12 May 2026
I still have Beverly Buchanan on my mind. The closing symposium, on 21 March, for the exhibition Beverly’s Athens, the subject of our art feature for the Winter 2025 issue, capped an art experience to which I’ll return time and again. When I showed up for the keynotes, by Bryn Evans and Patricia Ekpo, I joined a group of dedicated attendees who, as I learned after the fact, included several important folks in the art world from around the globe. New York gallerists, writers at prestigious art magazines, faculty at renowned art schools, directors of Eurpoean art museums, formidable art collectors, members of the Venice Biennale team—they were there merely to attend. Bryn’s moving, incisive account provided an autotheoretical exploration of the way breath can comingle art and poetry. Patricia’s talk was a tour de force; her book on Buchanan will move debates in myriad discourses, whenever it comes out. The GR I want to lead is the one that gets into, say, an elite metropolitan gallery, or onto the radar of this and that art world VIP not through promoting “timeless art” but rather through a focus on ephemera, the materiality of art, the process of art-making—and a hyper-local focus, at that. Feeling less like a gathering of elites than a high casual gathering of those who care about Buchanan, and thus Athens, or vice versa, the symposium atmosphere obfuscated any of the various hierarchies present (then-mayor Kelly Girtz was sitting next to a student who was sitting in front of an art star), enough to prevent any of them from being the organizing principle for the social group there.
For me, for the rest of my life, I know, my engagement with Buchanan will be a primary example of art’s capacity to foster friendship across time and space, thanks first and foremost to Mo Costello and Katz Tepper, the exhibition curators, but also to others through the ongoing series of encounters that have followed the GR publication. I knew this would be the case immediately when I saw people from different parts of Athens, from different generations, embrace at the exhibition opening in a way that exuded the warmth that their shared experience with the art cultivated. I’ve met folks, and of course there is that attachment to Buchanan herself. That room of Buchanan angels grabbed hold of me once again, as I dipped in to say goodbye to the exhibition. All these connections, drawn together from their various places and networks, are cemented by nothing but a fondness built out of shared admiration for Buchanan and her art. I’m blessed to have my sense of Athens grow out of Beverly’s Athens.
Through the symposium, I got to meet Elizabeth Bridges White, one of the managers of Buchanan’s estate and the daughter of Jane Bridges, Buchanan’s longtime friend and late-life partner. I learned from White about a series of poems her mother, a poet and retired science teacher, wrote about Buchanan. It’s my honor to open this issue with one of them. “Beverly’s Cane” takes the form and occasion of an elegy but does so in a way that shares in Buchanan’s distinctive work about the body. In “Medical Arts: Disabled Kinship as Methodology,” the conversation between Mo Costello and Katz Tepper, which can be found on our online platform, GR2, the curators discuss Buchanan as an exemplar of “disabled kinship,” or the “complex dependency” built by people whose variousness of body is not always supported by dominant social structures. Their incisive and sensitive reading of the artwork that graces our Winter 2025 cover, a chair made out of medication spatulas, provides a strong basis for approaching “Beverly’s Cane.” Like the chair, the cane is a “disabled signal” with a “slightly cyborgian [feel],” an object that not only provides necessary support for a body, but also takes shape from that body after prolonged, intimate use.
There’s a whole lot that can be unpacked here, but I want to focus on the “complex dependency” between the beloved ones. That fourth verse paragraph stuns me, every time. An unspooling list of time markers establishes a temporal mélange of eternal present, eternally iterative present, and extensively protracted present that gives us the feel of the speaker’s intense, protracted caretaking and the deterioration of her loved one’s memory governing this moment. The speaker persists in her care, and when the multitudinousness of the cane—a singularity turned plural through naming—we see the “Emily” episode in a new light. The speaker’s resistance to, or refusal of, the imperative to think oneself absolutely singular allows her to continue her caretaking, and the poem turns chiasmic: the intimate, secret utterances of names at the core makes the final utterance one of freedom too, one that enables the speaker to care across time and space. Buchanan is a master at making the complex dependency of disabled kinship into an art form, both beautiful and life-giving. “Beverly’s Cane” shows that, but also demonstrates how this art-making ramifies through the care that binds each to each.
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In this issue you can also read Anna Journey’s poem to a dear friend from the past as well as Katie Berta’s elegy for her teacher Norman Dubie. Munawwar Abdulla translates an excerpt of Motherland by Zordun Sabir, an important twentieth-century writer for Uyghur people and culture. Edmée Lepercq has a quietly moving essay that recounts a young woman’s navigation through the art world. And Reginald McKnight shares a story about the simultaneous innocence and cruelty children sometimes display and the painful recognitions that maturity makes possible.
In other news:
• We would like to congratulate L. F. Khouri and Soraya Palmer for being the winner and runner-up, respectively, of our 2026 prose prize, chosen by Kiese Laymon. Khouri’s story and Palmer’s essay will be published in our Winter 2026 issue.
• We would like to thank our experiential learning students for their year with us. We also thank our graduate editors, Maxime Berclaz and Christina Wood, for all the work they’ve given us over the year. We couldn’t do this without y’all.
G.M.
