In 1987, Beverly Buchanan moved to Athens, Georgia, where she continued her artistic practice responding to the intertwined social and ecological specificities of the region, deepening in particular her study and documentation of threatened vernacular architectures and their inhabitants. Beverly’s Athens, the result of a multiyear immersive research process by curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper, details this crucial, understudied period of Buchanan’s practice. Featuring three critical essays alongside previously unpublished documentation of Buchanan’s artworks, including drawings, collages, found object assemblages, and original photography, the publication further highlights reproductions of exhibited works and Buchanan’s research materials and personal ephemera. These combined selections elucidate themes of place, landscape and domesticity; racialization and representation; health and medicalization; and networks of care as inextricable from the underpinnings of Buchanan’s work.

Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) was born in Fuquay, North Carolina and lived in New York; New Jersey; Macon and Athens, Georgia; and Ann Arbor, Michigan. After studying at the Art Students League with Harlem Renaissance painter Norman Lewis, she returned to the South in the late 1970s, where she developed Ruins and Rituals and Marsh Ruins from 1977–80. In the mid-1980s Buchanan began creating makeshift sculptural “shacks”, paying tribute to the improvised homes of Black communities across Georgia. She was honored with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work is held by the High Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum, among others. A posthumous solo retrospective, Ruins and Rituals, curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2016–17.

Mo Costello is an artist and curator drawn to the social life of objects. Costello’s working practice revolves around the maintenance of small-scale, community supported infrastructure for the visual and performing arts. Curatorial and studio-based efforts emerge—and often converge—from within this ongoing commitment to place-based inquiry and infrastructures of care. A recipient of residencies from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2024), and Denniston Hill (2024), Costello lives in Athens, Giorgia.

Katz Tepper is an artist and guest cocurator for the exhibition and publication Beverly’s Athens. Tepper’s work as a practicing artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary, Georgia; White Columns, New York; Cushion Works, San Francisco; and Laurel Gitlen, New York. Tepper’s work has been screened at the Tang Museum in Sarasota Springs, the British Film Institute, and Fluentum, Berlin. The Wynn Newhouse Award, New Jewish Culture Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and residencies at MacDowell and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture have supported their work. Tepper’s art writing has been published in Burnaway Magazine (2019–22) and the Gwangju Biennale guidebook (2024). Tepper earned a BFA from The Cooper Union (2010) and an MFA in sculpture from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College (2021).

Patricia Ekpo is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work mobilizes black studies, art history, black feminist thought, and psychoanalysis to interrogate the role of antiblackness in constituting space, body, gender, psyche, and subjectivity. Her research explores this question through black women’s abstract sculpture, installation art, and other visual media that illuminate black formlessness—forged through the continuing violence of chattel slavery—as the containing negative space of modern human forms. Her current book project explores this through monographic study of sculptor Beverly Buchanan’s de/forming body of work and life—including her architectural painting, environmental and shack sculptures, photography, storytelling, and personal artistic production and correspondence. She provides a contributing essay to Beverly’s Athens.

Bryn Evans is a writer and arts worker from Decatur, Georgia. She situates her work within Black feminist theory and performance, with a focus on Southern Black geographies and vernacular poetics. Evans earned her bachelor’s of arts in African American and African diaspora studies and art history from Columbia University and is currently a PhD student in art history. Evans provides a contributing essay to Beverly’s Athens.

Institute 193 collaborates with artists, musicians, and writers to document the cultural landscape of the modern South. Institute 193 is a nonprofit art gallery based in Lexington, Kentucky. Founded in 2009, Institute 193 embraces the notion that groundbreaking contemporary art can and does emerge outside of large metropolitan centers. It provides artists from Kentucky and the Southeastern United States—selected not by commercial viability, but by the quality and relevance of their work—with exhibition and publication opportunities. It also endeavors to help these artists gain broader media exposure and foster connections in art markets across the globe. Over the past fifteen years, Institute 193 has hosted over 110 exhibitions and produced 29 publications, including zines, vinyl records, postcard sets, and artist books. Book highlights include monographs by Joe Minter, Charles Williams, Eric Rhein, and Amy Pleasant, as well as Walks to the Paradise Garden (Institute 193, 2019) by Jonathan Williams, Guy Mendes, and Roger Manley, an important document of the vernacular art movement emerging across the Southeastern United States.