From

Winter 2025

Winter 2025 Issue Cover Explore This Issue

If I Won the Lottery

By Beverly Buchanan
From the Winter 2025 Issue

 

• 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.

 

• Finally, a surprise gift for someone who’s always wanted a “Dale Evans
cowgirl suit + hat holster etc

 

______
Transcribed by Mo Costello and Katz Tepper from a handwritten note in the Beverly Buchanan Papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, undated (circa 1990s).

 

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.