanan repeatedly photographed these “survivors,” so it all comes full circle.
We’ve structured this exhibition to unfold across five thematic sections, with the hopes that these fragments, in their site-specificity to Athens, serve as “reminders,” to use Buchanan’s own language. In the entrance to the gallery, a suite of self-portraits across a range of media introduce Buchanan through her own self-representation. Inside the main exhibition space, Buchanan’s iterative images of the Rocksprings Street shotguns repeat across a whole wall. Nearby, we’ve gathered archival records from the Linnentown Resolution’s thorough research implicating the university as an active force of displacement, putting these materials in dialogue with Buchanan’s work.
MC: Another thematic section, the “study room,” centers Buchanan’s research materials and her own archival impulses. The study room brings particular emphasis to the influence of her father, Walter Buchanan, whose academic work with rural Black sharecroppers in South Carolina doubled as service work. The fourth thematic section focuses on Hawthorne Drugs, and the artworks emerging from Buchanan’s own survival and dependencies. This includes the pharmacy spatula chair sculpture, and a suite of images and writings she produced about angels and guardian angels. One of her angel drawings is captioned “Hello—I’m one of your Angels. It is my job to protect you from hurt, harm, and danger.”
KT: This section of the exhibition begins within the gallery and extends beyond the campus with a few off-site installations, including at Hawthorne Drugs, Carson Plumbing, and Athens Pulmonary. These local businesses all have had Buchanan’s work on display preceding our curatorial intervention. We’ll be adding a few specific texts by Buchanan to their displays for further context. These off-site installations privilege local, non-institutional audiences, who can encounter Buchanan’s work while going about their everyday lives.
The last thematic section brings us most intimately into Buchanan’s artistic process. Featuring her photographs, drawings, writings, and sculptures, as well as a video recording by local artist and documentarian Judith McWillie, it highlights the three homes where Buchanan lived and worked between 1987 and 2010. These domestic studio spaces sprawled outward into the lush gardens she cultivated, where she installed her sculptures amongst the vegetation.
MC: In one handwritten text installed near images of her garden in the exhibition, Buchanan writes what we might consider a manifesto or proposal:
If I Won the Lottery
- Set Up a Kitchen available for artists to come by and get meals, and go on back to work for—Breakfast, lunch + supper
- sections Eat on site or take home or studio
open 24 hours.
- Set up Artists garden area for anyone to plant things or just “Be”.
Full time staff garden supervisors helpers. Free seeds
- An ART Hospital. Have to be a sick artist –
Rooms with canvas walls. Play rooms—Greenhouses, Nurseries –
Mandatory No Work periods—Flexible Times. Honor system.
- Art Car and Bus for picking up supplies, stamps—mailing express mail items. Staffed. You don’t have to leave your studio.
- Garden area Fountains. Plant seeds, stop and get a drink near several fountains.
continue work
- Holiday A Present Room. Pick up or drop off a gift for another artist—Holidays or Not.3
KT: In this text, we see Buchanan’s vision for disabled kinship and futurity—a care-driven, collectivist space for support and abundance. I love to picture the ART Hospital, with all of us sick artists gifting each other sculptures made out of pharmacy spatulas, surrounded by fountains and flowers. Buchanan’s dream of an Art Hospital returns us to Campt, exemplifying what she describes as “the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be.”4
______
1. The 2016 posthumous retrospective Beverly Buchanan—Ruins and Rituals at the Brooklyn Museum, curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, significantly expanded public awareness of Buchanan’s work and catalyzed ongoing scholarship.
2. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), 17.
3. Transcribed from a handwritten note, circa 1990s. Beverly Buchanan papers, 1912-2017, bulk 1970s-1990s. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
4. Campt, Listening to Images, 17.