Beverly’s Athens

Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) lived in Athens, GA, from 1987 to 2010. “Beverly’s Athens,” the first major solo exhibition of her work in the city, situates Buchanan’s expansive practice from this period within the local and lived conditions that shaped it. The exhibition emphasizes two intertwined threads from Buchanan’s Athens years: her modes of surviving chronic illness in the absence of an equitable healthcare system, and her multidisciplinary efforts to study and commemorate Black Southern geography, traditions, and forms.

Bringing together lesser-known works—small sculptures, drawings, photographs, print multiples, autobiographical ephemera, research materials—alongside examples of her noted ‘shacks’ paired with new archival research, the exhibition foregrounds the daily relationships, local geographies, and lived conditions that shaped Buchanan’s practice, allowing the textures of the artist’s lived experience to emerge.

Buchanan arrived in Athens in 1987 after formative years living and working in Macon and Atlanta. In Athens she established a pattern of transforming her domestic environments into live/work studios. Over the following twenty-three years, she produced an expansive body of work from within the three houses she inhabited over this period. These works ranged from the nationally celebrated sculptures, drawings, and documentary photographs Buchanan created as tributes to the Black vernacular architectures she studied in Athens and its surrounding counties, to an abundant array of personal musings,  print reproductions, and material studies created in the daily rhythms of life. Although Buchanan spent more years working in Athens than anywhere else, this period has never been the subject of a dedicated solo exhibition in the city she considered home.