Beverly’s Athens Symposium, Film Screening: Beverly Buchanan, Athens, GA, 8 July 1995

The Athenaeum and UGA Willson Center for Humanities & Arts present a closing symposium for the spring 2025 exhibition Beverly’s Athens with guest curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper and invited keynote speakers Dr. Patricia Ekpo and Bryn Evans. Program details and speaker bios here.

REGISTER HERE

Symposium concludes at 4 pm with an evening film screening and discussion at the Athenaeum from 6-8:30 pm of Beverly Buchanan, Athens, GA, 8 July 1995 with filmmaker, artist, and professor emerita Judith McWillie and co-curators Mo Costello & Katz Tepper.

Judith McWillie, professor emeritus at the Lamar Dodd School of Art

Judith McWillie (b. 1946) was born and raised in Memphis, TN, where she earned her undergraduate degree in painting at Memphis State University, followed by her MFA at Ohio State University. In 1974, she moved to Athens, GA, to teach painting at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. She began recording videos with yard artists in 1984, and donated her vast videography to the Southern Folklife Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011. The author of numerous essays in arts and culture publications including Public Art Review, Visions Art Quarterly, Metropolis, and Artforum, she is coauthor with Grey Gundaker of No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work, winner of the 2007 James Mooney Award of the Southern Anthropological Society. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens; the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, GA; and Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

Mo Costello is an artist, educator, and independent archivist in Athens, GA.

Katz Tepper is an artist and writer who plays with video, text, and other materials in Chicago, IL.

Costello and Tepper cocurated the 2026 exhibition Beverly’s Athens: Beverly Buchanan in Athens, Georgia at the University of Georgia’s Athenaeum, with support from the Teiger Foundation. Beverly’s Athens was featured in The Georgia Review Winter 2026 issue, where Costello and Tepper’s curatorial essay “Medical Arts: Disabled Kinship as Methodology” was published alongside essays by Patricia Ekpo and Bryn Ashley Evans. A catalog for Beverly’s Athens is forthcoming from Institute 193, with support from the Graham Foundation. Their forthcoming book Beverly Buchanan, Athens, GA, 8 July 1995 (Soberscove Press, 2026) is a transcription and annotation-based study of Judith McWillie’s 1995 video with Buchanan.